I don’t have a cite for it because I forget where I read it. Even though cognitively we assume rape has nothing to do with sex it has been found that most rape victims are in their fertile years (12-40ish). So procreation has something to do with it.
That’s the point. They are being silly and self-contradictory.
They also claimed that (1) women are the same as men and should be treated equally and (2) women are different from men and should be treated differently.
Really? Every single one of them, huh?
I dated a women’s studies major once. She liked it hot and raunchy. I don’t recall her crying “rape.”
I believe Iskinner used the disclaimer “when I was in college…”, indicating that whatever followed this was likely to be an anecdote.
Every last one. In fact, I commissioned a survey of the women’s studies majors.
:rolleyes:
Cartooniverse, your cite is a password-necessary newspaper article (I know I could Bug Me Not but I’m a bit lazy on that at the moment.) I had no idea she just passed & I wasn’t trying to rub salt into any wounds.
I would suggest looking at the woman’s own writing though:
I’m sure there are other examples easily found. This to me is a pretty depressing worldview that the heterosexual sex acts most humans enjoy and which created all of us are acts of violation and domination. Fortunately I’ve had girlfriends (not to mention a mother!) who disagree.
Sounds like poor Andrea Dworkin just never met the right man.
To address the cases where rape would be less obviously about “power” or “dominance” I might suggest weaseling (as opposed to rhinocerosing) the language a bit and saying rape is about choosing to dominate oneself less. For that is, I believe, what prevents men from all becoming rapists at some point in their lives–the willingness to dominate his own urge to take what he wants.
Now I’m having a WTF moment 'cos I thought Dworkin died months ago…
checks it out
…actually, about this time last year.
Malacandra’s right: that cite is for April 12, 2005.
According to Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, this theory originates in Susan Brownmiller’s book Against our Will, and suggests that “rape had nothing to do with an individual man’s desire for sex but was a tactic by which the entire male gender oppressed the entire female gender.” He quotes Brownmiller:
This is, of course, absurd. The italics are in the original, and suggests that if Joe rapes Susan, it’s part of a process that I am using to keep Lisa frightened.
Pinker goes on to say that the theory is one of the all-time great mass delusions: “It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.” He goes on to describe these reasons in detail.
THe evidence might be the most interesting part:
All in all, I think it’s a dangerous canard, unsupported by the evidence.
Daniel
Isn’t the insuation that sexism reduces rape rather dagerous? What could gender roles actually have to do with it at all?
I know this is an old post but I came across it while looking into the topic.
Was their relationship sexual?
I think most of the time when it comes to the men involved in rape it is mostly about the sex for the man. Obviously there are cases of rape where the sex part is a distant second but those STM to be the extreme pathological individuals.
From the woman/victim’s point of view, its not that they had sex they weren’t interested in, its that they were forced to have sex and felt powerless/vunerable. So from that point of view it is about power.
So, when you are talking about the rape power dynamic are talking about the motivations or the consequences.
So IMO, its fine to talk about “power” for half the problem and silly/PC correctness/feminism gone off the range for the other half of the problem.
That would be rates of reported rape.
To say ‘mostly about the sex for the man’ is very ambiguous. When it comes to the motivating factors if it was only horniness that motivated men the incidence of rape would be much higher. Something else triggers men to do more than make fools of themselves in order to get laid, it’s going beyond that to use force to engage in sex with an unwilling person. These factors can’t be measured in precise percentages that would allow a quantification of ‘most’ but we can see that there is some triggering factor which does not occur in most men. It may be stupidity or sociopathy or sadism or intoxication or lust for power or even cultural norms but it can’t be merely ordinary sexual desire in a society that condemns it.
Rapes where the rapist is not known to the victim are relatively rare (that’s not to say it doesn’t happen). There’s a wealth of statistics to back this up and it would be blindingly obvious to those whose work (e.g. police, lawyers and judges) means they see a cross-section of rape cases going through the criminal justice system.
I honestly don’t know where the idea that rape is not about sex, but about power. I must admit I am highly skeptical that this is the case and I have never seen any evidence (as opposed to speculation) to back this claim.
If he “gets off” on the feeling of overpowering the victim, is “turned on” at the idea of forcing himself on somebody, then the crime is still about sex.
Even if it doesn’t matter for the perpetrator whether the victim is attractive or not, it doesn’t make it not about sex.
If it wasn’t about sex, then he wouldn’t feel the need to rape them, since being able to impose his will upon the victim in whatever way, would satisfy him. Penetration (or in general any sexual activity) could be a way, but anything else would do. He would be more likely to become a manager of the little tyrant kind to satisfy his needs (and perfectly legally on top of it).
I pulled out Pinker’s book. He does not make that insinuation. He does claim that targeting sexist attitudes might not be the best way of combating rape. Rape is inflicted by a minority of men. And its prevalence does relate to the degree and quality of the rule of law. So he focuses on that as well as on an evidenced based approach to crime reduction.
Not entirely serious I guess, but that potential contradiction leads to the actual point which is that maybe rape is about power not ‘sex’ (in the best sense) but consensual sex (in the practical sense) is also often about power, and also not just ‘sex’ (in the best sense).
And the latter goes both ways to a much greater extent than rape. Forcible rape of males by females is freakishly rare; it’s almost always the other way around or else homosexual. But consensual sex as a power game by females is not necessarily any less common than by males. That’s not to morally comparing the two things, just to say there’s some grain of truth in both 1) and 2). It’s not as total a contradiction as it seems.
Except in the case of a frat boy raping a passed out girl I would say that’s more cowardice than dominance. That goes for men who drug a woman to rape her as well.
I believe it was Steven Pinker who wrote (maybe he way quoting someone else) something to the effect of: “If rape is never about sex, that would make sex the only thing in the world that nobody is willing to use violence to obtain.”