You don’t see a difference in thinking I believe 98% of the board (remember, this would include all the posters to all threads in all the forums) are unreasonable biased liberals vs. my thinking that 98% of biased, partisan threads come from liberal posters?
There is quite a difference. Lemme 'splain. It would take only twenty or thirty posters such as yourself to make 98% of the political posts around here biased, unreasonable left-wing posts. That still leaves thousands of posters not making biased, unreasonble left-wing posts. Yet you accuse me of lumping the entire board together and viewing all its members the same as the twenty or thirty nutjobs, and that just ain’t so!
As far as insulting people, have you happened to notice that in almost every instance when I insult someone, it has been because they’ve insulted me first? I doubt it.
And if you think I’m plagued with imaginary enemies and overrate my significance around here, you are taking this place far more seriously than I do. The reason I said you jump to conclusions where my posts are concerned is because you obviously have an attitude where I’m concerned, and then went off half-cocked, completely misunderstanding what I’d said, both about the rape question and about what I’d said with regard to partisan posts. You couldn’t have read either of those comments calmly and dispassionately and still arrived at the same conclusions as you did.
I’m afraid i’m not well-versed in the feminist movement, but it seems to me there’s a difference between coming up with something and promoting something, and in this case quite an important one, since it imparts motive. Too, we’d need to have comparisons to know whether it’s a significantly different proportion. And beyond that, correlation doesn’t imply causation; feminists who vilify men do not necessarily believe or espouse all arguments because they* in particular *vilify men.
FTR, Dworkin vehemently denied ever saying that all heterosexual sex was rape. As it happens though, female acquaintances of mine who had read her work got the impression that she believed something like that, before the outraged denials came in.
SA: Your mixing up your 1970s feminist claims. “Rape is about power, not sex” had wide currency among feminists back then: crypto and explicit lesbian separatism was more of a specialty niche, albeit one that wasn’t denounced openly.
You see Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were in the same business that Ann Coulter is in. They made outrageous claims with paltry or nonexistent empirical support to sell books. The electronic media loved them because they provided stimulus, though they crapped on the information space. Dworkin and MacKinnon were also protected by the lack of internal dissent in 2nd wave femininism, though this truce broke down in the late 1980s and 1990s. Modern conservatism hasn’t experienced serious or substantial internal dissent yet, so Ann Coulter is still in business.
Today Dworkin and MacKinnon are no longer taken seriously except by the truly committed fringe.
mswas: No worries, but your responses to me lacked empirical grounding. That’s ok, but at some point we have to go beyond introspection and sift through the plausible explanations.
Incidentally, there are 2 aspects to the libido. One dimension is sexual excitability. Another is sexual brakes or inhibition. Apparently these are separate phenomenon, neurologically speaking.
According to the dual control model, rapists tend to have high excitability and low inhibition (see also studies alluded to above). Low inhibition, low excitability types won’t have lots of sex, but they are less likely to use condemns if they do.
Recently, the dual control model has been extended to the female gender. Preliminary evidence suggests that women are complicated.
This is what I was going to post–there was never any specific “All sex is rape” quote. Though was it her that said that often normal sex looks very much like rape? Or that rape looks a lot like normal sex?
I haven’t read Dworkin, but I see that the 20th Anniversary Edition of her seminal classic Intercourse came out in 2007. The jacket includes rave reviews by such luminaries as Erica Jong and Mary Daly.
Woo-hoo!
Note the remove from issues of female participation and advancement in the work force. Vain rhetoric is typically orthogonal to the underlying challenges of economic development.
I don’t know that I’d use the word violent necessarily, but I see what she’s getting at. The act of penis into vagina definitely feels more…well, something than just oral sex or fondling. There’s a lot of potential for things to hurt or feel weird or scary or…I don’t know, but it’s got a lot of baggage attached to it, for sure.
Baggage? Ok. Discussion of that might have been helpful.
Intrinsically violent? That’s just messed up.
Also remember that this was when Dworkin was walking back her remarks. Intercourse was published in the late 1980s and by that time some of her fellow feminists weren’t afraid of calling her a blathering lunatic. So I’d be reluctant to take that elaboration of hers as representative of her work or even at face value.
But that, to my mind, is glossing over the most interesting part: you’ve now got “primarily” doing all the work in that statement, even while explaining in the next breath that you don’t know whether it’s factually correct. How would you respond if I said armed robbery is not motivated solely or even primarily by a desire for money, but primarily by a desire to exert power over another person?
