If you are a male who thinks rape is about sex, not power

The BBQ Pit
241

No, don’t wait. Yeah OK there were laws against rape. It was illegal. It was nevertheless and simultaneously treated as something that under sufficient provocation, was going to occur illegal or not. Because men can’t help themselves. Ask some of the women on the board who are old enough to speak of how things were before feminism if they were ever exposed to the notion that they should not let men see them underdressed lest they inspire such lust that the poor guys would not be able to help themselves, would be overcome with sexdrive and would rape them right there on the spot.

Rape cases almost routinely focused on whether or not the victim had *done something * to cause the perpetrator’s behavior, and if she had then the rape was her fault.

It’s not that ALL rapes were considered to be “natural and inevitable” (some creep breaking into a window — not a window in front of which the victim had been undressing, mind you, just a window — and raping a woman in her own home would have been engaging in inexcusable behavior in 1962) but that it was considered natural and inevitable that they would occur under certain circumstances. Because men and boys “are like that”.

I would agree that this formulation is a problem. It’s like saying cannibalism is not about eating. SAYING it may startle people into listening to you explan about ritual cannibalism and about how no culture has relied on cannibalism as the main element in their diet, but at the bottom of it all it is a factually incorrect statement. Bringing the organs of sex into the physical arrangement that we define as sex when we ask “did sex take place” kind of makes it “about sex”.

242

No, it doesn’t follow, and yeah we’d probably still just stick them in jail. But the truth is, I’m not so sure armed robbery isn’t in part the outcome of a desire to dominate someone at gunpoint, or perhaps more accurately a desire to inspire fear. Sure , there’s a desire for money involved. But why an armed robbery rather than shoplifting, burglarizing unoccupied homes or businesses, stealing cars or any of the other ways to steal? Most armed robberies are of people, not businesses or banks, and robbing people generally doesn’t get you a lot of money but can get you a lot of time. I’ve spent enough time with criminals to know that there is a difference- the armed robbers aren’t just looking for money, they also want to see fear. Rape may have something to do with sex, but it’s not just about sex

The reason you won’t get a multi-page thread about it is because there has probably never been a time when people acted as though robbers couldn’t help themselves and it was the victim’s fault for wearing that expensive watch, and after all, I gave Joe some money last month so I must be lying about being robbed. I don’t remember any one saying “Bernie Madoff doesn’t need to steal” as if that meant he was innocent.

243

I think arguing about this is silly because those who are attacking the “rape isn’t about sex” are doing so from a ridiculously serious, defensive, and literal vantage point. No one still has been able to come up with how the “power” thing villifies men. Of all things to take issue with from feminists, I’d actually think this would be least the threatening to the male ego, as it keeps the focus off male lust (a normal, desirable thing) and puts it on pathological attitudes.

Yes, rape is about sex, if we define sex as anything in which arousal and genitalia are involved. This is a such a obvious thing that’s its hardly worth arguing about it. The question of all time is not “what is rape?”, it’s “what causes this to happen?”. Women wearing short skirts on Ventura Blvd? Men who aren’t getting laid enough? To apply a broad brush answer that boils down to simply wanting sex oversimplyfies the truth.

In many situations, rape really isn’t sex. When I hear stories about random granny rape like the story I linked to earlier, or stories about what has happened to the women in Dafar in which machetes are shoved up their vaginas, it’s hard to consider these acts to be driven by pure sexual desire. Maybe the guy has an orgasm at the end, yippee, but if so, he’s only having it because he’s done awful things to her. Becoming fixated on his dick and writing this off as sex means downplaying the pyschological underpinings that make him vastly different from men who are just as horny, just as fearless, but do not rape.

“Rape is about power” means that a rapists feeds off unconsensual sex. Other kinds of sex are not adequate substitutes. Does this apply to all rapists? Probably not. The most disturbing kind that stalk, beat, and maybe even murder their victims? Yeah, I’d say so. What is unconsensual sex? It’s sex that is taken, not given. Its sex in which the rapist is completely overpowering victim. The kind of rapist who does this is akin to a thief who would rather steal than accept the same items as gifts. Calling the prime motivation greed ignores that their is more going on in their heads than just wanting money. They want money in a way that is linked to violence.

