Enough from the defenders of rapists already

The BBQ Pit
361

I honestly couldn’t begin to speculate. It is so far beyond the realm of modern life and experience that I don’t think anybody’s opinion on this would be informed enough to make a reasoned argument one way or another. Unless women of that time wrote about such experiences and it’s possible to be a historical expert on the subject, I have no idea.

My knee-jerk reaction, of course, living in modern society, is that I’d rather be raped at knifepoint by a stranger than by my own husband, whom I love and trust more than anyone else in the world. I already have experience being violated by 2 people I loved and trusted more than anyone else in the world, and contend that it sucks. Of course, if I lived 300 years ago and spousal rape were a routine thing, perhaps I would have never had that expectation or trust in the first place. There’s no way of knowing.

See, that’s kind of the thing. People assume the knifepoint rape is more bad because there is a legitimate fear of death or physical harm. Certainly many women raped by their husbands can be reasonably certain that they aren’t going to die (though I might also question that assumption given the high rates of domestic-violence rated murder.) But in the latter case, the psychological betrayal is profound. Date rape also has this element of betrayal - we all know we can’t trust knife-weilding maniacs on the street, but we’d like to be reasonably certain that we can trust our stepfathers, our coworkers, or the nice guy we’ve been on four dates with. When your sense of security in your social world is shattered, it changes everything.

Does that mean spousal rape is more bad than knifepoint rape? No. Because fearing for your life sucks too. Context.

If that were the primary factor, I think we’d see a pretty dramatic variance between relative levels of rape trauma from society to society and context to context. I don’t think we really have that. Put another way: do we have lower rates of PTSD when rape happens in societies where sexual mores are more relaxed? No, I don’t think we do. The U.S. arguably has very relaxed sexual mores relative to a lot of other countries, but rape is still a traumatic and horrible thing in the U.S.

For rape as a crime, I wouldn’t want to downplay the inherent trauma of having your bodily integrity violated, regardless of social context. I think there is something very primal about it, as primal as sex itself. For rates of PTSD, rape goes up there with torture, being a POW, or being in a concentration camp. I’d be hard-pressed to argue that those other things are bad because of society’s perception of them. Another generalization we can make is that when someone is made to suffer at the hands of another person, it is psychologically worse than if the suffering is non-pesonal (e.g. earthquake.)

362

Read the thread. The short version is Cosby is beyond the reach of any court or legal proceeding that he doesn’t start. He has at least 14 accusers with the same method of operation over a period of 40 plus years. He should be shunned socially due to the volume of evidence. Accusers are evidence as complaining witnesses.

363

I guess I would add that perhaps we see rape as so commonplace in U.S. society that we tend to downplay how profound the trauma is. We’re used to hearing stories of date rape by now to the point I don’t think we’d put it mentally in same category as say, being tortured. But from a clinical standpoint the symptoms and psychology are much the same. Interesting book about similarities among certain types of trauma.

In that way it’s not unlike miscarriage. Miscarriage is shockingly common given how fucking horrible it is.

364

But that’s the whole point, it would seem to me. You’re acknowledging here that the extent to which a woman was traumatized by rape is not an inherent fixed quantity, but is impacted by society and culture. If this were not so, then you could comment as confidently about another society and era as you could about your own.

How about if your husband was drunk and/or misjudged your communication rather than intending to rape you. Does that change the equation?

How much do we know about the relative rates of rape trauma in various cultures? I myself have no idea, but I’d be surprised if this was well-established.

But I don’t think what you write follows anyway. There are a lot of factors involved. Attitudes about sex are relaxed in the US, which would tend to lower trauma, but women’s expectations are higher (as compared to many sexually-repressed societies), which would tend to heighten it. It’s a complex matter.

But those other examples tend to involve a lot more physical pain. Which is not to minimize psychological pain as compared to physical, but only to note that the latter tends to be much less dependent on society’s perception than the former, so the comparison does not hold WRT this.

365

What is all this talk of degrees of trauma and pain for? How does that bear on the social issue? Unless you are contending that it is less wrong to rape someone who, for whatever reasons of personal history, psychology, physique, or happenstance, ends up less hurt.

366

I agree that the effect of a trauma like rape is absolutely impacted by society and culture, but I would draw the line at saying it is only traumatizing because of social attitudes about it.

I don’t think it’s your intent, but some of your arguments could be used to draw the conclusion that the problem with rape is how women think about it, not that it happens.

[QUOTE=Fotheringay Phipps]
How about if your husband was drunk and/or misjudged your communication rather than intending to rape you. Does that change the equation?
[/QUOTE]

Without question it changes the equation - but does it make it better? Even if that were true (a misunderstanding), it doesn’t mean that would be my perception at the time, or that I would find it easy to accept the truth given the impact of my perception at the time. Part of processing any trauma is unpacking the erroneous assumptions surrounding it, and even if it were, in fact, a misunderstanding, it’s not really more comforting.

