Like charity, most things begin at home. And right now our society is in the throes of a homegrown epidemic. Celebrities like George Clooney have the money and notoriety to get the sickness splashed in front of millions of people internationally. His commitment to humanitarian causes like the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan is laudable. But, back home, many of the same crimes fly beneath the radar. This sickness is rape.

During the great European explorations to find new worlds and to save those heathens for Christianity, the churches back home were burning heretics and political enemies alike. I think that sometimes we project our own dark thoughts outward; if we are saving the world then we must be a great country, right?

Our military is rife with rape. People say, “It’s been around since Adam and Eve.” Others scream for justice from the courts. For the unfortunate victim in the military, however, s/he has to stand before a military tribunal, people much higher up in their food chain, not a civilian court. Often the raped are told that they somehow instigated the whole thing.

The military poses some challenges for soldiers at all levels. Many feel that it’s a bad idea to mix women and men on the firing lines. Still, women could probably handle the controls of any aircraft better than a man; their hand-eye coordination is supposedly that much better. But, remember when the Iraqis captured one of our women soldiers in Kuwait? It added a new spin on our hallowed war on terror.

While a lot of our military is spread around the globe our colleges are on home turf. They, too, are breeding sexual offenders. That may sound harsh when our young’s views on sexual freedom and partying are taken into account. Still, when someone pushes his/herself onto someone else in a sexual manner, that is a crime and we need to call it by its true name.

I’ve been told by ex-firemen that their dream job bottomed out when the government pushed “The ladies” into the firehouses. It is a tough job with severe physical requirements but was this evaluation based solely on that or was another male-only bastion being breached? Or, maybe both?

I guess it isn’t much of a stretch from a barracks to coed dormitories. Maybe sexual segregation is a bad thing but Rome in its last days became sexually polarized and we know what that got them. Rape is now rampant on colleges as well.

I think the rape issue is not new. Many times the stats are skewed many intimate crimes go unreported. How horrible it would be to have to sit in a courtroom and describe such an offensive act. We’ve all heard men say, “If they didn’t want to get raped they shouldn’t dress that way.” Does the same apply to men who get raped?

The fact is that women are easy targets. One bit of eye contact or a subtle smile can result in a woman being attacked by a male misreading her “signals.” Maybe she was thinking of a good joke or listening to a phone call with the ear pod hidden in her hair. My sister-in-law had one man draped across her car windshield in a disgusting manner because he thought he had seen a come hither look in her eyes.

Politicians have some stern views on this. The “Women Issue” is a major plank of one party’s agenda. In the debate about women having the right to decide what they do with their own bodies, evangelical men hold up whichever book they consider holy and quote scripture; how a woman should dress, how many steps behind her husband she should follow, how many wives a man can have, etc. This is at our U.S. Congress, not somewhere in the middle-east. Several religions foster epidemics of unwanted children because their holy men advise women that it is their Christian duty to submit to their husband even if an unwanted pregnancy could be deadly to her. When contraceptives are banned, unwanted children are the result. This is happening in so-called advanced societies, not third world countries who we think desperately need our guidance and support.

It’s an illness that is woven into the fabric of our society. Music, film and sports groups make millions running the gamut from trivializing women to hate and the downright misogynistic. Most video games are no different. The problem is that those folks who condemn the people in the entertainment business are pounding books that have portrayed women as inferior from the dawn of time. This disease is homegrown and concerns us all. We need to change the way we think. No means no; always has, always will.

Jerry Tuck is a retired San Andreas resident and an indie author. Contact him at olwhofan@aol.com or use the Contact Form.