Depending on the sex partner, that’s an assumption that does not always hold true.
Assuming good sex, in an ongoing relationship there is the joy of partners sharing their love and esteem for each other, and in a new or casual relationship, there is novelty and exploration.
I don’t see how this has any bearing on rape.
You can get and keep an erection while a woman is trying to claw your eyes out, really?
I know what you are saying, but it really is so much more layered than that. I mean, we have to consider that lots of women like to ‘pretend’ to be raped on some level (I don’t enjoy ‘rape role playing’ but I have gotten off on pretending to say no when I really mean yes).
Many normal, healthy men can maintain a raging freakin’ hard on with a woman ‘actively fighting’.
I realize that fantasy play is different than the real deal, but that is why these things are complicated.
Back in the early 1980s, I attended an erotic film festival where one short was a closeup of an orange being peeled and divided. It was the most erotic film of the festival. I don’t know if that says more about the lack of cinema porn in those days, or the lack of qualtiy of the cinema porn in those days, but in any event, that was one sexy orange.
Now lemons, that’s just plain kinky.
I don’t see how you could test this out without actually committing rape. Would we call a man who’d do that normal and healthy?
Pretend fighting is different than real fighting. If someone were to attack me, I could see myself fighting so hard that I’d piss on myself, bite, spit, and scream like a horse on fire. A guy who could still rape me through all of that is coming from a different place than a regularly horny dude with nothing to lose.
Maybe he’s driven by sex and maybe he just want to hurts me and maybe it’s both, but to suggest that a normal, healthy man could do this? Insane and shocking.
That reminds me of a poem someone wrote in that My So Called Life episode with Mr. Racine.
Followup – looks like that orange film floated about for a long time, for although I saw it at a festival in the early 80s, I wonder if it might be the same one that was exhibited in 1970?
So… you will concede that sexual activity isn’t all about some physical drive? That there’s something else going on?
I’m going to be completely honest now. I’ve never actually tried that.
But, I have kept an erection whilst having my nipples twisted, clawed deeply in the back, and spanked with a leather whip. That was rather painful, but boy was the orgasm worth it. I’d be fairly confident in my abilities to maintain an erection during the most trying of circumstances. Pain does not effect an erection and in fact can enhance orgasm. I hate to actually write this, but I’m pretty sure I could rape someone if I was so fucking stupid and moronic enough to go and do it.
Erm, depends on context doesn’t it. Sexual activity can be just about physical drive. I’ve had sexual partners where it has just been about primal urges, where there has been no actual lovey dovey feelings for one another.
The reason things like fleshlights exist is to accommodate for these urges without requiring a partner to do so. There can be a lot of emotional baggage in engaging in ‘friends with benefits’ type relationships.
Seems to me that you’re defining ‘sex’ (which is a very wide concept) as ‘an act of love between two consenting partners’. Well, sex can be that, but it doesn’t have to be.
Edit: Plus, one reason why a preferred method is to drug the person you are about to rape is to avoid the whole eye scratching thing.
But all of this pain was presumably done in the context of consensual sex. Would all this nipple twisting and clawing have a different effect on you if you knew these actions weren’t done in the spirit of fun, but rather a fight-or-flight defense reaction at the hands of an unwilling partner? Or is the intent irrelevant to you?
I’m also curious as to what are the right conditions that could bring you to rape. When you say you could rape, are you including including violent, forceful rape in that?
I could shoplift food and money under the right conditions. Those conditions being the threat of starvation and imminent poverty. Could I mug someone at knifepoint and then slash their throat after taking their money, under the right conditions? Uh, don’t think so. Those “right conditions” would be so alien to me that I don’t think I’d be “me” anymore under those conditions, let alone normal and healthy. For that matter, I wouldn’t be healthy if I was stealing due to starvation, either.
Well, duh. Sex can be about a lot of things and rape can be about a lot of things. Have I ever suggested that it is not? Perhaps you missed one of my earlier posts in this thread:
I’ve made the point repeatedly that what you feel and think can have absolutely no effect on your erection. If it is being stimulated, either manually or otherwise, it’s possible to keep it going no matter what. If I wanted to, I could masturbate whilst looking at pictures of dead people. No, really. I’d never want to, and that’d be incredibly weird and disturbing but it is physically possible.
The intent can be irrelevant, if you want it to be. I don’t think empathy is directly connected (neurologically?) to sexual desire. But you can make that connection if you want.
What are the right conditions that could bring me to rape? Well, if I decided that people’s feelings no longer mattered and that going to jail wasn’t such an issue. No chance of that any time soon, so you don’t have to worry!
You seem to be missing my point. You say you could shoplift food and money, so you would agree that you are capable of doing that act. I don’t mean philosophically, I mean physically. You have the physical ability to walk into a shop, grab a sandwich and run away. Yes? That’s what I’m saying about my ability to rape. I believe it is ethically wrong to do many things I am capable of.
No but empathy is connected to non-sociopathic behavior. If we assume that most men aren’t sociopathic towards women (at least in our society), then doesn’t it follow that most men would find rape too distasteful to engage in?
I understand perfectly well that sex and empathy do not necessarily have to connect with one another. That’s why rape exists, duh. My point is that I would not expect a normal, well-adjusted man to find pleasure in that kind of sex to the extent that it’s likely he’d be doing it “under the right conditions”.