It seems that men struggle to accept that this happens, because they are coming at it from their own shoe perspective and not the shoes of someone who thinks about the world in a radically different way. The messed up thing is that it hard to say in each individual circumstance what motivated the man to rape. In a world in which 80 year-old grannies get raped because they are a convenient targets in which to unleash rage, whose to say with expert confidence that the 19 year-old sorority girl was raped because she was looking extra cute at the club. The fact is, you don’t really know unless you’re the guy doing the raping.

Everything that AHunter has posted in this thread rings true to me.

244

Yeah, and I can dig that. I really can. I’m all about using inflammatory language to ‘startle’ people into thinking about things.

But the thing is, that ‘rape is not about sex’ really did turn into kind of a sound bite that a lot people started saying. And when you get a sound bite floating, you get a lot of people saying it that are not really thinking about the idea of it, on a deeper level.

I know that I personally have argued with a very smart, thoughtful woman about this statement, and she seemed very certain that rape was not about sex on any level, it was completely about power.

I can’t hear that without counter-arguing. Because an orgasm is a very specific experience, directly related to sex.

ETA: doreen, I just want to say that I tend to agree with you here:

I want to make that clear, once again, because I may be having trouble following this thread, but I think most people agree that rape may be about power on some level.

245

I can not put myself into the mind of a rapist. But it is a violent sex act. It is definitely both . I don’t see how you can separate them. Purely violent people have plenty of outlets that do not involve women. It is illogical to insist it is not also about sex.

246

For this particular debate perhaps the definition you are using of rape needs to be tightened a little?

I have no doubt that the drag a woman off the street and stick your dick up her at gunpoint rape is about power. And quite explicitly, I would expect any such rapist to acknowledge that he’s not getting off on the sex but rather on the subjugation of the woman involved.

From there though I think its a downhill slide in terms of being about power - statutory rape with a willing* 17 year old has practically nothing to do with power.

For cases of date rape, it may be an element of power in the situations where the guy feels emasculated and decides to “take what she doesn’t want to give” but this falls closer to my arbitrary definition of violent rape. Where the girl kinda sorta doesn’t protest or is too drunk# to actually consent the rape is probably more about sex than anything else.

*yes yes I know

but not actually unconcious

247

I think no sex, save rape, is about power. I can not believe you said that.

248

I believe that he is alluding to for example consensual power exchange. Some of sex is about that. Not all of sex is about that. The world is big.

249

You’re manipulating the ambiguity in the phrase “about sex” to make it seem as though anything that is “about sex” is in the same boat as anything else that is “about sex” and they’re either all good or they’re all bad.

Let’s consider these facts:

(a) Virtually all men deeply crave sex.
(b) Some men have very few qualms about using violence.
(c) Some men are not highly sensitive to the feelings of others.
(d) Some men can’t convince women to sleep with them through more respectable means, possibly because they suffer from (b) or (c).

(a) does not, in and of itself, bring about rape. But (a) through (d) do. Rapists want sex, have no problem with using violence to get it, don’t have sympathy for the victim, and can’t get sex through less risky methods.

I don’t fantasize about raping women. I constantly fantasize about having sex with women who are overjoyed to be bumping bodies with me. But what if I didn’t have a problem with violence or even enjoyed violence? What if I didn’t care how other people felt? What if I couldn’t get women to just sleep with me through normal means?

I believe that I’ve said all that I should need to say to establish my point. But people like you don’t listen to this type of argument because you view “sex” as this entire universe populated with nothing but brilliant, shining stars. In the world of sex there is just love and pleasure, and if it isn’t about love and pleasure, it’s not part of the sex universe.

