I think the comparison being made is not the two guys are rapists, but that the two guys have a high likelihood of becoming embarrassing / socially awkward / please god just let me get on with my day and stop.

It seems to be a heavy handed way of putting most guys in the shoes of a woman hearing a similar conversation.

But I dont think it applies much to this sittu.

You're missing the point.

Men aren't normally afraid of sexual assault, because most sexual assault is perpetrated by men on women. If you want to the feeling of fear that a potential victim feels, you have to imagine a situation where you feel at risk of sexual assault.

If that story doesn't make you feel sufficiently uncomfortable to have empathy for women surrounded by a bunch of men when the context suddenly turns sexual, I encourage you to make up your own story.

For what it's worth, when I was imagining the story, the guys talking in the bar hadn't even noticed the straight guy in front of them.

I assure you, I'm not missing the point - I understand very well the point you're trying to make, except you've decided to make it in an incredibly offensive, homophobic way.

You've committed the same injustice against homosexuals with your comment as women frequently suffer in our field (and beyond): the reinforcement of tired stereotypes and insensitive association.

In what world is is okay to so casually draw a line between homosexuals and rape? You can make your point about how men do not suffer the constant fear of assault, but you are not free to drag gays into this in a slanderous, offensive, and deeply harmful manner. People have been battling the image of the sexual deviant/predator for decades - your free-association is the sort of casual, unintentional prejudice that would be more forgivable if you weren't so defensive of it.

Let me make this clear once more: your point that men do not experience the same fear of assault as women stands, you did not need a fictional story to go along with it. More importantly, your "defense" of women came at great expense to another marginalized demographic, needlessly, thoughtlessly, and IMO repugnantly.

Making your point on the back of somebody else is not okay.

This is rape paranoia, if you feel that's fine then good for you, as I see it it's no better than racial profiling.

Sorry, which part is rape paranoia?

As a guy, I'm not worried about rape. It very rarely happens to adult men.

But that's the problem I'm trying to draw attention to here: a guy's intuition of what is an inoffensive sexual comment will be very different than a woman's, because they face very different risks of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Most sexual assault are generally, in any country that publish statistics, committed by people who know the people they would assault, they are "friends", relatives or coworkers.

Now I believe you're saying it's fine for a woman to feel threatened about sexual assault in the middle of a crowd because of dick jokes.

Well then maybe it's fine to believe that every man is a potential rapist, there was a girl who made this exact argument in a blog and called her rape paranoia Schrödinger rapist.

Here's the catch of my argument, I have many black male friends and some of them do actually said that sometimes people cross the road to the other sidewalk just to not cross with them in the middle of Manhattan in a crowded street at lunch time.

If you think safety über ales is a fine philosophy then as I said good for you, I call this paranoia, know that's an irrational behavior and just say that both are not fine.

Good night

I wrote both posts in hurry yesterday, now that I read your points (I read whole threads of your posts) I generally agree with you, I think that maybe elaborating my points would be a bit tedious. I also think "rape paranoia" was too harsh a world, as you made me realize, I'm almost 6.4 feet tall, I generally do not know what is to be harassed..

So saying basically about it. Yes I agree with you, women have much more to lose in the situation you described, I do think your initial example was poor, and having good gay friends who suffer because of that made me reply with anger.

Sorry for that.

Just clarifying, it sucks to type on tablets, world, and a couple of other spelling errors are mainly because of typing in tablets really sucks.