Do you think that kind of casual disregard for other people’s feelings is easy to acheive in a non-pathological person? I mean, I could commit mass murder if I woke up tomorrow a hateful person who thought life in prison was preferable to the life I’m living now. Of course, that would mean something was psychologically wrong with me and I’d forever lose claim to calling myself healthy and normal.
All I’m objecting to is portraying rapists as men who sit on the continnuum of normal male behavior. Some may be more normal than others, but there are plenty that are about as normal as Jeffrey Dahmer was normal. Which is to say, not very normal at all. I don’t think most people could become like Dahmer under the “right conditions”.
I don’t think all men are physically capable of raping a woman for the reasons I described about empathy and non-sociopathic behavior and the effect this would have on many men’s ability to perform sexually. This is how physicial theft is different than rape. Maybe you can overcome this and still find other reasons not to rape, but then you wouldn’t be who I’m talking about.
I don’t think this is what was said.
I think we can agree on these items:
A male human is hardwired from evolution (like all other animals) to reproduce. He wants to pass on his genes to future generations. Whether that want is conscious or unconscious…it is there. He wants to fuck as many women as possible.
There is a cost to be paid by the male if he rapes. This cost comes from the facts that rape is not the best reproductive strategy. It is extremely hard on the female and any offspring from it is most likely at a disadvantage in not being accepted by the mother and/or her family. In addition, there will be male family members/friends of the female that will be very pissed off and do extreme harm/kill him. So, rape as a reproductive strategy, can quickly remove said male from the gene pool and so must be used only in certain situations.
In addition, there is more to life than sex/reproduction. Most males would prefer to be loved with all the benefits of it.
So…
Most males would not use rape as a reproductive strategy. The better option is to woe a female voluntarily and to help raise the offspring. If one can get other voluntary females on the side…so much the better. This works…and almost all males go this route.
There are, however, some males that either have extreme difficulty attracting females. They could be very unattractive, mentally unbalanced, have any of many issues. Their only true option of having sex/reproducing is through rape…and some of these males will break down the cultural conditioning and do so.
Others are lazy. They don’t want to spend the time woeing and so rape because it takes less energy (and also don’t have to help the offspring).
However, IMHO, the area where most ‘normal’ males could be pushed to rape is when they desire a female where the female rejects him. An outlandish scenario is when a group of people is isolated for a long time (the stereotypical desert island). A normal young male stuck with this group of people where the women reject him continuously and he has no access to other females or the females he does have access to are of very low quality…may pursue rape. So, if societal controls are taken away (no fear of punishment) I think a significant (but still a minority) of males would consider this option and any female in this situation is in danger of being raped.
Well, unfortunately if one reaches an orgasm, it almost always feels good. Sorry about that.
I have no handy cites of studies in this to show you, and you haven’t shown me any that would indicate that. So I have to simply beg to differ. I don’t think it would effect most men’s ability to perform sexually. If the penis is being stimulated well enough, all the will power in the world can’t stop it being erect.
FTR, not all rapists rape their victims while erect or, if they do get erect, not all stay that way. NOt that that necessarily speaks to their level of arousal. Just a note.
You’re portraying sex as a passive process that the man is merely reacting to, as if he has been thrust into a situation that is not of his own creation. Too bizarre for me to even grok in the context of rape.
What do you think astro meant when he wrote this:
Reading what you wrote and what he wrote, I see no similarities. He’s essentially saying the threat of jail time is the one thing standing in between a horny man and rape. You’re not saying that, as in your scenarios, consequences of rape aren’t mentioned.
There’s something glaringly missing from astro’s distillation of what it takes to get a man to rape. He says there needs to be a high sex urge on the man’s part and the lack of fear regarding consequencess. But what he hasn’t stressed despite its importance is the desire not to one to do harm to another person, namely the rape victim. If rape laws were repealed tomorrow, I don’t think men would turn into rapists en masse, because most have been taught to value women and not treat them like walking vaginas.
That little detail is kind of important, because when we say “rape is about power, not sex”, it allows us to not label this as a sexual problem (even though sex is major component), but rather a problem regarding how the rapists relates to women and other people. It gets the focus off of the penis and the sexiness of his victim and puts it on his pyschology. I honestly don’t see why people would have a problem with this. What separates the rapist from the non-rapist is most likely empathy towards other people. Seems really obvious to me, but I’m not a man so what the hell do I know.
No I’m not, you just seem to think men control their erections at will. I seem to recall reading that erections amongst male victims (who are almost always raped by other males) are more common than you might think, and are often a reason those kind of rapes go unreported.
I tend rather to think of rape as generally a matter of sexual perversion. As in, for rapists, forcing someone heightens rather than diminishes their sexual pleasure.
It is I suspect in large part a sort of sexual sadism, minus empathy for the victim. Lots of people “get off” on sexual sadism - see BDSM; of course, the vast majority of these people are moral and have empathy for others, and so their sexual practices are all predicated on a code of consent. For them it is a kink, rather than a perversion.
Rapists tend to be those who have the sexual sadism, but not the morality or empathy.
A person with a taste for this perversion could be anyone - including people who could get “normal” sex whenever they want.
Um, no. You’re saying you can have get an erection from a woman who is kicking and screaming and trying to get away from you. Very well. That’s you. I’m saying a lot of men would n’t be able to get it up in that situation.