Errmm, it’s MrDibble, no second “R”.
And for those who asked: rape is rape, here, same as in the US. The guys doing the gang-raping aren’t just working under a different assumption of what constitutes OK sex. They’re actively seizing women, and taking turns raping them for hours. This is not mutually drunken sex. Yes, often they do this under the influence of speed, but we all know that’s no excuse.
I’d really like to know how they defined ‘rape’ in the survey, too. Not because I’m going to get into some horrible disussion about whether date rape really counts as rape, but because the BBC report (which is the same one on every other website) uses ‘coercing someone into sex’ and ‘rape’ almost interchangeably.
Coercing someone into sex is reprehensible, but no, I wouldn’t say it’s rape - or, at least, not necessarily; if you take coercing to include ‘holding someone at gunpoint till they do what you say, or otherwise seriously threatening them,’ then it’s rape; if it’s limited to saying ‘go on baby, we haven’t done it for so long and I’m about to explode!’ or even ‘you do love me, don’t you? Why won’t you have sex with me?’ then it’s not rape. Wrong, but not all wrong sex is rape.
Thanks for the perspective.
It’s still pretty shocking that even one region of any country can have as many as four men admitting to rape, depending on what they understand by rape.
Well, the questions asked in that survey are inarguably clear. How can anyone say that that survey’s using a casual definition of rape?
1 in 6 doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, going on my purely anecdotal personal experience. Obviously, that doesn’t mean 1 in 6 men are rapists; 1 man might rape 10 women. That includes date rape, but if anyone says date rape doesn’t count as rape then, frankly … actually, I don’t know what I’d call the kind of bastard who’d say that. It’d be like saying that having your face slashed in by a friend with a knife was better than having it smacked to pieces by a stranger with a hammer. They’re different, but either way you’ve still got a broken face. Oh, but it was done by a friend, and you met with him willingly, so it doesn’t count.
OK, so I did succumb to the sub-discussion about whether date rape really was rape.
FWIW, if the survey’s correct, this probably doesn’t help:
According to theGuardian:
Before his election as president, Jacob Zuma stood trial for the rape of a family friend. His supporters demonstrated at the court house, verbally attacked his accuser and sang “burn the bitch, burn the bitch”. Zuma was eventually acquitted.
Thing is, there’s situations where language fails. For example, let’s say I want to have sex with a guy (not “am willing to,” which sort’a sounds like “well… ok…”, but I wannaaaaaaa) but I want it to be either oral or vaginal, I’m not interested in anal. If he makes me have anal (and the only way I could avoid it was by finding a heavy, blunt object and applying it against his skull) - is it rape? It isn’t a consensual act…
I always find the quibbling about “was it really rape” in these sorts of threads to be very disturbing. What kind of asshole wants his partner to later describe her experience with him as rape - even if it was more of a “non violent, non threatening misunderstanding that involved some alcohol.” If she later describes her sexual experience with you to her girlfriends as ‘rape’ - has that really been a successful sexual encounter?
It seems to me that a lot of men and some women really want to downplay rape surveys by blaming women for calling ‘regrettable’ sex rape. I agree that there is some blame to be taken there - but there was a guy involved in sex so bad or entered into with so many reservations that the woman in question is willing to describe it as rape. That seems to be a problem as well. Since I doubt these women were begging for it, then decided to report on the survey that it was rape because they only came three times.
IME, the same kind of guy who thinks it’s a matter of pride to “leave her so sore she can’t walk right for three days.” But who can’t understand why she doesn’t want to have sex again for three nights (or even for ever)…
Or it could be that regrettable sex and rape are entirely separate words with separate meanings and this is a website dedicated to fighting ignorance not dedicated to promoting feminist propaganda.
The Weird One’s survey used a definition of rape that I think most people would consider to be a very reasonable definition of rape, and as such I’d run with the data from that report. Surveys which included regrettable sex or getting felt up on the bus as “rape”, I’d say that that’s simple propaganda. That doesn’t mean that feeling up an unsuspecting woman on the bus is a good or allowable thing. It just means it’s not rape by any reasonable person’s definition.
This has nothing to do with “downplaying” or “justifying” or any other sort of odd motive beyond the desire to make sure that one is getting accurate data.
I think that the data that reports this many woman describing themselves as having been raped is disturbing and problematic and points to a huge issue - perhaps not the same issue the researchers are going for - but a huge issue that gets lost in excuses about how we treat each other before and after sex and at what point lines are crossed.
I’m not saying this as feminist propaganda - I’m saying this as “what in the hell is wrong with us that even with a very loose definition of rape we could come up with numbers like this!”
