When I ask, “Why say that?” it is not the same thing as asking “Why think that?” or demanding “Ignore it altogether.” I truly only mean to ask why a person might say something at all that does not do anyone else any good and is in all likelihood a lie in the first place. Really. So, when I say that declaring a man a non-rapist is entirely useless to any other woman and is only valuable inasmuch as the (likely deluded) woman saying it is able to reassure herself that the man in question might not rape *her* in particular, it really does make me wonder why such a woman would ever feel the need to state aloud that which is only of any use to her and her alone.
I personally don’t want to hear it. And I have a difficult time imagining what on earth the motive could be for blurting something like that out. I really do. That’s not to say that no one should ever think quietly to herself “so and so is not a rapist (so far as I am able to discern from my own experiences of him),” although I admit that I don’t really understand the motivation for holding that thought near and dear or anything, aside from the possibility of sheer narcissism. I just really don’t understand why it is so many women decide to actually vocalize that very limited, necessarily incomplete, likely altogether erroneous assumption. Perhaps it’s illogical of me to wonder at the motives of those who would place emphasis on their limited perception of one man or all men as “good” but I do. Is there a wife/girlfriend/mother/whore/female relative of Nigel out there who can explain this to me?
