About This Episode
Content Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault, rape, and incapacitation in detail.
A man walks into a bar with three women who he intends to have sexual contact with. They ply him with drinks and drugs. Hours later he can’t function, and someone has started a 50-person group chat, inviting strangers to come and use his thumbprint to run up his Apple Pay advertising “Free Drinks!”
Nobody would call that consent. Everyone would understand that as a criminal act. So why—when the genders are reversed and sexual assault is the topic—are people debating that on national television?
In this unscripted, early-morning response to current events, Ruth Reymundo and David Mandel unpack a widely reported (and alleged) sexual assault at an elite US university, and the very public conversation that followed. They use it to name what’s really going on: rape is not about sex. It’s about power, and dominating and extracting something from another person.
In this episode, David and Ruth address:
Why agreeing to limited contact is never agreeing to everything that follows, and why someone who is incapacitated cannot consent at all
“Is the store still open?”: how that line shows men treating a woman as an object, and performing for each other
What a perpetrator’s own decisions tell us about capacity, control, and accountability
How culture trains men into violence, and the myth that men “can’t control themselves”
How the university’s response (expulsions for some, essays for others) can compound the harm of the alleged assault
Why so much law is spent defining what men can take, and what a culture-wide truth and reconciliation process around men’s violence might look like
A challenge to people working on men’s mental health, suicide, substance use, and boys’ achievement: if your map of men’s wellbeing leaves out men’s use of violence, you’re not serving boys, men, women, or children
Ruth and David close by asking men to examine their own relationship to sex, consent, and violent pornography, and by asking leaders to stop treating male violence as entertainment.
Plus: an update on the SafetyNexus Digital Coach and Insight Engine. It’s now in a three-month live pilot with around 50 child protection workers at a statutory agency in Australia.
Additional Resources
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence