For whatever it is worth I do NOT believe most men are rapists, or even interested or aroused by the idea of rape. This could be a cultural issue, or a result of the culture I and my peers were raised in.
However when reading about war and warfare before the last 50 years, it seems clear rape of female(and some male) civilians was not only expected but considered a certainty, and even advertised as a reason to go to war. It seems it is only the USA and other first world countries where this is punished harshly where it has died out.
So what is the deal here? Was it a minority of psychopaths/sociopaths in the past doing the majority of rapes during wartime/occupation which would get applied to the victors as a generality?
I ask this knowing it will be inflammatory, and not knowing a better way to phrase it honestly so please don’t try to find offense in my question. I understand how emotional this issue is, I’m just curious what the reality is. In my mind I doubt many of my peers would be interested in invading Hypotheticalstan so they can rape female civilians, but clearly in the past this was a bonus sold to average men for fighting.
Okay, you’re going to have to show some kind of citation that that’s the case. 50 years isn’t all that long ago.
Where, exactly, was all this happening? Who (as in which countries; be specific), exactly, was it promising men, “Join the Army, see the world, and rape the women, girls, and, if it occurs to you, some of the men, too”?
I’d be interested in knowing what you’ve been reading.
Rape is a crime of violence, and war is a situation in which behaviour normally condemned as a crime of violence is encouraged and rewarded. If there is a strategic or tactical value in inflicting violence on the enemy, why wouldn’t rapes occur, and/or be encouraged, in that context?
Something I noticed as a teenager and found very disturbing was how willing a large percentage of males are to take advantage of girls who were pilled up or drunk. What I found even more disturbing was that it wasn’t a bad boy thing, if anything the bad boys tended to be more respectful of women in compromised situtations. Maybe the goodboys were not as accustomed to being under the influence of alcohol as the bad boys were and acted out I really don’t know but it did tell me that young men are dangerous to be around when they don’t have constraints, war time to some degree would give them this power.
I can see where the stress a soldier is under could break down his moral compass as killing tends to do that so I might reluctantly be slightly more forgiving of a soldier. This is one aspect of war that I find very disgusting.
Dehumanizing the other side is also a pretty standard thing: the ither side isn’t made up of people, it’s made up of [slurs]. Once you dehumanized the men in order to be able to kill them (and, I’d argue, cope emotionally with the fact that they are trying to kill you), the leap to dehumanizing the women isn’t far. Thus is closely related to the other kind of baffling war tradition-how often, historically, children, even very young children, were killed. That’s not rage, that’s nit gratifying, that’s just total dehumanization.
Warfare is often driven by humans’ genocidal instincts, which we share with chimps. The goal (sometimes conscious, sometimes not) is to spread one side’s genes at the expense of the other side’s genes. Therefore there’s a common pattern to such warfare; kill or castrate* the males, kill the children and older women, rape and impregnate the young women. Chimps do it, humans do it; we just do it on a larger scale and sometimes try to manufacture excuses for it.
In my view the people who talk about how “rape is about power” or “rape is about violence” have it turned around; more often it’s power & violence that’s about rape. Power and violence have for many people and groups throughout history have been about accomplishing rape; as said, men were encouraged to go to war with the promise of rape.
And no, that doesn’t mean all or even most men are rapists; it just means that the kind of men who go to war have generally been rapists. Even in a modern force like the US military rape is described as an “epidemic”; it can be expected to have been far worse in previous eras.
*There were mass castrations along with the famous rape camps in the wars by the Serbs against their neighbors during the breakup of Yugoslavia; it just didn’t get nearly the same coverage. I recall one of the gang rape victims being quoted about how she felt sorrier for the men than for herself, though.
Rape fantasies – and being dominated in general – are some of the most common female sexual fantasies. I suspect there is a connection in the deep and unsavoury depths of our genes.
This answer ONLY applies to war time, as opened by the OP.
War is one culture, group of people against another. War is as old as mankind is, and will always be with us.
When one group takes over the territory of another they want to dominate totally the conquered area. This is done in many wars, including rape. In ancient times the conquers wanted to kill enough of the men so they not worry on uprisings, and then take the woman and let them know who is now in charge. I don’t think there is any mystery here at all.
It occurs now. The ancient laws of the jungle are never far away from nice society.
