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

The BBQ Pit
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That’s correct, but any desire for sex has evolutionary significance, so we should examine people’s desires for sex from a biological perspective and think about what they might mean. When men have sex with women, they don’t feel as though they’re doing it because it is evolutionarily adaptive. Nevertheless, the desire for sex itself is an evolutionary adaptation, so the pleasure of having sex should never be discounted from the rape scenario. Rape is a sex act - why wouldn’t the perpetrator get sexual pleasure from it, provided that he was willing to commit rape in the first place?

You portray rape as either emerging from a sort of personal desire to dominate a woman (I will show this woman that I own her) or as a sort of personal holy war against all women (I am a man and I’m going to dominate these cunts).

Let me confess something right up front: I cannot show, above 95% certainty, that you’re wrong. Honest. But I do think I have some objections that need to be met.

Point One: Sexually condescending views towards women are related to the belief that one can take from a woman what one wants, and that is sex.

You’re missing the end of the whole domination/control/male identity spiel. Men get an ego boost from knowing that they can get sex, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want the sex itself. Access to sex increases a man’s ego because sex is what almost all men want more than anything.

Public knowledge of a man’s access to sex greatly increases his level of status. Johnny Depp could sleep with a different beautiful woman every night and everybody knows it. This gives him great status. Public acknowledgment of a man’s ability to get laid increases his level of status.

But rape is a private matter. Men try to keep rape secret, so rape cannot be construed as an attempt to increase one’s social status.

But could it be an attempt to merely boost a man’s ego? Raping a woman successfully could boost a man’s ego, but the end of the road is still his desire for sex. The basis of the rape-derived ego boost is the very ability to get sex.

There are two other things I have to say to the view you advocate. My view may not be perfectly supported by scientifically gathered information, but I nevertheless presented (in an earlier post) those pieces of information that I think go along with my view. By contrast, exactly what data, scientifically assembled, supports your conception of a rapist’s motivation? Part of why I reject the sort of view you advocate in favor of a more sexual-gratification-centric view is that my view doesn’t have as many psychoanalytic overtones.

Feminist theory is so broad that I would never say that I am opposed to all of it. Some feminists, however, view the assertion and establishment of male power as the end of all things men ever do. Luce Irigaray once said that fluid dynamics is less well understood than other areas of physics because women have vaginas that ooze menstrual blood and secret vaginal fluid, whereas men have members that get hard. You’ll have to forgive me if I tread through the swamps of feminist theory with heavy boots.

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I can see the validity to that belief. It all depends, of course, on the setting and context and the nature of rape we’re talking about. It’s hard to argue that the “raping and pillaging” phenomenon seen in many wars is not a means of asserting dominance. Not specifically over women, but over the conquered.

Actually, I disagree that rape is used to keep women in fear. Historically and in societies where women are seen as a reflection of a man’s worth, rape has been used to keep other men in fear. I think AlHunter communicated this well.

Think of how alpha males establish themselves in a dog pack. Same mentality.

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Mistake:

I initially intended to include other points in my last post, but decided against it when I realized they were superfluous. I therefore phrased my arguments as though they are part of a sequence that never really got sequenced out. Sorry!

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Well, you seemed to be attributing such crankery to Hazelwood in your previous post. I guess I misunderstood your meaning, but you thanked me for tracking down Hazelwood’s name and then started in about the poor research standards of 1970s feminists. The transition between the two subjects was not clear to me.

*Ah, but the catchphrase isn’t “Rape has nothing to do with sex”, it’s “Rape isn’t about sex”. As I pointed out previously, this is not necessarily the same thing. What does it mean to say that X isn’t “about” Y? This can sometimes mean that Y has nothing to do with X at all, but this same phrasing is also often used to mean that Y is not the main theme or reason for X – for instance, “Animal Farm isn’t about animals”.

“Rape isn’t about sex” is a statement that is open to several different interpretations, but I don’t see any reason to believe that those who use it intend it to mean that no rapist has ever experienced even the most fleeting sexual arousal while committing a rape. Similarly, the NRA bumpersticker “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” isn’t intended as a claim that no human being has ever died from a gunshot wound.