I would reword the statement as “Rape is about power. Even when it is also about sex, it is first and foremost about power, and it needs to be understood as an act of coercion not an act of passion or a natural outcome of lust or appetite. Regardless of its motivations, it only happens when the perpetrator accepts and endorses coercion as an acceptable way of dealing with other people”.
You can take a male person and posit that he is the horniest he has ever been, unclothe him and stick him in a small room with an unclothed female, and you still do not get rape as an outcome unless he does that. And no, not all males do that. Mostly, I think (IMHO) it is those males who always held girls in dismissive contempt throughout childhood and never valorized them as people, who continue to feel dismissive contempt towards females once they become adults. The mere fact that puberty gave them an interest in females’ bodies doesn’t make them suddenly revise their attitude towards them as people. Instead, they get moved from the category of “useless silly annoying twits” to that of “yummy tits and cunts attached to useless silly annoying twits”. Or in some cases males who harbor resentment and retaliatory anger towards women, especially anger of a sexual nature (“They spread their legs for stupid jackasses but won’t give great guys like ME any of it and act like they are better, well I’ll fucken show them…”)
I totally endorse the observation that prior to feminism the attitude WAS that rape is an outcome of lust and opportunity, that it’s natural and inevitable. That men “can’t help themselves”.
I was explaining what I understand the catchphrase “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” to mean. I very explicitly was not making a claim as to the accuracy of this catchphrase, so I don’t know why you think I was contradicting myself. It’s possible to interpret the meaning of a phrase without assigning it a truth value. I was simply pointing out that it is not necessary to take the phrase “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” to mean “No rapist has ever experienced any degree of sexual pleasure while carrying out a rape”.
Like all catchphrases “Rape isn’t about sex” is simplistic, but that’s no excuse for making a strawman out of it.
*I wouldn’t respond because I don’t care. I doubt many people would, and am fairly certain such a claim would fail to inspire a multi-page thread.
And that’s what I’m getting at: even as a question of emphasis, a claim about whether armed robbers are in it for the desire to exert power rather than the desire for money wouldn’t be worth discussing. So why is the claim about rape being primarily about the desire to exert power rather than the desire for sex inspiring a multi-page thread?
See, I just don’t figure that either interpretation can be taken seriously, and so don’t see much of a reason to choose one that strikes me as obviously incorrect instead of the other one that also strikes me as obviously incorrect. But I get where you’re coming from a little better now.
That does not follow. It’s not necessary to infer that men are helpless if rape could possibly be the product of lust and opportunity. I would think it shows exceptionally bad judgement on the part of the man, it shows poor moral character and lack of control.
I think that all sex is about power. It’s about submitting power, sharing power and asserting power when appropriate. Both men and women find it enjoyable to be dominated, both men and women find it enjoyable to share tender moments of mutual pleasure, and both men and women enjoy having sexual power over each other. There is nothing quite like the feeling of power you get when you realise you can make your partner orgasm through your prowess in the bedroom!
Rape is an extreme form of sex. A pervasion of something that in the context of a consensual relationship can be quite normal.
So I must view statements regarding rape being primarily about power as misleading and not useful. Reasons for rape to occur are myriad and can’t be pinpointed down to one simple thing. Sometimes issues are too complex to turn into bumper stickers and sound bytes. If you want to know why a rapist raped, then you must ask them.
Again, I can’t help but ask: if folks believe, as I do, that armed robberies are often the outcome of a desire for money rather than a desire to dominate someone at gunpoint, would it somehow follow that it’s natural and inevitable and the men “can’t help themselves” and et cetera? Wouldn’t we still just stick 'em in jail?
Is it possible that everyone is misunderstanding the point of the quote. It seems quite true to me that “all rape is about power” is true in the sense that without a power imbalance, there can be no rape. Whatever the motive, without sufficient power to force sex against someone else’s will, there can be no rape.
Lamia, this is intellectually dishonest. The question is an interesting one, and saying “I don’t care” is cowardice. If you can’t answer it, there’s a reason for that.
Precisely–which is why, prior to feminism, there were no laws against rape. It was understood as something that just happened.
Oh, wait.
Certainly feminism helped remove a lot of the attitudes that were used in the past to condone many rapes–but it’s not as though it was always excused prior to feminism. It’s been understood as a crime for millennia. (And yes, sometimes it was understood as a crime against the victim’s closest male relative–nonetheless, it was understood as a behavior that the perpetrator could have chosen not to do).
Strassia, again, the problem isn’t the statement that rape is about power: it’s every bit as much about power as bank robbery, drunken assault, or arson is about power. The problem is the idea that rape isn’t about sex.