Thanks for responding to my comment.

What caught my eye about that quote was how laughably similar it was to the lines in the email spams that flood my inbox daily, which are chock full of ludicrous force metaphors — “Forge your new love sword” being the new one just today.

In general and in the abstract, drugs like Viagra give men the choice whether to have an erection, a choice they may not otherwise have; speaking as a man, I’m not inclined to condemn that as a bad thing. You give a man that choice, you’ve done him a good deed, pretty much every time. This is true regardless of whether he’s a rapist or a caring and sensitive lover. You pretty much need to know the man — individually — before you can even begin to guess about the morality of doing him that particular good deed.

I’m pretty uncomfortable with any argument that assumes the likelihood of rape among abstract populations in foreign cultures. I don’t know much about Afghanistan, but I do now what cultural bigotry smells like, and my smeller is twitching.

In a world where women have a right to who they have sex with, we can often forget what kind of problems “soft diplomacy” might cause.

:-D