@fiskitall

Can you comment about how your concept of "date fraud" affects male victims of sexual violence? You write,

It is important that a woman’s “noes” be respected and her “yeses” be respected. And it is also important when her nonverbal “yeses” (tongues still touching) conflict with those verbal “noes” that the man not be put in jail for choosing the “yes” over the “no.” He might just be trying to become her fantasy. (p. 315)

It's common for people to think men cannot be raped. When a man says "no" people may interpret this as a mixed message and decide to "become [his] fantasy" and he could be raped.

Also, does this mean that any defendent who can reasonably asert there were mixed messages (or so they thought) should be found "not guilty"? That's a steep burden for prosecutors.

the quote comes from the politics of sex chapter of The Myth of Male Power. The point that "He might just be trying to become her fantasy" comes after a discussion of how romance novels and, in my 2014 edition, books like 50 Shades of Grey--books that are the female fantasy--are rarely titled, "He Stopped When I Said 'No.'" The point is that women's romance novels are still fantasizing the male-female dichotomy of attract/resist versus pursue/persist, and the law is increasingly punishing that as sexual harassment or date rape.

the law is about dichotomy: guilty vs. innocent. male-female sexual attraction is about nuance. the court can't begin to address the nuances of the male-female tango. the male role is punishable by law. women have not been resocialized to share the risks of rejection by expectation, only by option. the male role is being criminalized; the female increasingly has the option of calling his role courtship when she likes it, and taking him to court when she doesn't.

the answer is education about each sex's fears and feelings--and that education being from early junior high school. we need to focus on making adolescence a better preparation for real love within the framework of respect for the differences in our hormones.

the most dangerous thing that's going on in some colleges is saying that a woman who says "yes" but is drunk can say in the morning that she was raped, because she was drunk and wasn't responsible. this is like saying someone who drinks and gets in the car and has an accident is not responsible and shouldn't get a DUI because she or he is drunk. we would never say the guy isn't responsible for raping her because he's drunk. these rules infantalize women and the female role, and criminalize men and the male role.