Don't Be That Girl

As the community is busy arguing about the finer details of date rape in the Rescue to Recommended diary, Are We Doing Young Persons a Disservice by Teaching them No Means No?,  an interesting article came up in my Facebook feed, an article about the Men's Rights Movement and their new campaign, Don't Be That Girl.

In the fore-mentioned diary where a teacher encourages both teenage boys and girls to see how they could have prevented a date rape scenario (a question that has it's own problems and issues), Tara the Antisocial Social Worker praised a program that has reduced rapes by 10% in the communities where it has been introduced. It's called Don't Be That Guy.

Some men have taken umbrage to the campaign. Don't Be That Girl is their response. Their campaign uses the same images and graphics of Don't Be That Guy yet sends an entirely different message:

Just because you regret a one-night stand doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.

Granted, this blew up earlier this year in July but it's only today that I heard about it. And today I've been busy typing comments like a mad woman as I try to explain to folks that date rape isn't as mild mannered as it sounds and that rapists are people who plan ahead of time to commit a crime.

Our Western Culture has some serious problems when it concerns rape and I would hope that on a progressive website that we could at least agree that the words "No means No" were a beginning to change the conversation for the better. But I'm afraid that isn't so. In fact, the conversation here at Daily Kos is not all that different from the one that took place earlier this year in Edmonton.