A blogger, yes, but also a (former) BNP. Said Nick Eriksen:
I noted upthread that I think the expression partly originated to counter arguments that some men need to rape women to satisfy their sexual urges (and therefore we needn’t fear charming, good looking men, and any accusations against them should be dismissed).
Reading more of the thread it’s also become clear to me that the other result of this idea, that most if not all rapes are a result of unrestrained horniness in desperate men, is what we’ve already witnessed but are (hopefully) moving away from – the cross-examination of the accuser, her clothes, her looks and her sexual history (and, conversely, doubting the stories of unattractive women).
I’m happy there are so many intelligent arguments in this thread. It’s odd but unsurprising that some people automatically assume the expression ‘rape isn’t about sex’ to be about the motives of rapists rather than the reaction of victims. Anyway, I’m not even sure we can agree on a definition of ‘sex,’ let alone ‘about.’
Actually, this isn’t about rape specifically but does anyone remember a thread from a while ago? I think it had to do with flirting/attention from men. One guy commented that the women who tend to complain most vocally about being hit on were unattractive women and he concluded that they were just doing it to brag about male attention by seeing innocuous situations as harassment or whatever. It was kind of disturbing–I’ve also heard this opinion from other people that in general women who are complaining about unwanted attention are bragging.
I think this is a case of some men projecting how they think they’d feel in that position on to women. Hence is why many men also don’t get why rape is a traumatizing ordeal to victims. Many men don’t readily grasp how women are physically vulnerable to men, and how aggressive this unwanted attention can be.
I’m quoting this because I liked it so much. I think this is very well said.
I can’t find it now (there are an awful lot of SDMB threads containing the word “rape”), but a while back we had a thread on here about modern use of “rape” to refer to wild but consensual sex. Some Dopers felt that saying something like “Dude, I’d totally rape her” about an attractive woman was horrible and offensive, while some others felt this was just a kind of slang and no big deal since the speaker didn’t mean rape the crime.
Historically speaking and in some parts of the world even today, it seems that rape was considered wrong only in the same sense that adultery was considered wrong. It wasn’t a problem because it hurt the person who was raped, but because it was sex outside the confines of marriage. The main difference was that with adultery both parties were guilty, whereas with rape only one person was guilty.
The main concern with all these laws appears to be discouraging anyone from performing sex acts (consensual or not) with a woman except for her husband. If a man committed adultery with another man’s wife or raped a betrothed virgin, he received the same punishment: death. But if a man rapes a virgin who is not already betrothed to another, the “punishment” was paying off the victim’s father and then marrying the victim. Raping a single woman who was not betrothed and was not a virgin apparently wasn’t even considered a crime, although lines 20-21 call for the execution of any new bride found not to be a virgin by her husband.
The Romans praised the memory of the historic/legendary matron Lucretia, who committed suicide after being raped. According to St. Augustine’s City of God, it was said of the rape that “Here was a marvel: there were two, and only one committed adultery.”
St. Augustine, to his credit, believed it was not only unnecessary but essentially murder to expect Christian women to kill themselves after having been raped or to avoid being raped. He argued that an assault on a person’s body does nothing to change the purity of their soul. But the fact that he had to make this argument indicates that there were people in his time who felt otherwise.
Once adultery and premarital sex were no longer considered such a big deal in our culture, there probably were some who felt that maybe rape shouldn’t be such a big deal either…especially if the victim wasn’t even a “nice girl”. If the victim dressed in a sexy way and had engaged in sexual activities with other men, who was she to complain about a horny guy just doing what came naturally to him? There’s also that old and unfunny joke about how if rape seems inevitable, one might as well relax and enjoy it.
Not many people would make that joke today. I wouldn’t put it past Nick Eriksen, but I think most people these days can understand that rape isn’t something a victim can just relax and enjoy and that it isn’t a crime society should take lightly. “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power/violence” is probably not the best way to explain this to someone who doesn’t get it, but I can understand the appeal of a short, simple, memorable phrase that covers the basics.
