I've been following the fuss in the USA over the Steubenville rape case a little. Although I've been spared the details of the crime itself, I saw the responses.
I agree with the people who are surprised and angry that the criminals got more sympathy in some coverage than the victims, but I was also annoyed at some of the points raised by the commentators.
Yes, we shouldn't tell young girls not to show cleavage as though rape is all their fault. Yes, we should teach men to behave themselves. But no, it's not all men. What I have to say isn't a nice easy solution; it cuts to the heart of how many people interact. I think that there's a tension between human desires that we cannot easily resolve, but I do think that we should recognise it rather than simply focus on the easy answers.
Every time a woman says 'I'm not sure' and means 'I want you try harder', she's creating a rapist. Every 'consummate lover' for one woman is a rapist for another.
 The statistics of reported rape show that the vast majority of rapes are done by people who know and are known by the victim. This isn't always an arbitrary attack by a complete stranger. It's a man a woman knows who then takes things far too far. That's not something easy, like teaching young men not prowl the streets at night and assault complete strangers. He managed to avoid raping her long enough for the victim, on average, to say that she knew him as a person. So what made him change?

It seems rather implausible to me to blame rape on either women wearing short tops and acting like sexually aware women, or on men having lapses from being seemingly normal people to utterly base animals. Rape arises from a complex interplay of emotions and incentives, not least of which are the ones I want to discuss here. However, I do not intend to claim that I'm giving an account of all necessary causes: just one aspect of the problem. The problem is that it looks very much as though people's intrinsic desires do not match those of being anti-rape. Allow me a few paragraphs of what might seem irrelevancy before I tie things back together.

How many women actually want a prince to come and save them? I guess that most quite like the idea of a handsome knight sweeping them off their feet, but in any situation that tends to be too much like that dream they find it unpleasant. I really don't know, since I can't read the minds of lots of women and do a good survey. But supporting an ideal and rejecting it when you find out what it's really like isn't good enough, especially if you continue supporting that ideal after realising how unpleasant it is.

http://ho-fun.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/gender-and-equality-disneys-wreck-it.html
This blog post has some interesting things to say about a recent Disney film, 'Wreck-It Ralph', and it is pleasing to see the princess dream being discarded, especially in favour of democracy, coincidentally a form of governance that requires and grants personal responsibility. If only we could run ourselves the way we aspire to run our countries: on principles and wisdom, rather than foolish fantasies that do not really work.

 There are people who like the fantasy of having the relationship made for them; of sitting back and lapping up the devotion. At the extreme end is a woman I once knew who expected a boy who wanted her affection to travel on a 2-hour train ride with her just to keep her company, even though he then had to go back on the reverse journey by himself. I have no doubt that everyone enjoys making little effort and getting something for nothing, and I have to applaud some women who manage to be feminists and yet still believe that this aspect of life should keep its gender roles.
I have even read a serious work of non-fiction (which seemed rather like a PhD thesis) written by Catherine Hakim, which argued that it must always be this way, because men need more sex than women (an undoubted fact if you look at the research on the topic, it seems), and so men will always be competing for the relatively lesser interest from women.
Looking at other animals seems to confirm this point of view. It is the males who grow the enormous horns, display the brightly decorated tails and so on; it is almost always males who bear the burden of sexual selection, because they create greater demand and all the females have more ability to choose.
From an economics perspective, a market certainly needs some people to be active, trying to sell and create competition, because otherwise it seizes up, there's no liquidity, and no-one gets anything.