These kinds of catchphrases aren’t fully developed arguments in and of themselves. They’re simple, memorable slogans* that serve as a sort of symbol for more complex positions. It’s a mistake to focus on the slogan itself and ignore what it’s supposed to represent. If the intended meaning of the catchphrase is unclear, it’s best to just ask the other person to explain what they meant and go from there rather than getting bogged down with the exact wording of the slogan.

This is especially important because, since catchphrases are always catchy and often vague, people who repeat them don’t always mean the same thing. “Rape isn’t about sex” isn’t explicitly a claim about the motives of the rapist, although that appears to be the most common usage. But I’ve occasionally seen the catchphrase offered as an explanation of the victim’s feelings, and as I mentioned before, it also sometimes seems to be meant as a statement about how society should view rape.

*Although as far as I can tell, “Rape isn’t about sex” was never an official slogan of any feminist organization. I did some more searching today and was unable to determine who was the first person to use this particular phrase. It started popping up in print in the 1980s and became very common in the 1990s, but I didn’t come across anyone saying “As So-and-So once said, rape isn’t about sex.” I’ve found the claim attributed to feminists in general, but not to a particular individual or organization.

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a) The good sound theory to be found there is worth the wade thru the swamp. Really.

b) But yeah. Point taken. My own opinions of Irigaray and her cohort are pretty much on the same plane as yours, despite being a feminist theory junkie.

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I have to disagree with you there. In my experience simple slogans serve as symbols for simplistic, often feel-good positions.

But “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is different. It is more or less accurate: a gun alone doesn’t typically kill somebody unless there’s a gun wielder (ammunition dump explosions can be set aside). And whether guns can intensify bad situations is a separate matter. But saying that rape isn’t about sex is just strange, though somewhat less bizarre than saying that, “…all men benefit from the use of, rape as a means of perpetuating male dominance by keeping all women in a state of fear.” (1975)

Still, I want to clarify something.

Oops, I didn’t mean to do that. I have no reason to question Hazelwood’s or Groth’s scholarship, unless you can quote them saying something ludicrous. But I maintain that 2nd wave feminism was populated by cranks such as Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin, quacks such as Mary Daly and various sundry sloganeering nutjobs. But I’m also saying (note to The Bith Shuffle) that these wackos have been thoroughly marginalized by now. (eg here’s a feminist-friendly treatment about rape and sex by the essayist and author Barbara Ehrenreich written in 2000 with notable sanity. The cranky stuff just didn’t fly by that time.)

The reasons for 2nd wave feminism’s nuttiness are varied and complex. Partly it had to do with their audience. Partly it reflected certain authors’ backgrounds in literature and to a certain extent the law, as opposed to more quantitative fields. But it also was a reflection of cultism: intellectual cults thrive on a sense of persecution. In this case, I’m saying that those who said the rape is not about sex were taking a rather different position than that of Groth. Furthermore, I speculate that if somebody pointed this out in the early 1980s they would be said to be just saying that because Groth is a man. Yes, some conversations were that packed with logical fallacies of that intensity.

Today, notable cultishness is confined to the right. Many of these wingers have grasped that the key to successful demagoguery in a democracy is to convince majorities that they are being oppressed by minorities. The problem with this formulation though is that many are simply turned off by hysteria.

To say “Rape is not about sex” goes beyond that. With respect, I think you’re engaging in revisionism. The left successfully purged itself of a lot of crankery in the late 1980s and 1990s, but I argue that some of the wackiness was once very real.

Ok. To be clear though, it typically was something that was stated flat out, as opposed to something attributed to feminists in general. Example. Another.

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And men don’t rape just because they’re horny. If they did, rape would be hugely, horrifically more common than it actually is.

*Google Books gives me a 1988 story in Ebony magazine where “Rape is not about sex” is presented as a summary of Groth’s research. This is one of the earlier uses of the phrase I’ve found in a popular source. I have yet to find any use of the phrase where the speaker/writer explained that they meant that rapists really did not feel any sexual arousal related to the act of rape.

