I participate in a few online forums. I cannot tell you how often I get reamed as a female for actually questioning whether women can have alterior motives and confusion about sex v rape just because (to me) victimhood seems to have become such a quick way at noteriety.
I am a female and I have four brothers.
I am a female who has been 'assaulted', both times by strangers in situations that did not scream consent, ( a public park, an apartment with someone blocking the door to exit)
I am a female who is not 'eager' and who has softly said' no' before even though the NO was only in the moment a cue to try harder or to convince myself to stop although I did not really want to stop. the hormonal rush during sex can be a complex and overwhelming thing.
My problem, even as a female, is the notion that women have power to start something so primal and demand partners be IMMEDIATELY responsive to even the slightest notion of hesitation or even the absence of eagerness, that such situations can start out with intention to intimacy and ruin a mans life because they may not notice slight changes AFTER that initiation troubles me as it flies in the face of what I have experienced to be the reality of sexual encounters.
I do not hold that women cannot be victimized in an intimate surrounding, but the details should matter as well as reasonable and realistic review in the shoes of BOTH parties involved. IT just seems almost too easy to immediately pin one person as 'victim' and the other as 'victimizer' in situations that are much more complex than any intention to 'rape' or even knowledge that the partner was considering it 'rape'.
As to harassment. I feel people should speak up and recognize that what offends them may not have offended another and the only way an 'offender' knows each individuals boundaries is if they SAY SO. I am also concerned with incidents where women have only said something in the public limelight about actions or words that a man or me have said/used. Men swing and miss, but Id hate to see them stop taking the bat for fear of being labeled with one of these terrible titles. If a man/woman intentionally (theres that word again) PERSISTS, once you have INFORMED THEM of something offending you, then they are jerks who are harassing you. But we just seem to be oversimplifying and lumping people in together and pretending details dont matter at all.
We don't just have this exact problem today with sex related issues, we have it with political issues as well.
And as with the sexual issues, abuses are happening on both sides.
In my lifetime, I have now seen several iterations, or "movements" if you will, in various areas of our mutual lives, where it becomes almost "fashionable" to either deny that a given problem exists, or to declare that because some people abuse or exaggerate their personal concerns about it, that ALL who are concerned should be ignored. Or more insidiously, that anyone who is on the latest "not popular" list should be ignored, while everyone else is lauded.
I am a trouble-shooter/problem solver by lifestyle, and by profession. Because of that, I know well, that deciding what to do for ANY concern, needs to be addressed in detail, according to the facts of that SINGLE INSTANCE.
More than anything else, I am opposed to BLANKET responses of any kind. When the BLM movement got going, I was frustrated to see the upper leadership of the nation essentially take exactly one side or the other, either declaring everyone wrong or everyone right.
Same thing seems to be happening with the Me Too movement, with one side of the issue acting as though every woman who speaks up is a hero of truth, and the other declaring that if even one woman complains unfairly, that the issue should be declared "fake news," and be ignored.