[Tango-L] reply to Sergio: There is no such a thing as bad publicity.

[Jeff Gaynor]

Jay Rabe wrote:
> Sergio, amigo,
>  
> An amazing thing, that I get to be in the position of explaining Our culture to You.   ;-)
>  
> The United States was founded by Puritans,
No it was not. One of the first colonies was up in Plymouth 
Massachusetts. Almost from its inception the US had a heady mix of 
cultures. Indeed, New York city had no less than 18 prominent languages 
spoken in it during the mid 1700's and German missed out by a hair's 
breadth of becoming the official language after the revolution.
>  and much of our culture, particularly mores and taboos related to sex, 
As with *all* cultures. Every culture regulates virtue, vice and 
sexuality or it ceases to function as a society. We just obsess about 
ours a lot more. You head to the Middle East and try to  sleep with some 
Arab's sister even if she does want it. Both of you will likely end up 
dead.
> still to this day are often tainted with a residual of unconscious puritanical attitudes. The one that relates to this subject is that it's not "nice", especially for a woman, to confront, and it's doubly not nice, and is even shameful, to talk about sex. It's another order of magnitude of "not nice" to talk about sex abuses. The deplorable fact of child and spousal abuse in this country would be non-existent by now if not for this tendency, in both men and women, to "look the other way"
*NO* I teach women's self-defense and rape prevention. Sorry but this 
statement crosses the line into irresponsible (which is why I ignored 
this thread until now). Sex has nothing to do with assault and violence 
and no amount of liberalizing attitudes towards sex will diminish such 
crimes.
>  rather than confront and say, "This is wrong." The empowerment that Feminism has brought most certainly made the situation better, 
No it hasn't paradoxically. From the perspective of self-defense a 
Feminist agenda tends to make victimization more likely that not.  Often 
there is a strong emphasis on tapping inner rage and abusing the 
attacker rather than protecting the victim which can go horribly wrong. 
But be warned this is (self-defense as an political statement) a really 
big hot button for me so I suggest you not pen a casual reply. 
> but the reluctance of many women to speak out against such things is, as I said, an unconscious "feeling" that is just their automatic response based on generations of cultural indoctrination that started with the Puritans.
>   
No. This guy fits the bill as a potential date rapist pretty well in 
that he knew his victims and chose them wisely.  E,g,, even after 
exposing himself at one point one victim was still not quite sure what 
to do. What is probably more chilling to realize is that he operates 
this way probably because he has been successful doing it in the past 
and repeatedly so.  This is the actual reason that so many incidents 
passed without being reported, not a general helplessness of women. He 
wouldn't have considered doing what he did for a minutes unless he 
thought it was relatively safe. He just (fortunately) miscalculated this 
time.

I am refraining from discussing this topic too much since it is large 
and very, very disturbing, but a good place to start reading is at

http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/rape.html

Jeff