I’ve now read Groth’s 1977 article “Rape: Power, anger, and sexuality” (co-authors Burgess and Holmstrom, American Journal of Psychiatry, v. 134, i. 11, p. 1239-1243), which recognizes that rape involves issues of sexuality but says that “There were no rapes [examined in this study] in which sex was the dominant issue; sexuality was always in the service of other, nonsexual needs.” The discussion section stresses the importance of recognizing that rape is not normal sexual behavior taken to an extreme but rather a form of “sexual deviation and that the pathology of the offender [must] be recognized.”

*No, I am saying that I can find no evidence for the position that the phrase “Rape is not about sex” was intended to mean that sexual desire has played absolutely no role in any rape ever. It isn’t difficult to come up with examples of certain feminists saying some pretty ridiculous things, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time now trying to track down early uses of “Rape is not [isn’t] about sex” and have yet to come up with any context where this phrase was clearly meant as a denial of any sexual arousal on the part of the rapist. And I’m a professional reference librarian, so I’m pretty good at looking things up.

Most uses of the phrase seem to be from people claiming, like Groth, that sex is not the primary motive for rape. I’ve also found instances of the phrase being used as a denial of any sexual arousal on the part of the victim, but not the other way around. Here’s one of the earliest uses of the phrase I could find in Lexis-Nexis, from a St. Petersburg Times opinion piece by Diane Mason (October 11, 1989, p. 1D) about a recent local rape trial:

Mason goes on to argue that rape is motivated by anger rather than “horniness”, but quotes Susan Brownmiller as saying “These unfortunate men who rape, do confuse rape with sexuality”. So it looks like even Brownmiller was willing to grant that a rapist may at least believe that he’s motivated by sexual desire.

“Rape is not about sex” likely became common in speech before it was widely used in print and many full-text databases don’t have good coverage before the 1990s, so there must be plenty of early uses of “Rape is not about sex” that I’m missing. But if it had commonly been used as a denial of any sexual arousal at all on the part of the rapist, I’d expect to be able to find at least a few examples of this. I have not.

I’d be curious to know if you have any citations from the 1970s or '80s where the phrase “Rape is not about sex” is used in that way, or whether you just feel that this is the sort of thing that feminists of the era could have said.

*Does this mean you don’t think people mean the same thing by the catchphrase “Rape is not about sex” now as they did in the '70s or '80s? The catchphrase is still very much in use, and if the meaning has shifted over time then I don’t see much point in dragging the alleged older meaning into a current discussion about the reasons for rape.

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Wow, Lamia: you certainly did some fine digging. The 1988 Ebony article seemed to me like a sane treatment (again, we’re not judging accuracy here, just ludicrousness). I see that while Groth maintained that rape was pseudosexual in 1979, by 1988 Ebony’s presentation was that “Rape is not sex per se.”

If the phrase is still active, it would follow from my hypothesis that the meaning has shifted. (Below I find a contemporary purist interpretation, so it seems that I’ve been falsified.)

I scrolled down the first page of Google for “Rape is not about sex”. A lot of the pages were presumably about rape treatment or prevention, so I must admit I can understand why the authors would simplify in such a context. That said, here are some quotes from http://www.womensweb.ca/violence/rape/index.php

Emphasis in original. Near the top, it seems they are talking about the victim. But later it seems that they talk about the rapist in ways that go well beyond what Groth argued. The Ebony treatment was superior in my view.
I think what I would want is something from a TV or radio transcript though: like I said, I’m not sure how harsh I should be on a rape prevention website. Still, I fear that those who believe that rapists rape indiscriminately, may pass over certain prudent preventative measures – although it’s the case that there are no guarentees.* Regardless, saying that rape is wholly about control to the rapist seems to me to be a possibly dangerous form of crankery or quackery.

Narrowly, the website doesn’t explicitly deny that the rapist gets sexual enjoyment (which in fact he may not in some cases). But its contention that, “Rape has nothing to do with sex. Rape is purely an act of violence and control. Plain and simple, violence and control are the key goals of most rapists”, appears to distort previous research.

