3. Teach young men how to express healthy masculinity 4. Teach young men to believe women and girls who come forward 5. Teach males about bystander intervention

I’m going to go ahead and say I agree with all of that. And I think that of everything she says, none of it is really all that dependent on the idea that we can change the hardcore rapist to a nonrapist.

Two Reasons

Even if you believe, as I do, that the predators are not confused and can’t be educated, there are two good reasons to believe that consent education can make the climate better. First, because there are rapists who are not that small percentage of predators. Second, the predators absolutely depend on what I call the Social License to Operate, the climate that explains away or excuses what they do in certain circumstances, calls it not rape, calls it the survivor’s fault, minimizes it and lets him get away with it. Without that, the rapists can’t do it over and over because they’d get caught, excluded from their social circles, disciplined by commanding officers or expelled from campus, and they’d either have to stop or end up in prison.

First, the one-timers. Lisak’s research and McWhorter’s complimentary research both found that there was a population of guys who admitted to acts that met the definition of rape, but only one time. These guys were not the predators who had an average of six victims. Now, the math gets complicated because of the difference between rape and rapists and because some survivors are raped more than once in a lifetime; basically, the predators are responsible for a lot of the rapes, Lisak believes the overwhelming majority of them and I think that’s probably right, but the known figures leave room for the interpretation that a significant amount of rapes are committed by these other guys. And Lisak and McWhorter don’t deal with rapes other than male-on-female at all, really, and just because we don’t have much data on those doesn’t mean they don’t exist, so there necessarily are dynamics other than the predator dynamic that this research has shed so much light on.

I’m not exactly overflowing with sympathy for guys who rape “just” once. Some other people are, and some people in my view want to magnify the significance of this dynamic, essentially for the purpose of making excuses for rapists. Some of that’s inside baseball between those of us who write about this stuff a lot, but I’m saying it. So is there a population of guys who are some mixture of entitled and confused, but might not commit rape with more education? Um, maybe? Actually, I think probably so, but how big it is remains very unclear. And if those guys can be gotten not to rape, well, fewer rapes is maybe one of the world’s few unalloyed good outcomes.

And it doesn’t matter, because even if educating people about consent doesn’t convince a single rapist not to rape, there is still reason to believe that it will produce an outcome with less rape, by stripping away the social license to operate.

The Social License to Operate is the set of beliefs that make rape seem like a continuation or extension of normal sexuality, instead of an aberration and personal violation. By normalizing rapists and rape, by blurring the lines between rape and sex, we create a culture where instead of responding to the crime like we should, there’s always room to argue for and or excuse or mitigate the rape and the rapist.

No matter what a rape survivor did, there is a set of pre-existing attacks on the survivor and excuses for the rapist. (These are mostly in the form of sexist tropes because the kind of rape that gets talked about, and the kind that is most common, is when men rape women. That’s not all rape. When women rape or when people who are not binary gendered are raped or when the victims are boys or men, the most common response it that it is never talked about at all.) These tropes operate to give the wily predators cover and let them weasel out of accountability for what they did. So in the case of Steubenville and now of Torrington , the survivors have been bombarded with threats — some by girls! Much of it takes the form of people assuring us that they don’t blame the victim for getting raped BUT … and the part that follows BUT is the important part , because what these people really want to do it to explain what the survivor did wrong and take the focus off of the criminal act of the rapist.

This we can change.

In Steubenville, many of the witnesses saw the rape while it was happening and did nothing to stop it, didn’t even say anything, because … I’m not going to dignify this bullshit by saying that they didn’t know it was wrong. But they didn’t know it was a crime, they hadn’t been armed with the language to say something, and they didn’t have any reason to believe that anyone would support them against the stars of the football team.

This we can change.

People didn’t believe her. People called her a slut and a liar. People always do that. We know that most alcohol-facilitated rapes are planned, that predators specifically use alcohol to facilitate rapes because it is hard to prosecute, and yet we excuse the rapists in a way we’d never excuse con artists that similarly prey on people’s vulnerabilities.

This we can change.

People joke about rape and talk about rape like it is inevitable, like it’s a weather system, like male sexuality is beyond human control. That’s a view that normalizes rape. If it’s beyond control, there’s nothing to be done about it except get out of the way. That’s wrong, wrong in fact and wrong morally

This we can change.

Look again at Maxwell’s Five Ways. Legal consent, humanity of the victim, healthy masculinity, believe the survivors, bystander intervention. Those sound to me like ways to revoke the social license to operate, direct attacks on pillars of a belief system that allows rapists and rape to seem sort of normal.

Teaching about consent isn’t going to convert the predators. But it looks to me like it can do a lot of good, and it sure won’t do any harm. That’s why I signed the petition.