Wake up. Sex is what it is; it’s people being sexually stimulated by other people. Women want it, but men want it twice as much. People who are in love are more likely to have sex, but that doesn’t mean that a man raping a woman isn’t doing it to get sex.

250

OH, for pity’s sake–no we’re not. I’m not defensive at all about this, because I don’t think either the phrase or its denial vilifies men. I’m arguing against it because it’s incorrect, because it impedes research, because it impedes education of young men about what rape actually is, and because it may consequently lead to more rapes.

AHunter, you’re right of course that feminism helped remove some of the absurd defenses men used against charges of rape. You didn’t quote the part of my post where I said all that. I’m glad we agree.

Your disanalogy to cannibalism is very interesting. Most cannibalism is indeed not about hunger, or even about a desire to taste the flesh of a particular victim: it’s almost always about the ritual. This is precisely why it’s like stranger rape, and not like many acquaintance rapes, in which the rape really is about a desire to experience the flesh of a particular victim.

Again, do you disagree with the notion that many acquaintance rapes occur because the man is motivated by lust, and insufficiently deterred by compassion, empathy, and fear of social/legal consequences? If so, what’s your specific disagreement with this formulation?

251

Would you care to explain?

I believe practically all actions are about power to a certain degree, in that there is always a selfish reason behind them. Even if it’s giving money to the poor to make you feel better about yourself, it empowers you.

Perhaps more accurately then rape is generally about the misuse of power. It is abusing your natural strength as a male, it is abusing opportunity and trust.

That would be massively shallow, don’t you think? Why do you think it has anything to do with our ego’s? What’s going in your mind here?
It’s not about making us look good in front of the other genders. Letting people believe rape is completely about power may be beneficial, it may make both men and women feel better about the male gender, but if it simply isn’t true, what’s the point? If men really are naturally evil, then that’s the situation, right? You don’t have to cover it up by making things up. Of course, men are not naturally evil.
This is a pathetic reason to accept this idea.

I don’t know how accurate this is, but only 2% of rape seems to occur with an absolute stranger. By far the most common seems to be within seemingly steady relationships. I don’t know about you, but this tells me that people who rape are generally ordinary people who are fully capable of enjoying normal relationships. But due to a myriad of actual reasons, rape occurs. Drugs and alcohol are often used to make the victim a little more susceptible, probably to avoid the whole clawing out of the eyes that was mentioned earlier.

Sometimes it really looks like it is overwhelming sexual desire + lack of control and decency. Why that vilifies men, and why we need to cover our eyes and sing loudly to block out that possibility, I don’t know.

252

Yeah, I do disagree. In acquaintance rape I think the primary motivation is a sense of entitlement. I’m WITH her and she doesn’t get to decide that I don’t get to have sex with her, that’s for me to decide, bitch. I take whatever I want, and baby I want you. I’m a badass motherfucker. Pussy was put on this planet for a reason. (etc)

I do not think any more than vanishingly small rare occurrences are cases of moments of overwhelming surges of lust. A general backdrop of ongoing lust, yes; that fuels the “what I want” part of the “I take whatever I want” package.

But they do it because they think it OK (not officially “OK” but OK in the sense of being worth a thumbs up of approval). They may approve of coercion in general (thus stealing is fine if the opportunity presents itself) or it may be more specifically an approval of sexual coercion (sex is men taking it) but that’s a necessary element in acquaintance rape.

253

I think interpreting the power catchphrase in purely a literal sense (as it’s opponents are doing) is massively shallow.

The statement is only meant to say that rape goes deeper than mere sexual lust. Really, that’s it. I don’t see how this debatable enough to haggle over for 6+ pages. And so that’s it for me.

254

Where’s your data for saying that it’s incorrect? Most of what has been posted in this thread is supposition and speculation.

How does it impede research? Research into rape has done more to show that rape is a sociopathic power-rage thing than the product of overactive lust. Do you have any data to support your hypothesis?