Nice treatment: I have a sense of the topic now that I didn’t on page 6. Props to AHunter as well.
More tangentially, a qualification:
I’d like to comment on Deuteronomy. I’m a little wary of the KJC translation, since its literary value exceeds its linguistic accuracy. Then again, we are talking about historical attitudes about rape, so pulling out the dominant translation over the last few centuries certainly is defendable.
The notes to my Schocken Bible are consistent with Lamia’s presentation: “…[The woman’s] consent is not an issue here; as a betrothed woman, she had no right to give it (Frymer-Kensky 1992a)” I will argue though that the pain of the woman is at least acknowledged. In the English KJV, the innocent damsel “Cried out” (or not) which is different than yelled out. In the notes to the Shocken Bible, alternative translations of “Humbled” are “Violated” and “Raped”.
So much for amateur apologetics. I understand that women could not hold property in ancient Israel, so I’m not surprised that they would receive no direct compensation for the harm did to them, other than guarantees of lifetime support by their forcibly wedded husbands. The idea that people marry for love and even by choice is a modern one. The damsel that is betrothed to the husband for example apparently refers to a woman for whom the bride-price has been paid: it’s not “engaged” in the modern sense.
As Measure for Measure mentions, this was a primitive way of providing support for the woman. Women were largely unable to support themselves without a husband in that kind of society, and a woman who had been raped would be seen as unfit for any other man. Those were brutal times…
Sigh. All I can say is: think harder. In 6th grade I was the smallest, lightest kid in my school of 500. So I know a little about physical vulnerability. The fact is men are far more likely to succumb to homicide (usually by other men) than women are.
But I can certainly understand why somebody would want another to buzz off. I can also imagine that male-to-male prison rape wouldn’t be a fun experience.
Wow, I’m think you’re the one who should be thinking harder on this. Male-on-male rape is viscerally impleasant to most men most probably because first and foremost its male-on-male. Ask a man to state his opinions on female-on-male rape, on the other hand, and it’s usually treated as a joke. That attitude has a way coloring how they view male-on-female rape as well.
It’s great than you understand the phenomenon of feeling physically vulnerable to men due to small stature all and that, but since I didn’t make any declarative statements about all men, it really doesn’t counter what I said. So here’s a refund for the sigh you just gave me.
(Bolding mine.) And why was that? Why should the victim of a violent assault be considered unfit for marriage? It seems clear enough to me that this was because rape was considered basically just another form of illicit sex. It wasn’t even as bad as adultery – a capital offense – as long as the woman was unattached. Raping a woman who was already betrothed to another merited the death penalty, but a man with the sense to rape an unbetrothed woman got to marry her. He’d then be free to rape her as often as he liked for the rest of her life. (Even in the US it wasn’t until the late 20th century that it became illegal for a man to rape his wife.)
I don’t mean to single the Ancient Israelites out here – citing the Old Testament is just a lot easier than citing other ancient codes of law. There were (and still are) other cultures that treated women more badly. My point is that historically it has not been good for women if rape is viewed by society as a form of illicit sex rather than a form of violent assault. One of the reasons analogies comparing rape to theft bother me so much is that for much of history, rape was treated as basically a property crime…with the woman’s body being the property. The “victim” was the man whose legal right to control the woman’s body had been infringed upon.
These days a lot of sexual activities that were once criminal are perfectly legal. The reason why rape and other forms of sexual assault are (unlike adultery or gay sex) still illegal isn’t because of the “sexual” part, but because of the “assault” part. This doesn’t mean there isn’t any sexual element to sexual assault, “sexual” is part of the name for a reason, but it’s the “assault” that makes it a crime.
Just a thanks to Lamia for putting it so eloquently. I love the Dope for this. It doesn’t happen all the time – people putting things better than you can put them yourself, clarifying your own positions for you and illustrating why they’re more than just doubts or niggling feelings – but when it does I am always grateful.
