# Do we as a society have a paternalistic attitude towards rape? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 21, 2009, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-as-a-society-have-a-paternalistic-attitude-towards-rape/514616 "2009-10-21T15:57:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Nilesta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Nilesta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nilesta)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2009, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-as-a-society-have-a-paternalistic-attitude-towards-rape/514616/41 "2009-10-31T06:11:22Z")
Often, young men will not accept ‘no’ as an answer that will preserve the friendship, or any social contact. As young women are learning about social interaction, middle-high school, and even into college (I know many men in their thirties who still think like this), they learn very quickly that any rejection of sex will mean a complete and immediate end to any friendship, and possibly even the rejection of the girl from their entire social circle, if the boy is powerful enough. Children are not and have never been nice, unfortunately, and often rejection of sex is equivalent in their view to rejection of the person as a person. Young women learn that they cannot say no. So they equivocate, make up excuses, put things off, claim headaches or menstruation, anything they can do to avoid ever having to say no directly. Is that confusing and unfair to men? Maybe. But that’s the culture, right now. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 11:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-as-a-society-have-a-paternalistic-attitude-towards-rape/514616/42 "2009-11-03T23:16:27Z")
[QUOTE=Gestalt] However, I think that by treating rape as a crime more heinous than non-sexual battery, we are elevating the sanctity of female sexuality inordinately, and undoing a lot of the work that has been done in the past fifty years or so to demystify female sexuality. [/QUOTE] I’ve posted about this before, extensively, using peer-reviewed scholarly journal publications. If the statistical likelihood of developing PTSD is any indicator, then rape is most certainly more psychologically damaging than non-sexual battery. Link to my full and original post [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11413097&postcount=116). The highlights: **Does Early Psychological Intervention Prevent Posttraumatic Stress?** by Richard McNally, Richard A. Bryant and Anke Ehlers. [QUOTE=Exposure to Trauma and PTSD] Among traumatic stressors, those involving intentional acts of violence are especially likely to produce PTSD (Yehuda, 2002b). In one epidemiological survey, PTSD developed in 11.6% of respondents who had experienced a sudden injury or accident, but in 22.6% of those who had experienced physical assault and in 80% of female rape victims (Breslau et al.,1991). [/QUOTE] To me, that difference is striking. It would seem there is something about rape that makes it especially psychologically damaging. Taking into account what we also know, > [@](#): > > Breslau, Chilcoat, Kessler, Peterson, and Lucia found that men are more likely to be exposed to trauma than women, but that trauma-exposed women develop PTSD at twice the rate as do trauma-exposed men, mainly because exposure to criminal violence precipitates PTSD at a much higher rate in women than in men (35.7% vs. 6%). My wag is that the reason women are more likely to develop PTSD than men is because in the case of criminal violence, that trauma is more likely to be rape. Another factor may be that a woman, because the issue is rape vs. another type of criminal violence, will consequently have a harder time finding social support for what happened. I’m guessing the reason that rape is so godawful bad is because it drags in a number of those other factors that increase the risk of PTSD, such as the mediating effect of shame. But all of that is just my speculation. In essence, though, you’re arguing two points and trying to pass them off as one: **1) Why shouldn’t women be allotted some responsibility for actions that result in rape? Why should their accusations not be held to scrutiny?** **2) Are certain treatment interventions and societal stereotypes about women and rape actually harmful to women and anti-feminist?** My argument for 1) Would be that we have hard statistical data that how a rape victim’s peers respond to their admission is a statistical indicator of whether or not they will go on to develop PTSD. Social support at the time of the incident for any trauma survivor is one of the largest predictors of PTSD, and the lack of social support for rape victims and victims of sexual abuse has been widely documented in the psychological literature. It IS a special crime, if only because society has made it one. That does NOT mean standard rules of law must not apply in criminal court. It means that words can literally, as evidenced by psychological research on mitigating effects of trauma, make the experience worse. My argument for 2) is that you are probably right, and I have a wonderful feminist essay called ‘‘The Collapsible Woman’’ that touches on this very topic. > [@](#): > > Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines rape as forced sex and also plunder—“robbing or despoiling,” to be exact. Therefore, a raped woman is the victim of theft. You weren’t just violated, we tell her. You were pillaged. Something of intrinsic value was stolen from you. The fervent belief that this is true is evident on all sides of the issue. From traditional cultures that treat a raped woman as bankrupt to progressive movements that speak in terms of “reclaiming” oneself and “owning” the experience, we consistently use the language of theft. We tell a woman loudly and clearly that if she was sexually violated she has been robbed, and that the objects stolen were purity and innocence. With the best of motives, we still say to her, “I’m sorry for your loss.” We will ask her to “reclaim” her experience, rather than realize its effects. The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The low-life who did it threw his soul in the trash, but yours is intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman’s worth and sense of self lie in her sexual purity. As long as the artifacts “stolen” are her defining virtues, we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is an absolute objectification of women. Full text [here](http://bitchmagazine.org/article/the-collapsible-woman). ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2009, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-as-a-society-have-a-paternalistic-attitude-towards-rape/514616/43 "2009-11-03T23:19:02Z")
> [@JR\_Brown](#): > > They’re not talking about “someone who’s scared but saying yes” (although, if someone is obviously _scared_, that’s a “no”, whatever sound comes out of their mouth). They’re talking about an evasive or equivocal reply, which _usually_ means that the woman doesn’t want to have sex with you but doesn’t want to outright reject you, because she doesn’t want to be rude or because she’s afraid of pissing you off or because she hasn’t decided if she might want to have sex with you at some point in the indefinite future. Only “yes” means “yes”. “Maybe” still means “no”, or “not right now”. Well, I did clarify and they did actually say that they meant people who said yes but were doing it because they felt they couldn’t speak up. I asked how the man could know what she meant and they replied that body language was key and that you could usually tell if someone tensed up or just didn’t seem that into it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-we-as-a-society-have-a-paternalistic-attitude-towards-rape/514616.md?page=2)