Daleth

Should've added (had I not been so busy being a smartass), if I remember correctly you made the same point in your first post on the thread, and although I didn't mention it, I agreed with you then as well.

Pain Paien

Well, obviously they can fly outside the car. Really, you should be more practical about these things. Honestly now, the idea of putting a dragon in a car. I've never heard anything more ludicrous.

Daleth

You're right, now that I think of it, it's embarrassing. It's all these years of living in the city, you know. We don't even have a car, and of course we couldn't have the dragon flying through the subway tunnels. Regulations and all. Bottom line, if you live in the city a dragon any larger than a chihuahua is probably a bad plan. Come to think of it, that might solve my cat infestation problem. Where'd that recipe for kitten pie go?

Pain Paien

Really now, you ought to think these things through. Everyone knows kittens are best served rare, and dragons simply won't allow for that. I might suggest big rat traps, or live capture traps if you like to club them yourself (the true gourmet always strives to handle their meal from start to finish-remember, freshness counts). As for the recipe, I'm sure you can find it in the Larousse Gastronomique, that book is the positively the last word on kitten dishes. You can look under "Tarte de Minou Alsacien". Just skip through the historical bit about how many Louis XIV ate a day, it's greatly exaggerated anyhow.

Daleth

No, no, it was on this board somewhere in a recipes thread. Sounded fantastic. Grandma's Favorite Kitten Pie, I think it was.

(Sorry everyone for all the posting off topic. I'll stop now. Just a momentary tension breaker in a thread full of strong feelings.)

Pain Paien

Ditto, even though I wasn't an active participant in this thread before, as you were. I just couldn't resist.

In all seriousness, however, I would like to know what the people who feel death is too severe a consequence for rape think would be a more fitting punishment (consequence, as legal rammifications are not necessarily for punitive purposes). I myself have no problem with predators being put to death on principle. Though I may be remembering incorrectly, I was under the impression that in some cases drug dealing can be punishable by death (I don't have a source I can give for this, if someone has one, for or against, I'd appreciate it), and that is certainly a less grievous crime than rape. I think at very least some in some cases rapists should be incarcerated for life (I think often the sentances are ludicrously short, especially considering that often no attempt at rehabilitation is made).

(As a final frivolous outburst, I would like to say I should like to further discuss the topic of kitten pastries through a less serious avenue, as it is my understanding that Grandma's recipe replaces butter with vegetable shortening; a most heinous crime.)

Bree

Someone else mentioned it in an earlier post, but when a women is in a potentially dangerous situation with an attacker, I'm not sure she's in the judge-jury-executioner mindset. She's thinking about how to get this asswipe down on the ground. To imply that the death of the attacker through self-defence of the woman is somehow premeditated is, in my opinion, absurd.

As an aside to all the men on this thread: I don't think gun-toting women are likely to whip out their weapons if you were to get fresh with them in a bar, or ask for their phone number, or even if you grab their ass. Just in case you're wondering what I was getting at.

keyser_soze

We never considered such a thing dearest. In my opinion, most women display more self control than men...

Daleth

I'm not sure what you're asking with this question... what the legal consequences should be, what the woman ought to be free to do, or what in imaginationland we think are fair consequences for rape.

The woman ought to be free to do whatever she needs to do to protect herself, including kill the attacker. My only disagreement earlier was that it's not always going to be necessary to kill him.

Maybe I'm looking at rape differently than some other people. We seem to be talking primarily about the rape in which a woman is grabbed by someone standing in the shadows and held down. Or even grabbed by a man standing in her living room and forced to the ground. This is the rape we've been talking about, isn't it? But it's not the only kind of rape.

I used to know a man (divorced at the time) who once commented to me that the best thing about being married had been the ability to just roll over in the middle of the night and start having sex with his wife, whether she was awake or not, without having to "get permission". This man didn't think he was a rapist. It never occurred to him that this was rape, but it was. He didn't mean to harm her and in other ways he was a gentle man, a good father, that sort of thing. And yet he was a rapist.

I once had a friend try the same sort of thing with me. I mean there I was in my skivvies and a t-shirt in a shared bed, so I must be consenting to sex, right? So he rolled over on top of me and prepared to get on with it. What it took for me to get out of the attempted rape was to push him off. "Don't even try to call me a rapist," says he, but had I not woken up in time to stop him that's exactly what he would have been. Brought that vacation to a very abrupt end. This was not someone who made an intentional attack on me. This was someone who failed to understand what "consent" means. I think I made the moral choice in pressuring him into counselling.

There are a lot of men who have committed rape who don't think that they have because they didn't jump out at some woman from behind a parked car and drag her away. They didn't punch her in the head. They didn't, at least in their eyes, act violently. This is what I think Brighid was getting at when she said that men need to know what constitutes rape. At any rate, thinking about situations like this has colored my comments through this entire thread.

Pain Paien

Sorry, I should have made myself more clear. I was not talking about what the woman justified to do in self-defense (as I think that was made pretty clear, and a reasonable consensus was reached), but what people think a good legal consequence for rape would be, based on each's respective views of the act.