But that’s irrelevant to whether rape is primarily about sex or about power, right? It might be worse for women to view it that way, it might give rise to analogies that bother you, but none of that has any bearing on whether a given rapist is motivated primarily by a desire for sex while another one is motivated primarily by a desire for power, or whatever?
All apologies for using an analogy that bothers you, but I want to make sure I understand your point: are we agreed that for some criminals the “assault” is merely a means to the “sexual” end, while for other criminals the “sexual” component is just a means to an end and the real thrill is exerting power over a victim, or something? Rather like how some criminals rob people to get money, sure as yet other criminals presumably just rob people for the thrill of ordering people around at gunpoint?
Anal injury, forced unsafe sex and being treated as Bubba’s bitch doesn’t thrill me either.
Or with bafflement.
Cite?
Guys learn to measure each other up from a young age. All but the largest of the gender are familiar with unarmed physical vulnerability; all are aware of the risks of physical confrontation.
Might it be that ‘rape’ describes a particular act under circumstances (a 20th century euphemism I think, literally meaning ‘theft’ or ‘kidnap’ for what was formerly called ‘violation’ - no doubt another euphemism) but even stripping all the legal fakeries that deny girls under an arbitrary age sexual freedom, the act may have many reasons that vary from I’ve started so I’ll finish just like a woman except she can’t physically force a man who has lost erection, to prudish feelings of sex as ‘degrading’ and so a means of punishing the victim for arousing feelings the pervert feels ashamed of at the same time as relieving them.
Almost by definition. ‘real’ rapists - that is, when ‘age of consent’ or misunderstandings an misgivings between teenagers drunk in bed together or later regrets and puritan pressure are not at the root of it - are sexual inadequates taking revenge on women who won’t have them. Women won’t have most men any more than in reality most men won’t give themselves to any woman, however much they say so when it hardly ever happens. But most men and most women do not turn their sex into a weapon of revenge against the other sex in general because they aren’t accepted by the ones they’d like to be. Rape is the flip side of sexual repression for both sexes.
Where women are taught not to admit to any sexual demand of their own they can actually make it look like ‘faint heart never won fair lady’ because they want the male to take all responsibility and to cover themselves against being seen as ‘sluts’ by claiming to have been raped. It is where women are required to be sexless that real rape and demand for males to make all the running and make her appear browbeaten into sex overlap and ‘normal’ relations between the sexes take on the appearance of a socially accepted rape where she is ‘giving in’ to his demands without admitting to any demands of her own.
The best way to know that “No means don’t” is when a woman feels free to say “Yes”, even better, to do the asking. Strangely, the only women I’ve met who regard women being sexually free to say what they want so they do not feel the need to pretend that they don’t (as most women have been for about 50 years!) call themselves ‘feminists’. Only from them is there still an outcry as if sex were some evil demand that men force upon women for their own benefit that women just had to put up with in the past but no longer do and can all be noble Victorian Virgins or Lesbians again free from having to admit sexual equality with men. That does not mean they actually are ‘feminists’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) but argument that falls into the ‘idealism’ sphere like people trying to say that of course Stalin and Mao and Kim were never ‘real’ Communists. The ‘real’ ideal ones have never existed, so we go on what we find.
Whether it’s relevant or irrelevant depends on who we’re talking about. As I’ve said already, the statement “Rape isn’t about sex” is somewhat ambiguous. This isn’t just because “about” can have somewhat different meanings, but because simply saying “Rape isn’t about sex” doesn’t specify for whom rape is not about sex.
*Whether or not rape is “about” sex for the rapist is (obviously) open to debate. The point I was making is that, from a modern Western perspective, the reason why rape is a crime is not because it’s “about” sex but because it’s “about” violence or coercion. The sexual aspect of rape was once reason enough for it to be considered a serious offense, in much the same way that adultery was a serious offense, but today for the most part consensual sex is not considered a criminal matter. (Prostitution is a notable exception, but that’s a subject for another thread.)