I suspect that it’s only how we’re raised in society that makes consent an important part of sex. Men generally have higher sex drives than women - I can’t think why that would be if our ancestors weren’t acting on it.
MandaJo’s theory makes the most sense to me. We should also consider the type of men most often used in war historically: young, poor, impressionable, with few if any attachments. Put a bunch of guys like this together and a couple of bad apples have the power to influence their cultural views and behaviors. Raping and pillaging will become their norm in the absence of leadership that makes these punishable offenses.
I’d largely agree with this, and I’d also point out that in one of the iconic modern episodes of mass rape- during the Soviet march to Berlin during World War II- it’s not hard to understand why the Soviets dehumanized their enemies, when you consider how evil the Nazi regime was and how much the Soviets in particular had suffered from it. This isn’t to excuse the rapes of German women (that should go without saying): it’s simply to say it’s not difficult to understand the psychological factors that must have led to it. It becomes especially easy to do evil things when we persuade ourselves we are doing them in a good cause.
I rememberer reading in a WWII encyclopedia that usually the first line of troops from the red army that came to Germany were more disciplined and generally followed the rules, but even they knew what was coming, they usually warned the civilians about the bloodthirst and rape that the second or supporting units were committing.
As Hector_St_Clare points out, there is no justification, only that one can understand when one realizes that many times most soldiers had seen with their own eyes the aftermath of the crimes and destructions committed by the Nazis to their own villages, towns and cities.
It doesn’t have to be about dehumanization. It can easily be a sense of entitlement to the spoils of war. It really doesn’t matter, the ‘fog of war’ provides an enviroment where moral and social standards break down.
I don’t think I could rape; I think coffeewang would lie down on the job when faced with a sobbing woman screaming, “No, no.” Am i unusual?
And bozuit, men have a different sex drive than women-- women are less likely to want casual sex–but I’m not convinced it’s any greater. A woman in love can leave her man drained and gasping for breath.
Cornelius Ryan narrates a first-hand anecdote of exactly that in The Last Battle. The all-business front-line commander praises his disciplined crack troops as “good boys,” while warning the woman he was talking to that the men following behind were “pigs.”
I don’t find this strange at all. Men without access to women (and who didn’t even had the benefit of our current education with its emphasis on rape is bad) are given free reign (which would have typically been the case)? I most certainly expect them to rape to their heart content (I know that the current trend is that rape is a power trip, not a way to satisfy’s one urges, but I don’t buy that). I also expect them to pillage everything that isn’t nailed to the ground and to add a bit of murder and arson to the mix.
And “in the past”? You’re such an optimist about human nature. Just allow them to rape consequence-free, and it won’t be long before they behave like in the good old days.
You’re probably not an uneducated 19-year old conscript with shitty judgement and lousy impulse control who has just seen his friends butchered around him, has been deliberately conditioned to see the enemy as inhuman, and has been subject to immense privation and draconian conditions where his own officers often seemed almost as scary and violent as the enemy. Such was the condition of most pre-modern fighting forces ( and more than a few modern ones ). Not to mention many would have been half or fully drunk after something like a successful siege. Sieges in particular often ended in a orgiastic release of slaughter, looting and rape and it was the extraordinary pre-modern commander that managed to reign his army in even if he wanted to.
Violent, drunken, brutalized and desensitized teenagers in particular can be scary fucking people.
My shipmate Yeoman Third Class Castillo was our rescue swimmer (meaning he’d undergone the sometimes fatal training exercise “sharks and daisies”), and claimed that an uncle was one of three of the colonels in the Dominican army. But he’d not taken family connection, and instead joined the U.S. Navy in order to obtain citizenship.
One day he entered a busy brothel in Olongopo, Phillipines and selected/was assigned a young woman. Filipinas tend to be petite and thus often of indeterminate age. When Castillo atempted intromission, she began to moan more than should be expected for ones five dollars. Then she began to actually cry and scream. Castillo felt his loins covered in blood. The mama-san came to investigate, and assured him as he swabbed the sheets with a wet rag that he should continue with the transaction.
Castillo demurred, and as he left the room he discovered that the commotion had attracted a cluster of Marines, all of whom were imploring the mama-san to let them line up and break the girl in right.