To give a completely non-rape example, there were a couple incidents in my childhood in which my mother threatened to kill or seriously harm me while explicitly outlining the means by which it would be done. In one case she threatened to go get my father’s gun from the room next door and shoot me, and in the second case she held a glass bottle over my head and told me she was going to break it over my head and send me to the hospital. In both cases, I feared for my life. I later tormented myself, a lot, with the question of whether she would have actually killed me or not, had I provoked her. My husband told me that this question was beside the point, that I believed my mother was going to kill me and that’s all that really mattered. He was right. Knowing now that my mother would not have killed me really makes no difference in how traumatic the event was then (I still don’t know the answer.)

Also, being told that sexual violation is a misunderstanding is a pretty common way to shut up survivors. Happened to me. So this whole ‘‘misunderstanding’’ argument is a double-edged sword, and frankly in most cases is complete horseshit.

[QUOTE=Permensoe]
What is all this talk of degrees of trauma and pain for? How does that bear on the social issue? Unless you are contending that it is less wrong to rape someone who, for whatever reasons of personal history, psychology, physique, or happenstance, ends up less hurt.
[/QUOTE]

Dunno why others are interested in it, but my goal is to try to dislodge some of these notions that there is a linear relationship between severity of trauma and impact of trauma, which is a common reason people give for explaining away/minimizing things like date rape or various degrees of sexual assault. So basically the opposite of what you said - it’s not less wrong to commit rape act X as opposed to rape act Y because there is no actual way of knowing the harm that will result in either case. There’s really nothing wrong with generalizing that all types of rape are roughly morally equivalent in terms of deplorability.

I educated myself a lot about trauma and trauma psychology in my attempt to deal with my own shit. And I don’t mean by reading survivor websites, I mean by reading peer-reviewed studies and books written by clinicians. Discounting the experiences of rape survivors is bad enough, but just seeing so many patently false assumptions bandied about like they are fact just magnifies my level of irritation.

367

I’m not sure I understand this question. And I think I’ve already addressed what the context of my remarks was. (Perhaps this question was directed to someone else?)

So would I.

FWIW, I asked my wife what she thought. She thought there would “absolutely” be a difference in trauma between one and the other, although she noted that the spousal situation would also involve damage to the relationship which could have a broader impact in the long run.

368

faithfool is a moron who’s lobbed several gratuitous insults toward me in this thread and I simply decided to let her have a little of it back. There is long-standing animus between the two of us and it would be a mistake for you to assume my comments toward her are indicative of my attitudes toward normal women.

369

Here’s a quote from the Janice Dickinson/CNN interview: “There was semen all over me and my pajama bottoms were off and my top was open.”

Even granting the ridiculous claim that some people call their underwear pajamas, it’s pretty clear from this statement that she was wearing a full set of actual pajamas.

(The entire performa…uh, interview can be seen here.)

It’s little wonder this woman never made it as an actress. One can only hope that her prospective excursions into meditation and church (of all things) can enable her to finally ‘process’ her feelings about [having had sex with Cosby in hopes of getting a role on his TV show but having been turned down because she’s a terrible actress] all this. :rolleyes:

And then what? The pajamas jumped out of the suitcase, disrobed her and slipped themselves onto her all on their own?

Who said it did? Where do you get this stuff?

370

Speaking of trolling, how is your accusation that people who defend the idea of innocent until proven guilty “probably being rapists” not trolling?

371

Principally you (along with Spice Weasel who has answered), for your recent introduction of the variable “trauma of rape” concern. Still can’t figure out what you thought your point was there. You (and SW) have agreed, have you not, that the act of rape is not less wrong if it happens to cause less hurt for a particular victim, and that increased awareness is good even if it theoretically leads to greater discomfort along the way for some people.

So why are you talking about how “the extent to which a woman was traumatized by rape is not an inherent fixed quantity”? What difference does this make, relative to the morality and politics of the issue?

Because it looks like it serves only to obfuscate, to make clarity and progress seem harder. In short, to provide cover.

372

Good point. If a woman says “stop” in the middle of intercourse but the guy takes one or two more strokes, that is illegal. And it should be illegal. But it is simply not as bad as a stranger rape at knifepoint.

Consider this. It is illegal to hit someone with a stick. It is also illegal to repeatedly bludgeon them with a steel warhammer until they are covered with blood. Both are assault and battery. One is clearly more evil than the other. That doesn’t mean that people should be allowed to hit people with “ordinary” sticks whenever they want. It means that society acknowledges that there are degrees of bad behavior and that some behavior is worse than others.

If I go to “the hood” late at night and start flashing around a large wad of cash and end up getting mugged, do I bear any responsibility for what happened?