*No, I don’t believe that, when it comes to rape, assault is merely a means to an end. If rapists really just wanted to get their rocks off then there are easier ways to do it. Based on my reading, it seems clear that most rapists enjoy both the sexual aspect of rape AND the violent or coercive aspect. For many rapists I don’t think it’s possible to separate “sex” from “violence/coercion” as a motive, because the specific experience they want is sex with an unwilling partner. Others seem to consider “sex” and “violence” two great tastes that go great together, although they can enjoy either one without the other. But I don’t believe that rapists ever rape solely because they’re very, very horny.
I would be willing to change that belief in the face of sufficient evidence to the contrary, but it wouldn’t really change how I feel about the crime of rape or rapists themselves. It would definitely change how I feel about men in general though, since practically every man alive has been very, very horny at times.
Well, there’s that same ambiguity I’m having trouble with again; first you say you don’t believe that, when it comes to rape, assault is merely a means to an end – and then you say it seems clear that most rapists enjoy both the sexual aspect and the violent/coercive aspect. And then you opine that for many rapists it’s not possible to separate “sex” from “violence/coercion” as a motive.
So which is it? All? Most? Many?
But what about the alternative explanation another poster floated in this thread? That some men just plain don’t care whether someone gets hurt or feels threatened, but are simply out for the money or the sex or whatever and so rob or rape without much bothering to think stuff through and without any real sadism either; they’re maybe just self-centered and impulsive, but the victim’s feelings don’t enter into it one way or another. Wouldn’t that be a plausbile read on some rapists without impugning “practically every man alive”?
Easier ways? Well, there are easier ways to get an orgasm, but just using your hand sometimes isn’t enough, or else our species wouldn’t have lasted very long. I don’t see how it’s necessarily easier to spend time and money to make someone willing to have sex with you, not that that should be why you’d start dating - but if all you physically want and care about is sexual intercourse then it can be seen as just a means to an end. It’s much easier to take what you want, but there are more risks.
The majority of rapes are date rapes, most often between acquaintances, ex girlfriends, friends etc. A very small minority occur with a complete stranger in a dark alley. Alcohol and drugs are often used to make violence less necessary.
One problem that I see cropping up here is certain individuals posting here seem to have a stereotype of rape stuck in their heads. Seems like people think there is one size fits all scenario that apparently all instances of rape must adhere to. When someone says ‘rapist’ what image comes to mind? A dirty old man with a beard?
Rape is a complex issue and saying it’s about one thing specifically is not useful. However rape always involves sex (or attempts at), it’s in the very definition of of the word. It’s also undeniable that having more power than your victim is important in most rape, but it is not necessarily the goal. The feeling of anger could be primary, whilst feeling of power could be secondary, or need for sexual gratification could take precedence over everything else.
It’s like trying to pin the same motive to every single robbery.
I’m not trying to defend the ugly ancient attitudes, I’m just trying to explain where they come from. You’re absolutely right that women were treated like property, and that’s the basis for the difference in sentences. Every woman had to belong to (and, in theory, be provided for by) a man. Hence, adultery earned a man the death penalty because he wasn’t needed for the purpose of owning/supporting that woman – she was already married. Society couldn’t put the rapist of an unmarried woman to death, though, because there was no one else to own/support that woman. You’re quite right that he thereby gets the right to rape her for the rest of her life, but as you point out, for most of history that was true of any marriage. History is depressing.
Did you deliberately choose not to quote an important section of my post in an attempt to make it look like I was contradicting myself (not that “many” would be a big about-face from “most”), or did you just not bother to read the whole thing?
*I have no difficulty believing that many rapists are sociopaths with poor impulse control, but I do not find it plausible that there are rapists who do not enjoy the experience of hurting or dominating their victims. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t do it. I’d expect that even most sociopaths prefer willing sexual partners, just because a willing partner is at least going to try to give them a good time.
It’s certainly been my impression that most men consider masturbation a far more enjoyable way to relieve sexual tension than raping someone, but perhaps I have been misinformed.