Yikes!: “When you hear a rapist claim that the act of rape was sex or consensual sex, right off the bat, you can pretty much guess that the criminal is fabricating a story.” I guess that’s true if you know for a fact that the a rape indeed occurred. But matters of guilt and innocence are not always that clear.

Definitions:
Crankery is poor scholarship used by outsiders. Quackery is poor scholarship used by insiders. Those practicing sound scholarship know that they are at best partly wrong: generally speaking, one does not arrive at the truth, one only converges to it, except on certain narrow matters of fact.

  • And furthermore, the website does have a separate page on rape prevention.
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Sheesh: what’s wrong with me? If the accused refers to the incident as sex, it really doesn’t imply anything.

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Here’s a philosophical treatment of the contention, “Rape is not a sexual act.” If you define “Sexual act” as implying consent, then that statement is true.

The philosopher Stephen Law argues that doing so is an example of a persuasive definition, or a redefining of a familiar term so as to advance a certain agenda. Is rape a sex act? This borders on logical fallacy, in my view.

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I actually thought of the notion of persuasive redefinition on my own. The tactic works like this:

  1. Give a word an alternate meaning.
  2. Make an argument that reaches a conclusion that would be what you actually believe if you were using the standard definition of the given word, but that is only valid if using the alternate definition.
  3. Act as though your logical argument in step 2 using the alternate definition somehow implies the correctness of the view you actually advocate.

Here’s an example.

  1. “Keira Knightley” means “my girlfriend”.
  2. I made love to Keira Knightley last night.
  3. You see! I told you I’ve nailed a movie star.

Saying that rape is not a sex act because sex requires consent fits this bill.

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That is not the specific contention we have been discussing, though. We have been discussing the rather well-known catchphrase “Rape is not about sex.” I will elaborate below.

It is unnecessary to do this if one wants to use “Rape is not about sex” to mean something like “Sex is not the primary motive for rape.” It’s perfectly consistent with standard usage of the word “about”.

Here’s the relevant portion of Merriam-Webster’s definition for the preposition “about”:

The phrase “Rape is not about sex” could be taken as using the word “about” as meaning either 4b or 4c. If 4b, the phrase would certainly appear to be a denial that sex had anything to do with rape. There’s maybe still some wiggle room there, but that meaning would be fairly clear if one knew for sure that definition 4b was the intended meaning of “about”.

But “about” in this phrase could just as easily be taken to mean 4c, and would then be a denial that rape is primarily concerned with or directed toward sex. The David Mamet quote isn’t a claim that poker is always about nothing BUT money, a claim that would obviously be false because people sometimes play poker without even betting money. It’s a claim that money is the most important part. Someone who disagreed might say “No, poker isn’t about money, it’s about having fun with your buddies.” This wouldn’t be a denial that money ever has anything to do with poker at all, it’s just a denial that winning money is the most important thing about poker or the main reason to play.

The fact that “about” has different definitions makes the phrase “Rape is not about sex” somewhat ambiguous, but both 4b and 4c are ordinary everyday uses of the word. The meanings are also close enough that there isn’t a huge difference between the two interpretations. With either sense of the word “about” the statement “Rape is not about sex” is a claim that rape is primarily about something other than sex. The second half of the catchphrase explains what this “something else” is – “power” or sometimes “violence”. The only difference the two possible interpretations of “about” makes is whether the claim leaves room for sex to play any role at all. And if one’s main point is that “Rape is about power/violence” then this shouldn’t really matter. I can’t think of any important conclusions that could be reached by insisting that rape never has anything to do with sex at all that could not just as easily be reached by arguing that sex plays only a secondary role. For the purposes of a debate, there’s nothing to be gained on that side by making a universal claim that sex never has anything at all to do with rape for the rapist.

There is something to be gained on the other side by attributing the more extreme position to one’s opponents, though. If “Rape is not about sex” means that rape never has anything to do with sex at all, it can be proven false by finding even one instance where a rape did have at least a little bit to do with sex. That’s an easy victory that allows one to ignore discussing the role that power and violence might play in rape. It also avoids the hard work of making a well-supported argument that rape is primarily about sex.