But when it becomes a part of our culture it has more insidious effects than the main one of allowing people who can't think for themselves to fall into predetermined roles. If a person has a lot of choice, why not make suitors demonstrate how much they're willing to invest in her?
If she values material wealth that much, she needs to know that he has it. It makes a complete mockery of the notion that women are the romantic ones who value their partners as individuals, but if a woman really does value wealth, a display might seem to make sense, as well as being pleasing both as a visceral demonstration of how attractive she is and how much power she has over him and other men, and in the immediate benefit of whatever is being bought (stereotypically a dinner).
However, if women begin to require material investment, we reach the nasty world of transactions. If material wealth is important in a partner, more than character, a woman is effectively admitting that she's selling her affections to the highest bidder. When people make investments they usually make down-payments in order to get certainty. The only time when down-payments don't bring certainty is when someone is being scammed: the wonderful e-mails from businessmen who need just a few hundred pounds in order to be able to share millions, and then just a few hundred more....
Of course, if the cost of the meal is truly negligible, then maybe it won't be regarded as a transaction. But then we're getting into princess territory, since the vast majority of the population can not regard a nice meal at a restaurant as a negligible cost. Not that I think even super-rich people are immune to the transaction mode of thinking. It's not as if many super-rich people buy a pack of chewing gum (or anything cheap) but pay hundreds of pounds for it. You pay the price expected in an exchange. Rich people who throw their money around probably won't stay rich for long, unless they're some sort of social parasite with a line to easy money. I know that sort of person can be attractive (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSFMsyBqZlY), but it's sad that that's the case.
If competition is created for something that men have a particular need for, they won't only spend negligible amounts of money on it. They will spend unwisely, and although every man should realise, utterly and absolutely, that paying for another being's dinner buys nothing, and certainly no right to sex, I do wonder if any man would actually buy that dinner if this vital truth were widely acknowledged. Implicit in the whole set-up is the romantic aspect of such a date (if these dates ever are romantic; I wouldn't know, since as you can guess I don't have many). For men, romance includes sex. It is not all that men think about, but it is a vital ingredient.
Any woman who accepts a meal has to ask herself why. If she is not selling something, why does she need paying for it? If she is selling something, but no-one has been clear about whether that's an evening's company, sex, or long-term interest, is it any surprise that confusion can result? As the great Jack Sparrow has it, "We've established the point in principle and now we're only haggling over price." If a woman can be bought, she's not the romantic partner most men want for long-term relationships. If she goes so far as to compare restaurants and meals with friends or with the men themselves, she's making it very clear whether she's after a relationship or a transaction.

Of course, it's not all about buying dinners and converting social capital into material capital. I've gone into that in some depth now, and if I haven't at least made the reader think a bit more about it, I won't with any more writing.

Men do many things that betray our culture's insidious effect on their attitudes to women, and women can ask them to stop them all. So what else do men often do in the 'dating game'?
I could make a long list, but the common factor that makes things worrying to me is when something involves competing for a prize, especially if it involves material wealth. I know that it must feel good to be competed over, and it can't feel wise, but it has a pernicious effect on people's minds if women are thought of as a prize to be won.
We hear often enough from feminists who claim that pornography is vile stuff because it objectifies women; it has a bad effect on men's attitudes. How much worse must it be when the effect is in reality, not in a fantasy world on a screen?
Every time the competition is between men the woman is sidelined; she becomes less human, just a thing to be gained. Women become arm candy and accessories: things to have, not people to know.
The woman who chooses for herself can find herself reviled by men and women.  

Of course, the people who are truly nasty are the men who would never respect such a woman, and the women who disapprove of her. The women who need social pressure are the ones who do confuse transactions and relationships in society. These are not the prostitutes or call girls, who openly and honestly sell access to their bodies without any relationship, but the ones who find themselves drawn to wealth or status; who objectify men as accessories (or rather, covet the accessories that men mostly nowadays can bring, which include wealth and, for a certain class of person, therefore social status).

Interviews with call girls (who are mostly, contrary to popular belief, perfectly decent young women who find that they need the extra money and are satisfied with their work, and are not drug-addled slaves) show that most requests they get are for the 'girlfriend experience'. So maybe prostitutes are selling a fake relationship, but it shows that men are actually the true romantics. While women chase wealth and status, men have to resort to deliberate fakery in order to have a relationship in which they are valued as a person.

It's also a bit odd to make men front up the investment when they do not even know if the relationship will work well. If you tell an investor that if he'll give you some money he might have a chance to buy something but neither of you knows if he really wants it he'll have to be very desperate or foolish to take your offer. 

Men are encouraged to ask for all the dates, plan the dates, whether that's a sports game (renowned as a bad option, but actually very sensible) or 'just' the cinema (also regarded as boring, but at least provides something to talk about afterwards).
The harder you make a man work for something, the more he expects a reward when he's done it all. It's a neat line to say that 'time with me is reward enough', as one might see on a chick flick or television show, but it's just a cheap line. The truth is that until you've got to know someone and perhaps love that person then time with anyone isn't reward enough for one-sided relationships.
Dating is all the wrong way round. A man who puts enough effort in for some women will necessarily be a bit obsessive. If women don't want men to think that they've won/bought/earned sex, they could try a bit harder not to force men to win/buy/earn it, as well as on telling men off for the final moment of confusion.
If some women were honest about how much sex they wanted, they might not get as much interest. But honesty is best, and deceit leads down a dark road. I'm not trying to excuse rape, but like any action or problem in society, there is a network of contributing factors that might help us deal with it, and the approach many women take to dating is certainly one.

Most insidious of all, of course, is the 'try harder' line when used before sex. This I've discussed in a later post (much later, but this one stayed in draft form for a while).