If I come onto the SMDB with an unpatched Windows XP system, Internet Explorer 6, a version of Flash from 2011, and no ad blocker and get hacked by one of the SMDB’s scummy advertisers, do I bear any responsibility? Will the board owners compensate me for my victimization?

Why do we take measures against crime at all? Why have ATM PINs? After all, bank fraud is illegal, so if someone empties my non-PIN protected bank account for which I left the card sitting on a café table somewhere, it’s not my fault!!! I don’t need to look both ways before crossing the street, because negligent driving is illegal! If I get whacked by a car, they are 100% at fault!

I’m going to uninstall my antivirus software. I’m not responsible for the bad actions of virus and malware writers. No computer user bears any responsibility – not even a little bit – for his or her computer being hacked. if you don’t believe this, you are perpetuating misocomputeruseristic myths that are hurting us all.

373

No it’s not, not that this is a particularly important point.

She put it them on (assuming she wasn’t already wearing them under her clothes), or someone else did (like, perhaps, her rapist). And even if she did put on her pajamas, wearing pajamas, even in the presence of a man, does not mean one wants to have sex necessarily, or should be raped.

You implied that these actions (accepting drinks, wearing pajamas, etc.) somehow make it less likely that she was raped and/or more likely that the sex was consensual.

374

Moral responsibility. No – only the attacker bears moral responsibility.

The two questions are unrelated. No, you won’t be compensated. You also don’t bear any moral responsibility, in my view – only attackers/violators/etc. bear moral responsibility for violence and other crimes.

These are not the same things. It’s fine to take precautions – even wise. That doesn’t mean that you’re morally responsible for what happens to you if you don’t take precautions. You might feel responsible afterwards – but feelings, in my view, don’t constitute moral responsibility in such a situation.

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nm…

376

I think part of the issue is that many of the supposed things women can do to avoid this particular crime are pretty much bullshit, because rape doesn’t happen the way most people assume it does. I have not seen any evidence that things like dressing more modestly, not drinking, etc. actually do anything to prevent the preponderance of rapes. I’m not convinced that a woman drunk at a party is in more danger than a woman on a date with a nice guy she met at Starbucks. I’m not convinced that a woman walking down the street alone at night has a higher chance of getting raped than a woman who doesn’t do these things. It happens in so many contexts and circumstances (usually with someone the victim knows and trusts) that it’s just sort of a part of life. If a woman were to take these helpful cautionary suggestions to their logical conclusion she would wear a sheet and never leave the house. And even then, there would still be a nonzero chance of her being raped because of a drunken misunderstanding with her husband.

377

My take was that it was an oblique comment about one specific member of this board who, that particular commenter believes based on certain posts, probably is a rapist.

378

I think the term “less wrong” can be used different ways, so I’d like to be clear here.

If one guy walks up to some random unsuspecting guy on the street and gives him a shove, that’s 100% wrong. And if another guy walks up to some random unsuspecting guy on the street and shoots him in the spine rendering him a paraplegic for life, that’s 100% wrong too. So in that sense, one is not “less wrong” than the other, both are 100% wrong.

Nonetheless, I think a lot of people would acknowledge that the first act is “less wrong” in the sense of being less evil, and less of a departure from moral behavior, even if it too is evil and a departure from moral behavior too.

What are the ramifications here? I can think of 2 offhand. 1) is that just as a person who shoved someone on the street is rendered less of an evil monster than someone who shot them in the spine, so too in general, someone who committed a less heinous act is less evil than someone who committed a more heinous one. And 2) which is what I was thinking of when I made the initial post (IIRC), the victim is likely to be more forgiving of the first guy than the second guy. So, for example, if there is a dispute as to whether A assaulted B in the street, and someone points out that hey look, they maintained friendly relations thereafter, it would make a big difference whether the claim was that the guy was shoved or whether the guy was paralyzed by being shot. But this would not be true if one were to maintain that there is no difference between the two acts. So it would be worth pointing out that there is a difference.

It looks from your posts as though you may be looking at this thread as a sort-of rape awareness campaign, and interpreting posts in that context. But I’ve been looking at in general as a thread about Cosby defenders and related matters, and my posts are generally along those lines (and further driven by the posts I’ve been responding too).

379

Right, Cosby flew her into town in his dime, so far as I recall. Maybe she was wearing pajamas because she was intending to sleep there? That has no bearing on her credibility.

380

Nothing gives you a 100% guarantee that you won’t be a victim of rape, or any other crime. But the notion that these actions don’t change your risk run counter to common sense and prevailing wisdom, and the fact that you “have not seen any evidence” to prove them does not carry any weight.

What iiandyiiii seems to be going with is the idea that the woman engaging in risky behaviour is not morally responsible but has responsibility in the sense of someone engaging in any other risky behaviour. That’s a more sustainable approach.