If one actually has a well-supported argument that rape is primarily about sex, then this argument should work equally well against a claim that rape is not primarily about sex or a claim that rape is not about sex even a little bit. There’s no need to go with the latter interpretation unless one can’t deal with the former. If there’s any doubt as to what “Rape is not about sex” is supposed to mean, why not be magnanimous about it and credit one’s opponents with the more reasonable position? This may not be as easy as knocking down a strawman, but it makes for a more interesting discussion.

Or one could, as I suggested before, just ask the person saying “Rape is not about sex” what they mean by that. Do they mean that rape is not primarily about sex, that rape has nothing to do with sex for the victim, or that rape has nothing to do with sex for the rapist? Seems like a good way to save time and get on with the real point of the discussion, which is the question of what motivates rapists.

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What is more useful is untying previously (implicitly) tied-together ideas, in order to argue that they are not intrinsically harnessed in tandem.

  1. “Fucking” means “having sex with”. “Fucking” also means “wrecking, destroying, ruining”, and also implies violence and hostility.

  2. Rape is an act of fucking. Anyone disagree?

  3. Sex is not intrinsically an act of wrecking, destroying, or ruining, nor is it intrinsically violence or hostile. We need an understanding (and a word) for it when it doesn’t, and a different word for it when it does.

  4. From now on when we speak of “rape” it is to be understood that we are referring to an act of violence and hostility, an act of wrecking, destroying and ruining. When we speak of “sex” it is to be understood that we are referring to mutual and volitional fucking that does not fit that description at all. Rape is therefore not an act of sex. We’re distinguishing between the two. (And in the ensuing discussion of rape and what to do about it, we expect nary a single wink, giggle, nudge, or tittilation, having made this distinction, are we clear?)

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Disagree. Sex can be an act of wrecking and destroying. Your definition isn’t widely accepted in my opinion.

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Sorry for not dealing with this in my earlier post, I had intended to cover this part as well but got a phone call in the middle of writing and forgot to come back to it.

I’ve been trying to pin down the origins of the phrase “Rape is not about sex”, so I wasn’t really looking for a current website. I don’t think just any old website should carry much weight either, since it’s very easy to find stupid, offensive, or absurd things on the Web (here’s a Salon piece about a blogger who said that since women enjoy sex and rape is sex then rape can’t be that bad). But since you went to the trouble to look this up, I didn’t want to ignore it.

I agree that there are several places where the essay you linked to seems like it’s claiming that sex does not play any role in rape for the rapist. But I also agree that there is no explicit denial that the rapist gets any sexual enjoyment from raping. The essay seems to be going back and forth between the victim and the rapist. The emphasis is usually on the victim (which makes sense considering the target audience), but it’s not always clear who is being referred to. I’m not sure whether this:

is supposed to mean that rape is never about sex for the victim, that it’s never about sex for the rapist, or that “rape” and “sex” mean two different and mutually exclusive things because one isn’t consensual and one is. It looks to me like the author is criticizing “she really wanted it” style victim blaming, but it’s badly written enough that I’m not confident in this interpretation.

The author also seems to contradict herself with regard to a rapist’s intentions. She writes “Rape is purely an act of violence and control” and then in the very next sentence “violence and control are the key goals of most rapists”. But if rape is purely an act of violence and control, then shouldn’t these be the sole goals of all rapists? Does she mean to leave room for the possibility that some minority of rapists might have other/additional goals? Beats me. If the author were a poster here we could ask her to explain herself, but we can’t. She doesn’t appear to have written anything else on the Women’s Web site either.

I think whoever is in charge of Women’s Web would do well to either revise or replace that particular essay because it’s sloppy and confusing. Whatever point they’re trying to make, it could be made a lot more clearly than this.

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Does statutory rape fit in there.? That is often consentual ,just one person is too young. No wrecking or destroying . It can involve a couple teens going too far in a moment of passion.

