Unless there is a complainant, practically speaking there is no rape. It may fit the legal definition, but it would never be prosecuted.
I suppose in cases of diminished mental capacity, the state can act as the complainant. But if the woman is capable of understanding the situation and says she wasn’t raped by her husband, she wasn’t. Why would she be? Just because explicit consent wasn’t given doesn’t mean it was against her will. She has to say it was against her will.
If she wakes up and says it was rape, that’s a different story.
A lot of things work this way. If you steal my car and I never accuse you of it, even though I had the opportunity, did you steal it? Perhaps. But what prosecutor would pursue the case, when all the defense has to do is ask me if you stole it, knowing I would say “no”?
If you don’t mind or tolerate it, then it’s probably not rape. (Presuming you’re an adult). However, if you ‘don’t mind or tolerate’ a sex act because the alternative is something even worse, then it’s rape.
But, aargh, I keep getting drawn into these discussions of what’s rape and what’s not - but they’re all still focusing on the victim being truthful or not, and that, to me, is distasteful in a thread that was about men admitting to rape. I know threads go off on tangents, but could someone (not me, sorry) possibly start a new thread on the subject of defining what ‘rape’ means?
That form of feminism is outdated and is being replaced by third-wave feminism, which has a much more sex-positive view.
I once had sex with someone because, to make a long story short, he was very insistent, I was alone in his apartment, and I thought he might try to force me if I refused. I didn’t know that he would, but I thought it was a strong possibility. I certainly could’ve said no, and maybe he wouldn’t have tried to rape me, but I chose to just go ahead and have consensual sex with him instead. I don’t think I was raped, I don’t feel I was raped, and the only lasting effect it had was teaching me to avoid that kind of situation. And yet, when the choice is between consenting to sex that you don’t want to have or risking forcible rape, you’re likely to make a different choice than you would’ve otherwise. I think it enters a gray area that should not be defined as rape, but may have a similar psychological effect for some women. Unfortunately, we don’t have a word for that kind of unwilling-consensual sex, which makes it difficult to discuss and contributes strongly to these arguments and misunderstandings over what constitutes rape.
And yet, in threads like this, I am told I wasn’t raped. And what did happen to me wouldn’t have been prosecutable as anything other than sexual harassment (which I did get the bugger for).
People think of rape as something violent - but I had a “relationship” (coerced, but a relationship) with my rapist for another three months - and at no time did he see what he was doing as rape, or for that matter sexual harassment - even though I used those words TO HIM many times. I’m a ‘pretty little thing’ who just didn’t know what I wanted. I am told, by the corporate psychologist that handled his case, that even walking out the door he didn’t think he did anything wrong.
So I’m always a little touchy on these “well, I wonder if it was REALLY rape threads.” I was a women’s studies minor through the mid-80s - and I’ll acknowledge that second wave feminists had some screwy ideas on sex and rape - unfortunately the tides have, I believe, turned, but these discussions always come back to mistakes they made (see Shodan’s posts)
The underlying cause of current malignant behaviour–including rape–is not the past. It’s current malignant choices. The past is not an explanation, nor a justification.
That’s my point. I understand that we disagree on this. To my way of thinking, attempting to explain current bad behaviour on (completely unrelated) past events is not only inaccurate; it’s part of the problem because it promotes an excuse for the rapist…“I am a product of my past and that’s why I’m raping women…”
The underlying cause of rape is rapists. The underlying cause of rapists is…personal choice to rape.
If that was true, there would be no difference in rape numbers from country to country, from culture to culture, from historical period to historical period, or even from man to man. Clearly that’s wrong. Human behavior, including rape tends to have a reason for it. Either genetic or experiential, and if the men in a particular place and time are more likely to rape than others, the latter is indicated. And if you want to stop it, figuring out the cause and getting rid of it is the obvious thing to do.
