But this isn't even a case of between friends, I've run with a rough lot, but it seems rape as a punch line is on the rise, i really remember it being a something that came up in the past.
I wonder if this is a push back against the move to educate people about the issues around rape.
Partially. Under whose aegis, though? Mens' Rights Activists are mostly a bunch of inchoate chest-beaters, so do we lay this one at the media's door? I mean, historically the media follow direction, so who's directing?
I think there's also an issue regarding the tension between male displacement from the workplace, and continued promotion of the "man as breadwinner" meme, but again that's only part of it.
I think there's also a deliberate coarsening of social mores by those elements of the population that are more able to "get away" with such things. We hear a lot about working class people getting drunk, misbehaving and basically being lewd and licentious, and invariably such people end up before the magistrate, paying the price for their folly. What we
don't hear quite so much about is when this behaviour takes place (and it does) in non-working class environments, and because such behaviour isn't "policed" in the way it is among w/c populations, it's not questioned anywhere near as closely. Unfortunately, unaddressed misbehaviour quickly becomes habit, and the unpunished twat quickly comes to believe that their behaviour is not merely acceptable, but legitimate.
And yes, I'm well aware I'm making a class issue out of a behaviour (rape) that crosses class boundaries, but there's an element of difference between how the classes are treated that provides a fertile soil for a sense of middle class "entitlement" to grow in.