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You can define words in any way you want to as long as you make the meaning clear to your audience. So I can define “lampshade” as “consensual sex”, and then state that rape has nothing to do with lampshades because it has nothing to do with consent. But it’s good form to make it clear when we’re using unconventional meanings.

It would have been clearer to say that “Rape has nothing to do with consensual sex.” But that’s sort of obvious isn’t it?

Lamia: I’ll have to think this over some more, but I’ll note in passing that I linked to a minor Canadian website – but that it was not a blog. The Ebony article said: “Rape is not about sex per se,” and I think the last part changes the meaning of the sentence. A clarifying sentence would also change the sentence’s meaning. That is, when you say “Rape is not about sex,” without qualification it sounds a lot like the absolutist meaning 4b- “Concerned with”. Furthermore, it would be pretty easy to say, “Rape is not predominantly about sex: rapists are motivated more by control than by arousal.” Such a position may or may not be accurate (Pinker thinks it wrongheaded and incomplete at best), but it’s not nutty.

AHunter’s hypothesis that some seek to sever the ties between the ideas of consensual sex and not consensual sex has merit. But covertly redefining the word sex is a dubious method of doing this.

Separately. Not to open a can of worms, but some women have rape fantasies, though they all understand them to be exactly that. Is the “Rape is not about sex” bit addressing that aspect of human sexuality? If so, is that really necessary? There’s some relevance here, as a few posters have blurred consensual domination with rape. Consensual sex can be about power and control – but that’s using the latter two words in fundamentally different ways than those who speak of rape being about power.

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This may not be the central issue in this thread – but it speaks to my central point.

Those who substitute sloganeering for thought need to be denounced. Those who dogmatically spout nonsense need to be denounced. Both of them muck up the information space.

We should be forgiving though. If somebody wants to set aside slogans and (for example) compare and contrast Groth and Pinker, they should be welcomed with open arms.

Why is this important? This is important because noise crowds out sound policy and empowers the lunatics. Lunatics form a portion of the liberal and conservative electorate, but in the liberal case they have been thoroughly marginalized: during the 1980s and 1990s the hard work was done by Sokol, Clinton, Krugman and even the DLC among others. The marginalization occurred because liberals self-police. In contrast, modern conservatives have ejected their reality-based wonks as heretical and elevated the nutjobs. This strategy has achieved some amount of electoral success, but it should be resisted.

So in short, this lefty is trying to keep his neighborhood clean.

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I don’t disagree with either of you. I did not mean to be asserting that feminists in the late 70s / early 80s were overtly saying they were redefining terms. I think what they were doing was closer to the process described by Lamia in post 312, pertaining to “about”.

I was pointing out (perhaps not very clearly) that there is (and/or has been, historically) a “one word two meanings” problem. It’s actually more vivid with the word “fucking” than the word “rape” (especially nowadays; the feminists have been successful by and large in robbing the word of its titillating sexy overtones, at least in a mainstream-society general-conversation context), but I think it was also a problem for the word “rape”: perhaps more connotatively than denotatively, it conjured up socially-shared images of le grande passion and of sex that could not be resisted. Scarlett O’Hara being scooped up and hauled up the stairs leading to a next-morning sigh rather than a next-morning face full of bruises and fury and miserable weeping. If there had not been a social subtext of “rape is sex” it would not have been necessary to try to untangle volitional sex from coerced sex, and if “sex” did not tend to titillate and distract whenever it is part of the subject it would not have been necessary to stress (to the point of overstatement) that this is not ABOUT sex, it’s about power.

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Not unusual: language is ambiguous, despite English’s enormous vocabulary. Just saying.

Agreed. In fact, I don’t even personally perceive those overtones.

Could somebody who is, say, over the age of 55 or an expert in 1950s/1960s/1970s popular culture comment on this? Did the word “Rape” ever have connotations of “Passion” as opposed to “Injury and trauma”? Or did people (dubiously and dangerously) apply other words (eg “seduction”) to Scarlett O’Hara et al? I’m not disagreeing: I know of some evidence for AHunter’s position in fiction. I’m just asking for additional casual assessment.