This is why so many of you are confused by the Christian criticism of gay marriage, the "They'll be marrying children and animals next" bit. They genuinely don't understand the difference -- that a homosexual partner can consent, but animals and children cannot -- because to them, all of those acts are equally impure. Remember when people implied it was hypocritical for Jennifer Lawrence to complain about stolen nude photos while also posing nude for a magazine ? Same deal -- if you grew up hearing that all naked photos are sinful, what difference does it make if the woman consented to the sin?

Either the act was pure in the eyes of God or it wasn't, and the only pure sex act was married intercourse (and note that many of the married women in the Bible had been bought like livestock ). Thus, there was no reason to talk about anything else. If they taught a lesson about how forcing a woman to kiss you is wrong, that'd have been implying that consensual kissing was okay (and premarital kissing = eternal hellfire).

1 "Boys Will Be Boys"

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Explaining someone's actions is obviously not the same as excusing them. Saying that the behavior is shockingly common doesn't excuse it either. The point of this isn't to defend [insert subject of most recent scandal here], but to prevent people from insisting that guys like him are rare, incomprehensible monsters.

They're not. Lots of guys grope. Lots of guys who don't will masturbate to rape porn. Lots of guys who don't do that, still happily masturbated to the stolen "Fappening" pics. Lots of guys who didn't do that still see James Bond movies as wish fulfillment. Lots of guys who don't, still didn't see any problem with that Han Solo scene until I pointed it out.

Lucasfilm

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The writers of all these movies and ad campaigns would say they didn't invent a damned thing, that males have testosterone and will have certain urges at a certain age, even if they are raised on a desert island. And because the urges are natural, anything that appeals to those urges must also be -- boys, after all, will be boys. Those boys will then grow up and write movies and ads which portray their sexually frustrated adolescent fantasies as if they are everyday reality.

But what's the alternative? Censorship? To force women to cover themselves, like in Saudi Arabia?

No, the alternative is to recognize that ridding guys of toxic attitudes toward women is a monumental task. I've spent two solid decades trying to deprogram myself, to get on board with something that, in retrospect, should be patently obvious to any decent person. Changing actions is the easy part; changing urges takes years and years. It's the difference between going on a diet and training your body to not get hungry at all.

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In the meantime, to act like it's crazy that a particular guy doesn't see the clear line between consent and assault is misguided. The culture has intentionally blurred those lines and trained that man to feel shame for erring on either side. You have to start teaching kids that consent matters from Day One. Now let's put this depressing subject aside and enjoy this scene from Ratatouille. In it, the hero forces a kiss with a girl, she pulls out pepper spray to fight him off, then realizes that she loves it:

Pixar

David Wong is executive editor of Cracked.com, his most recent novel is now in development as a TV series, and you can get the paperback here. Thanks to everyone in this thread for suggesting all of our many disturbing examples of this phenomenon from film and television.

You know all those facts you've learned about psychology from movies and that one guy at the party who says, "Actually ..." a lot? Please forget them. Chances are none of them are true. Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, the one famous psychology study people can name. It was complete bullshit. Funny story actually, it turns out that when you post flyers that say, "Hey, do you wanna be a prison guard for the weekend? Free food and nightsticks," you might not get the most stable group of young men. So join Jack O'Brien, Cracked staff members Dan O'Brien and Michael Swaim, and Psychology Professor Martie G. Haselton of UCLA as they debunk Rorschach tests, the Mozart effec,t and middle child syndrome, so soon you can be that person at the party who says, "Actually ..." Get your tickets here!

For more from David Wong, check out 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained To Hate Women and 5 Subtle Ways Hollywood Taught You To Be A Worse Person.

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