First point: the entire post rests on invoking a double standard. Imagine how it would feel if it was your daughter... in some parts of the world a raped woman's life is ruined.... Um, bad intro, really bad intro. Sure, the idea that any kind of sexual experience devalues a woman shapes a woman's experience of sexual assault. However, asking men to get in touch with their patriarchal, proprietary attitudes toward women's sexuality is not a good way to further a discussion about sexual assault. Leading into my second point....

Second point: the male response to a story of rape is really their response to an imagined scenario in which they're falsely accused of rape. This says a lot about men's difficulty identifying with women. They find it easier to identify with the man in the story, even though he's the villain and acted in a way they never would. Since they're unable to identify with the woman, they identify themselves with the man, and since they themselves are not sexual predators, they imagine a scenario in which they have been accused of rape because of an innocent mistake.

Naturally they recognize this is different from the original story, but they are so unable to empathize with the female protagonist that the alternative story they conjured, in which the man is a victim, is much more compelling to them. They know it's a different story, but it's so scary and real to them that they simply must discuss it. The original story of rape is so unreal to them that they simply push it aside.

This lack of empathy for victims of rape is what needs to be overcome so that men can have a more evenhanded response to stories like this. Instead of asking men to imagine themselves as a patriarch whose honor and property have been marred, ask them to imagine themselves as a woman. Ask them to put themselves in the place of a woman and imagine the experience of a man shoving his hand into their pants and groping them.

Empathizing with women does not come naturally for men, so men need to practice and take a self-conscious, self-critical approach (as anyone would when attempting to empathize with someone different from themselves.) They need to be careful to balance their perception of the story. They should not automatically replace the man in the story with themselves and let that perspective define their response. If they easily imagine the man's point of view and feel the intense emotions they would feel in his place, they should work until they can imagine the woman's point of view and feel her emotions just as vividly. Women can assist by describing a woman's experience. Actually, I would say that guidance is essential, and men should pay close attention. There's no lack of material available; we must simply avail ourselves of it.

Again, it's the woman's experience that we should focus on. It's a bad idea to invoke the brother's or father's response. Sure, every guy can imagine the sense of shame, violation, and powerlessness they would feel about their sister or daughter being raped -- feelings that may be analogous to the shame, violation, and powerlessness felt by a rape victim -- but the fear in the heart of every loving high school boyfriend approaching the door of his girfriend's house betrays the assumption that his girlfriend's brother or father would be similarly outraged by the idea of her having consensual sex. The brother's or father's outrage does not depend on empathy and may be in contradiction to the woman's own feelings. In this day and age, their reaction seems pathetic and ridiculous, an atavistic twitch.

So the empathy must be with the woman herself. To have a balanced response to the story, a man must identify with the woman as easily as with the man, and should not simply project himself on the man but instead realize that the man might have behaved in a way that they themselves would not. Until that is achieved, men will respond to a very different story than the one told.