What if someone punches you with their genitals? I need to know before the weekend.
When does touching someone’s genitals against their will become sexual assault, though? Kicking in the groin isn’t necessarily a sexual assault but grabbing a stranger’s breasts/genitals/buttocks certainly is classified as sexual assault.
Why are you touching them?
While your pizza delivery guy may not have a good reason for touching em, I suspect folks in the delivery room do. Call me an optimist.
Well, I wasn’t really thinking about folks in the delivery room. Just responding to the part about how touching the genitals doesn’t automatically equal sexual assault. Other than in a hospital setting, is there any scenario where touching a stranger’s genitals without their consent isn’t sexual assault?
If I got into a fistfight, and the other person punched me wildly, and the punch landed on my breast, it would not be sexual assault. It would just be assault.
If I am drowning and unconscious, and the lifeguard, using the standard under arm-across chest grip, touches my breast while towing me to shore unconscious, it is not sexual assault.
We sneer at ‘the Victorians’ as being obsessively uptight but we are often far worse. At least they had things from the Middle Ages still around to be uptight about. The saddest thing is that so many of these women shouting the ‘feminist’ odds about their ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ are actually shouting for the opposite, of being treated as children more than Victorian wilting violets protected from any adult responsibility at the same time as they are condemning men for failing to wrap them in protective cotton-wool.
Well, I think that some of this birth rape talk goes too far. But can we recognize that even though we shouldn’t call it “rape” that there are a lot of abusive situations that go on during childbirth? Some of those stories were kind of creepy though I guess there hasn’t been verification of all of them.
Police can do a full body search without your consent but with a proper warrant.
Just to sum up, it is not in any way true that you have an absolute right to prevent all other people from touching your genitals without your consent.
How is being pregnant in any way similar to being suspected of a crime?
The more I read about this, the more I think women are just confronting the mix of shitty health care and institutionalized sexism with one of the only words they know that seems to hold any power. I still don’t think it’s the right term, and agree with those that say overuse risks watering it down, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely in the wrong.
Yeah. Just because the doctor has the right to touch your genitals doesn’t mean it’s not traumatic to have your membranes stripped or to have your cervix dilated when you aren’t expecting it or are screaming in pain for him/her to stop. It may not be rape but it’s not a good thing either.
I was merely responding to another poster who asked if there was ANY situation outside a hospital in which touching the genitals without consent was not sexual assault. I came up with three - a simple assault that happens to involve the genitals, lifeguard towing you to safety, police executing a valid warrant. Some more examples include: Firemen carrying you out of a burning building. Pushing someone out of the way of a car that’s about to hit them.
You’ll notice that every example where it is permitted concerns either your own safety, the safety of others, or an unexpected occurrance.
Hmm… what can these factors possibly have to do with the birth process…?
Shitty doctors happen. But there is nothing “special” about it being during the birth process. People have felt violated after an appendectomy, with good reason I’m sure. I personally have been strapped down screaming during a dental procedure and felt pretty violated afterwards.
But even in those situations, it’s not like the person has carte blanche to touch you anywhere. Like a lifeguard can accidentally brush your breast but can’t feel you up. Similarly, a doctor can in an emergency do a C-section without consulting you about everything but if there’s a routine exam that they’re doing during the process and there’s no medical emergency, he/she shouldn’t be touching you in a way that’s causing so much distress.
But see above for my point, there is bad doctoring everywhere, and that includes the delivery room (although, interesting that the original article in the OP concerned a midwife. I thought Midwives were supposed to SAVE US FROM THE AWFUL DOCTORS@!@~!~). bad doctoring should be stamped out, but there is no objective difference, nothing that makes one scenario “rape” and the other not, between a disturbing incident at the oncologist and one at the obstetrician.
If they are in my line of sight when I am trying to pick off zombies with my rifle after they take over the world, I am going to brush them outa the way. This answer also indicates how seriously I take the compliant of birth rape.
Um, why? I get that the term rape is charged and that it shouldn’t be used, but a lot of these stories are pretty disturbing. Does it really matter what we call it?
Yes, it really does matter. Again, it trivializes actual rape.
But if someone has a terrible experience where a doctor does violate her, are we supposed to brush it off and not take it seriously just because the person used the wrong word to describe it?
If the person complaining is too stupid to come up with a respectable term for the problem, its pretty hard to take anything that follows very seriously.
I don’t think they’re doing it out of stupidity. It might just be out of fear or pain or whatever. A lot of these experiences sound genuinely violating. If a woman uses the term “birth rape” it might be because she just doesn’t know how else to express herself. I think we can all agree that if a doctor shoves his/her hand into you when you’re crying or begging him/her to stop that that’s a pretty horrifying experience. I don’t think that’s “rape,” but I don’t think it’s helping matters to call a woman stupid for using that term.