How can drawing attention to the power dynamics of rape and getting it off sex itself lead to more rape? Honestly, I’m curious about the supposed mechanism behind this. I can see how focusing on the male sex drive to the exclusion of other variables could be counterproductive in solving the rape problem, but not when we make a twisted psychological makeup the scapegoat. What would societal interventions look like if we made sex the focus, and how would they be any different from what’s in place now?

255

Um, cite? I’m pretty sure this is wrong.

256

I’ve already cited some articles, and I’ve admitted I’m unable to find the one that specifically changed my mind on this issue. Do you need me to repeat those cites by going through my old posts in this thread searching for them, or can you do that yourself?

257

I just scanned the entire thread and came across the two links you posted. Neither one support your blanket assertion that it’s incorrect, as you say, to emphasize the role of the power imbalance over the sexual role when it comes to rape.

Blanket assertions have no place in a thread about rape, when its nature spans the gamut. Can we all agree on that? I’d be surprised if any reputable figure in rape criminology didn’t classify rape differently based on the likelihood of lust being a motive versus aggression. The strawman is that the power meme is the leading theory by those in positions of influence for why all rapes occur, even though its obvious on its face that rape-by-machete crimes are radically different than the case of a college freshman who was raped by a roomate after having one too many beers. That’s why I don’t get why this topic is worth debating so heatedly. Armchair amateurs may have their pet theories as to why men rape and some may believe its all about power, but so what?

I noticed that you didn’t answer my other questions, despite them being asked in good faith. How does drawing attention to the power play in rape get in the way of rape research? And how could it lead to more rape? If the messages we’re currently sending to young men all wrong, how should we change those messages? Is there any evidence that rape interventions crafted around the power theory are ineffective in decreasing rape prevalence?

258

Drawing attention to the “power play” in rape gets in the way of research because it loads an unnecessary assumption into the research. If researchers believe something that is not true (that rape is primarily done to assert power over a woman), they’re going to pursue misguided questions with misguided methodology. It’s as though you’re asking “explain how belief in phlogisten will get in the way of research into the nature of combustion”.

Teaching people that rape is not about sex leads them to discount the role that the desire for sex plays in the occurrence of rape. Women are led to believe that normal male horniness doesn’t play a role in rape, even though it obviously does. It will train women to think that rape is something done by power-hungry sociopaths, as opposed to normal-seeming men who just happen to not be on the very sympathetic side.

I don’t know all of the manners in which the “rape is about power” idea affects the prevalence of rape, but I don’t think that a straightforward delusion can do anything but hurt. Those of us who oppose the “rape is not about sex” view recognize that getting in touch with reality is the first step in thinking about how to prevent rape.

259

But how do you know it’s about normal male horniness? You say it “obviously” does, but does it? If we’re bringing research into it, do you have studies that prove it’s just about sex?

260

In The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker cites multiple academic works that bring forth the following points:

  • Copulation is widespread in the animal kingdom, indicating that it is at least not always selected against and may even be selected for.
  • Rape is found in all human societies.
  • Rapists generally only apply enough force to coerce the victim into sex. Only four percent of rape victims suffer serious injuries and less than one in five hundred are murdered.
  • Rape victims tend to be in a woman’s peak productive years.
  • Rape victims are more traumatized if the rape could result in a conception. They are more traumatized if they are in their fertile years.
  • Rapists are overwhelmingly young men, who are at the age of greatest sexual competitiveness.
  • Rape often results in conception.

Thousands of intellectuals like to view evolutionary psychology as hogwash, but I really think Pinker has a point here. These pieces of data support the view that rape is generally a tool used by men to get sex from attractive women.

These are pinker’s citation for these points:

Symons, D. The evolution of human sexuality
Ellis and Beatie. “The feminist explanation for rape: an empirical test.”
Check and Malamuth: “An empirical assessment of some feminist hypotheses about rape.”
O.D. Jones. “Sex, culture, and the biology of rape: Toward an explanation and prevention.”
Thornhill and Palmer. A natural history of rape: biological bases of sexual coercion.