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; inflict any physical or serious psycho- logical damage. The real problem now becomes: By spending so much time telling our children about the dangers that surround every strange man, do we perhaps do more harm than good? My present associates at the Insti- tute for Sex Research—John Gagnon, the sociologist, and Cornelia Christen- son, our curator—and I are firmly con- vinced that lurid warnings are harmful; we feel that they tend to encourage a sort of paranoid fear of all strangers and all men and even of life’s situations in general, without really preventing any significant number of these incidents. We are confirmed in this belief by an- other. fact shown by our new report: The man who molests a child is usually not @ stranger anyway. Like other crimes, these happen most frequently in the poorer neighborhoods, and the offender is often a man who lives in the same boarding house, or a neighbor or friend of the family, sometimes even a relative—someone whom the child \ knows and trusts. The “lurking stranger” is largely a myth. I; young girls are overwarned, per- haps older girls are not warned enough. - Many of the older victims of rape, our studies indicated, had actually invited the attack—not knowingly, but through ignorance of social] custom, particularly of the customs of young men of a dif- _ferent social class. For example, a 19- year-old girl went to an amusement park, missed her bus home and accepted a ride from five young men who were riding away from the park in an auto- mobile. By the young men’s standards, any gir] who got into the car with them was openly offering herself for sexual experience; so the minute she stepped in, rape was inevitable. The young men did not even think of the incident as rape, even though she resisted; they be- lieved that her resistance was just part of the game! Another girl of 19 was raped when she foolishly let four boys give her a ride home from a party; a girl of 14 was raped by a group of boys who picked her up in an automobile and got her drunk. In some neighborhoods and small communities, there happens to exist a sort of unwritten law that accepting a ride, particularly from more than one young man, implies acceptance of sexual relations. A girl who does not know this—say, a college girl who her- self comes from a well-behaved sub- urban community but goes to another town to visit one of her clasgmates— can “QUTeRIY get into trouble. { THE 1965 KINSEY REPORT continued from page 67 | ey, ——eee . here is a whole range of questions | which make the problem of rape a diffi- cult one indeed. For years—perhaps centuries—people have been arguing whether a full-grown woman can be ' raped at all if she really wants to resist. ; Among the skeptics, we found in the - institute study, are many policemen and _ prosecuting authorities. A woman who complains of rape is likely to meet with a certain amount of suspicion, especially - if, as so often nowadays, she turns out | to be taller than the man she accuses. ; But our interviews leave no doubt about the answer to the old ques- ; tion. One of the prisoners denied rather | convincingly that he had used force; however, when we checked his story} we found that it had required fiv titches to close the cut in the youn woman’s lip. Another who denied using force turned out to have been armed with a kitchen knife; another with a pistol. Certainly any woman who values her life can be raped, no matter how desperately she would like to resist. There can also be no doubt, on the _ other hand, that many men who have gone to prison for rape did not use force; they were more or less innocent victims of circumstance. Sometimes the young woman submitted willingly, and later, conscience-stricken, changed her mind. Sometimes, when the incident was dis- covered, the woman claimed rape rather than admit that she had taken part will- ingly. This seems to happen especially often in the case of a girl living at home, whose parents find out that she has been engaging in sexual activity. There is also much room for difference of opinion inherent in all the social cus- toms of dating and courtship. According to the rules, the man is supposed to be the aggressor, the woman is supposed to resist—or pretend to resist, At what point are the woman’s protestations, which she has been making all along, supposed to be taken seriously? And how is the man to know? It is a game fraught with difficulties and danger. Sometimes a man ’ who ignores the protestations finds him- self charged with rape or attempted rape. Sometimes the man who listens too politely is, in fact, alienating a young lady who might have been the perfect wife for him. This is one of the many ironies of our sexual customs and laws— a subject that will be considered in next Se sell Mont s Journal. od fe semerme ot. my . . rapist—the man ith the _knife or the pistol, the California man ‘who went on the prowl in his auto- ‘ mobile— is a dangerous, unfeeling man. He regards women as mere objects, and pays little attention to their physical appearance or even age. Sometimes he is a sadist, for whom inflicting physical harm is an important part of his pleas- ure, Yet, strangely, although he is among the most unlovable of men, he often exhibits a peculiar masculine van- ity that leads to his undoing. Some rap- ists we interviewed were in prison for making this kind of mistake. In their un- thinking way they assumed that the woman enjoyed the experience. Some- times such a man even suggested another meeting. When the woman had the pres- ence of mind to agree—and the rapist showed up for the “date’—the police were waiting. Otherwise he probably would never have been caught. In many ways the rapist represents an extreme example of the difference be- tween the masculine and feminine atti- tudes toward sex—a difference that be- came apparent in our earlier reports, and that also proves to play an important part in understanding sexual offenders. One of the basic problems of our society is the fact that the average man does not understand the psychology and the feel- ‘ ings of the average woman, and the av- i erage woman does not understand the sexual drives and psychology of the average man. In a sense, most sexual offenders are men who have the usual masculine misconceptions about the sex- ual attitudes of women—but in an ex- treme, exaggerated and distorted form. In next month’s concluding installment of this summary of our new report, I shtatrexpitin this in detail, ~———_