Hence my view that you are far more interested in expressing outrage than in actually stopping the practice. When some significant number of admitted rapists note that they began their depredations in their early teens–often as young as the age of ten–then there is clearly a social component to their behavior. The typical ten-year-old might think girls are “yucky,” but he does not entertain thoughts of forcing himself on them, sexually. That requires that he be taught both that such behavior is acceptable and that such behavior is even possible. It requires that there be a societal situation in which other older males will explain, demonstrate, and encourage such behavior and that a significant number of adults of both sexes will not condemn the same behavior. Simply muttering that rapists are the evulll will not actually change the situation while pointing out that such societal toleration actually exists and is, indeed, evil just might.
In the late 1960s, drivers in the U.S.–nearly 70% of whom were under the influence of alcohol–were killing roughly 50,000 of themselves and their fellow citizens in car wrecks each year. The attitude in the country at that time was generally that getting drunk was not a brilliant idea, but that most people who hoisted a few after work or had a few too many at a party managed to make it home all right and that the resulting death toll was merely an unfortunate by-product of a society that relied on automobiles for transportation while recognizing that Prohibition was a failed movement. Then, in the mid-1970s, a different movement sprang up, (or finally got large enough to be recognized within the larger society), that offered a different viewpoint, one that said that while Prohibition might have failed and we might rely very heavily on cars for transport, there was still no reason to tolerate going around killing people just because we were so stupid as to drive drunk. It took quite a few years for the movement to catch on, but eventually the general attitude of society changed, followed by tougher enforcement of existing laws, personal condemnations of people driving drunk, provision for alternative behaviors, (designated drivers, surrendering keys at the beginning of parties, etc.), so that today, after an increase of over 80% in population, we have still reduced the number of auto deaths by about 10,000 a year of which only around 50% are the result of drunken driving.
Harrumphing that drunken drivers are solely responsible for the personal decision to drive drunk did not make any changes in the situation–recognizing that one mindset throughout society existed and that that mindset needed to be changed did change the situation.
This is pretty much par for the course. I wonder, though, if it’s easier to accept rape statistics in South Africa. It’s a bit like imagining all rape as done by strangers in an alley – if you concede that it’s more likely to happen in a dorm room or a suburban bedroom than a city street, by and to people ‘just like you,’ you can’t protect yourself by avoiding dark alleys at night and you can’t think of rape victims or rapists as something other that you’ll never encounter.
I was speaking in a general sense but it’s based on personal experience. The people in those situations who were pitching (if I understand it correctly, baseball ain’t my game) called it “c’mon, honey, you just need to get used to it” or the local-language equivalent of “stop being such a square;” the people who were catching and who called it a “bad lay” did so because calling it rape would, for them, imply calling the cops (not “just” breaking up the relationship, not “just” trying to explain to your attacker that “when I say no it means no, I don’t do ‘coy’ and this is life, not a bodice ripper or a porn movie”) - but if you do that… what will happen? You get called a whore, you’re told that as soon as you consented to something, anything, you consented to everything.
If you really don’t mind, then it’s not rape. Consensual BDSM is not rape. But if you’ve said “no,” “stop,” “that hurts, stop!” - then yes, I agree with you that it’s rape. Bloody hard to prove, though. (And being able to keep the RP aspect of BDSM while also having a way to say no is why BDSM includes “safe words”)
See, and it seems to me you are far more interested in minimizing personal responsibility by providing external reasons for malignant behaviour than you are in stopping the practice.
What changed the behaviour around drunk driving was enacting laws which held drunk drivers personally accountable and prosecuted them for it.
Society always recognized that drunk driving was wrong. Every knew it was not acceptable. What was recognized was that we should no longer make excuses for the then-current status quo based on some sort of drivel that it had always been that way, or that drunk drivers were somehow simply caught up in societal norms or any other substitute for personal responsibility.
And that’s the reason for my rant against the good professor. Well-intentioned pap providing explanations (and, in my opinion, incorrect ones) simply enable the status quo and distract from the solution: “This behaviour is wrong. This is not a product of your past and there is no acceptable ameliorating explanation for it, nor will we be excusing it in any way.”
Now if you are arguing that the problem is that current society in SA tolerates/condones/promotes rape as culturally acceptable, well that’s a different story. I have a pretty dim view of such a society, but that’s not the part of the professor’s comments about which I complained. I complained about promoting the notion that the “incredibly disturbed past…etc etc” somehow ameliorates current behaviour or norms. I am unenamored with the notion that we’re rapists now because we’ve “been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men…” We are rapists now because we are rapists now.