Oh no, definitely it is disturbing. I’m still digesting that it’s actually that high using a real definition of rape.
I have to wonder if it’s an effect of date rape drugs becoming available? I’d also probably be interested in looking to see how random their sample was and/or how much the values are linked to income of the woman or her parents.
It isn’t always the woman taking the survey who describe it as rape. Often it is the organization putting together the survey, or at least the press release describing the results of the survey.
I have never seen anyone without an agenda describe sex after drinking too much, or sex with a boyfriend because he threatened to dump you, as “rape”. And it seems problematic to describe someone as a “rapist” if the "victim’ then goes on to have consensual sex with him on later occasions.
That kind of overly broad definition of rape creates problems, as seen even in this thread. I don’t know, for example, if the rape defined in the South Africa survey is coerced sex or regrettable sex or even something else. And that creates the temptation to dismiss the notion of 1 in 4 South Africans being rapists for the same reason that I dismiss the notion that 1 in 4 men on the average college campus is a rapist.
Because the feminist notion that “rape” is “any sex without a notarized release on file in the DA’s office” is used to push an agenda, not to say anything real about the relations of men and women (sorry, womyn) on college campuses.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, that is rape.
Reading through The Weird One’s survey, it looks like they called random numbers around the nation, so the sampling is definitely good. They didn’t take demographic data beyond ethnicity, though.
I notice that the survey is 11 years old, so it’s possibly not the best indicator of how things currently stand. The crime rate has been steadily lowering over the last few decades due to the three strikes law, and I’d venture to guess that there’s an intersection of the guys who rip off liquor stores and the guys who rape their girlfriend. Of course, most rape happens to teens and college students, so the kinds of guys who would be dating those women would probably be too young to get their third strike. So perhaps there is no change.
Well, a lot of these surveys don’t say rape. Often, they say sexual assault which can encompass a lot of things that are almost as upsetting as rape like attempted rape.
The survey methodology often does leave something to be desired - particularly that early 80s survey methodology from the “all sex is rape” school of feminism. But regardless of the methodology, the fact that there are that many women out there that have even just less than positive experiences with sex is stunning.
I’m a date rape victim myself - and not a rape victim by a lot of definitions (I did not consent, there was coercion, and I was held down and said no. But I knew my rapist, continued to have a ‘relationship’ with him (he was my boss and I would get fired if I complained) and I didn’t try and fight him off. If you ask him, I had reluctant and perhaps now regretted sex (I think he might think I came to regret it when his ass got walked out the door for sexual harassment). But at the time, I am 100% sure he thought it was ‘sex play.’ If you ask me, I was raped.
God, now we’re getting bogged down even more into what constitutes rape.
It matters whether the survey in question was specific about what they were asking to get this result for the number of men who rape. That’s how much the definition of rape matters for this thread.
Does anyone else think it’s weird that a thread about rapists has turned into a thread about whether people really were raped, questioning the victims’ reports when the original survey was of the perpetrators, not the victims?
Didn’t you look at The Weird One’s link? (That was the one about women reporting rape, not the original South African one, just in case that’s not clear at this stage in the thread). That wasn’t a loose definition of rape - it was phrased in an admirably clear way.
I know many people whose label for it is “a bad lay.”
Those are people I’d want to stay far away from.
ETA: And Dangerosa, I don’t know any other word but rape to describe what happened to you. Very sorry that you had to experience that.
Were they pitching or catching? If you don’t think it’s rape when it happens to you, maybe it isn’t. I was speaking in a general sense, and thought you were as well.
To me, sexual intercourse without consent is, by definition, forced sexual intercourse, and therefore rape.
Which raises an interesting question. If you experience something but don’t mind it or tolerate it, but legally it’s considered rape, were you still raped?
If you don’t mind it, I would assume you have given tacit consent. I am also going to assume that in cases where the alleged victim was conscious and in full possession of her faculties, if she didn’t say “No” then the rape would be very difficult to prosecute. I could be wrong.
Well, I’m thinking of Nava’s example with the person who gave consent to vaginal/oral but not anal, and then were basically forced.
Or there was a thread about a woman in a coma in the hospital whose husband had sex with her. A lot of people thought the idea of accusing him of rape was offensive because they were married (which frightens the hell out of me, but whatever) but in that case, is it rape? Like, the hypothetical woman wakes up, is told that her husband had sex with her, and she’s all, “Well, I never said he could but I don’t feel like I was violated” is it any less rape? I guess I’d still see that as rape myself because the rapist had no way of knowing that there was consent at the time.