The use of the passive–“been socialised”–as opposed to the active–“created a society”–is very problematic if you want to change the status quo.
You want drunks off the road? Assign them personal responsibility for drinking and driving and remove any excuse that they’ve “been socialised” into it because daddy was a drinker too.
Think about this rationally, guys. If 100% of the male population were rapists, how many of them would admit it? Likely less than 1/4, right? The story seems bogus to me.
Why? There does not seem to be much local distrust of the numbers reported…no particular outrage over a “bogus” survey. If anything, seems to me there was a common perception the numbers were under-reported. Perhaps your own incredulity results from living in a more civilized cohort.
“I think that yes, the figures are that high and for us, for me in particular, that is a very sad state of affairs. It means that we continue in South Africa to be one of the highest capitals of rape in the world. I don’t think it’s cultural per se; I think it has to do with how a lot of us men worldwide were raised”
Absolutely wrong. The typical reaction to being caught drunk driving, outside a specific case of fatal accidents, was that nearly everyone did it and it was just an unfortunate incident. Even in the case of fatalities, the common expression was that the perp should not have his life “ruined” with a court judgment on top of carrying the guilt of the deaths. Sure, there was more call for personal responsibility: it came in the way of social attitudes toward drunk driving changing so that cops stopped sending drunks home with a caution to be careful if they lived close enough to where they were stopped, judges stopped letting drunk drivers off with warnings and probations when they actually were arrested, and people began to go out of their way to condemn drunk driving, in general.
The changes regarding the attitudes toward personal responsibility were changes to the societal views. “Society always recognized that drunk driving was wrong?” Not hardly. That is a new attitude that was propagated across society between 1975 and 1990. There was a recognition prior to that that accidents caused problems and alcohol was included in traffic laws as a sort of well, we ought to adderess this situation, but there was no general belief permeating society that drunk driving should be considered a criminal act. That is the attitude that had to change so that cops and judges would do their jobs and so that citizens would take acticve steps to avoid driving drunk or permitting their friends to drive drunk. Ultimately it is a personal responsibility, of course, but without the weight of societal opinion to get people to consider their actions, the factors that lead to specific choices differ. Even your “changed the laws” action that you think magically brought about a recognition of personal responsibility came about only after there was a change in the attitudes of society to pressure legislatures to make those changes in laws.
And that reaction really scares me. It’s pretty horrifying to think that what happened is anything less than rape.
I think that’s where it gets ambiguous. I’ve read of cases where the person just went along with it because of an implicit threat of violence, not because they actually wanted to have sex.
:dubious: Date rape is horrible. It is also often violent, even if it doesn’t involve a beating. It may be easier or harder to cope with than stranger rape, depending on the individual and the circumstances, but it’s not a lesser kind of rape that we can feel relatively at-ease with.
The problem with that scenario is that it’s quite possible that the “implicit threat of violence” was never anything but misinterpretation on the part of the victim. It’s about the only scenario I can think of where the victim really could be to blame, since it would be quite possible for a man to rape such a woman and never realize it. You can’t really hold someone responsible for not being a telepath.
Well, I’m thinking of one case (I don’t remember the name, but it’s in the book Real Rape), where a man and a woman meet at a bar and she drives him back to his place. She doesn’t want to come up but he takes the keys from her and basically refuses to give them back so she goes up with him. Later, he puts his hands on her neck (his defense is that it was a gesture of affection, she contended that she saw it as a threat), and she ended up going along with the sex because she was afraid it was a threat of violence. But in this case he basically bullied her into coming upstairs–he had to have known that she didn’t really want to be there to begin with.
That’s assholish behavior though *, not even implied violent behavior. Certainly he deserves the blame for essentially extorting her into his apartment, but there’s no “implied threat of violence” there.
I would consider “have sex with me or you don’t get your keys back” to be rape; just not a threat of violence. And she really should just have called the cops or at least threatened to if he wouldn’t give them back; that’s theft.