hi ElJeffe, did you miss the part where she wanted to hear from people who had been to counselling AND the part where I said “In my case?”
and also “YMMV”?
I never claimed mine was a standard circumstance. I was simply responding to catsix’s request.
On what basis is it determined that rape is underreported in law enforcement data, rather than overreported in the victimization surveys?
Sorry, jarbabyj, I interpreted your last point as more generalization than personal experience. No disrespect was meant. Maybe I should go home and practice my reading comprehension skills. 
Jeff
No prob. I probably didn’t need to snap at you either.
And while we’re at it, what’s your point Cole? I’ve read your OP a few times and I’m not sure what we’re arguing.
Do you propose that legalized prostitution will lower rape rates?
Are you proposing that woman make rape too big a deal?
Are you proposing that you don’t like ‘fems’ ?
Or, and maybe this is it…are you proposing that rape is a crime of passion rather than violence?
I guess I’m just unclear on the “Debate”. Your OP seems more like a rant against ‘fems’.
It is obvious to me that the Fems must be silenced. It is in their very nature to be violent. I don’t care if big hands make her the one, the Violent Fems must not be allowed anywhere near my sheets.
Thanks to everyone who answered my questions.
I guess you could say that this is a topic I’ve thought about quite a lot in the last …damn, almost 4 years now.
Mine was a case of three guys who pulled my clothes off despite my punching, biting and kicking them anywhere I could find purchase and telling them ‘No’ in every way I could. One of those guys happened to be a ‘friend’ of mine whose couch I was sleeping on because I thought it was too late at night to walk home alone.
I never got counseling, never pressed charges, I just sort of healed. Lately I’ve been told by some people not on this board that I couldn’t possibly have healed, that rape makes a permanent victim and the best a person can do is have something sort of like a normal life after extensive therapy. I know there are people who therapy did wonders for, and I wanted to ask them why and how they feel rape is different from other violent crimes.
Because I’ve never felt that way, I want to understand other people’s POV.
Huerta88
You apparently have a different definition of violence than I and my state do. In my state, violent felonies don’t have to include actual violence (such as a beating or even a slap) , only the the threat of it - so that if I rob you at gunpoint, or while aided by another person, I’ve committed a violent felony, even if I didn’t touch you. If I lay on top of you pinning you down, so that I can take what I want, I’ve been violent, whether what I take from you is sex or your money.
And what exactly is wrong with this? I won’t deny for at least some rapists, (not all) lust is mixed in there somewhere, although it may be very hard to separate the lust from the power. But it’s never just about sex. At the minimum, it’s also about the rapist making someone do what he wants them to do, regardless of the victim’s feelings- even the date rapist.That’s a pretty good definition of “control”. I don’t believe this is true only of rapists. People who commit gunpoint robberies don’t just do it for the money. There are plenty of ways to steal more money or property, with less chance of doing a lot of prison time , that don’t involve sticking a gun in someone’s face. There’s a reason that gunpoint robbers don’t burglarize unoccupied homes, or steal cars, and it’s probably quite similar to the reason that rapists don’t simply keep looking to find someone willing to have sex with them or use prostitutes (not difficult to find even where prostitution is illegal).
Sorry, but to say that sex crimes are different for the victim than other assaults says nothing about the rapist’s motives, only about his effects. And physical injury is not the only effect that matters.Kidnapping, even with no injury,no sexual assault and no ransom has the same penalty in my state as an assault involving serious physical injury, and if a ransom is involved, kidnapping carries the same penalty as murder. Those penalties are pretty clearly based on something other than physical injury and “bad things related to sex are worse”.
Well, of course, catsix, we all know that people are very different-what helps for one might not for another.
That’s the only thing I could think of.
However, I think we need to find a way without going to either extreme:
Rape=sentence worse than death itself
Rape=no different than being mugged
Because neither is really true.
Interesting website there. I notice that South Korea has the highest rate of solved murder cases: 101.25%! I’m sure there is an explanation for this statistic, but it strikes me as odd that more murders are solved in Korea than take place. Maybe it means they’ve already got some of next year’s murders solved in advance?
A lot of this will be anecdotal, but I did live in Japan for more than 2 years, and have lived in Korea for more than 8 now.
Prostitution is more open in Korea than in most of the US, but it isn’t necessarily cheap. Quickies are available, but I hear they are about a hundred dollars, or a bit less if she really likes the guy. A lot of prostitution is in the form of “room salons,” which run several hundred dollars per visit, and sometimes into the thousands. (Again, so I hear.) Businessmen with expense accounts are the usual customers.
I’m less current on the situation in Japan. There are lots of thinly disguised advertisements for prostitution, but I would stop far short of saying that it’s “an accepted part of their culture.” It’s winked at, as it is in much of the world. And from what I recall about Japan, ain’t nothin’ cheap there.
About providing cites for unreported rapes, that request also strikes me as a bit odd. If a cite can be found, then those rapes were reported in one way or another. Estimates are the best we can do in such cases. The stereotype of the docile, servile Asian woman who never complains, while certainly disappearing, is not without some basis in reality. Women in Korea, and probably to a lesser extent in Japan, commonly endure workplace injustices that would be taken to court immediately in the US, for example. Progress is being made, but to a large extent, women here accept that life just isn’t fair to them, thanks in part to the teachings of Confucius. It isn’t hard to believe that many crimes against women, including rape, go unreported in these countries.
I have personally known four (that I can remember) Korean women who claim to have been raped, most by family members or friends of the family. Sure, it’s possible that they were lying or exaggerating, but though I’m a pretty skeptical person in general, I tend to believe most of these stories. To report such a crime would bring disgrace to the family, something that is almost unthinkable in this culture. Confucius, again. Dirty laundry is kept behind closed doors, to a much greater extent than in the US.
I know of one Korean woman who says that she became a bar hostess (in the grey area between waitress and prostitute) mostly because she had been raped, by a friend of her father. First, because a non-virgin, particularly a rape victim, is often still considered “damaged goods” here, and many men would never see her as anything else. Second, because it gives her a way to sort of get back at men in general–in the bar, though she has some abusive customers, she also has some power, and it’s easy for a pretty woman to take advantage of drunks with lots of cash.
Sex is supposed to be consensual, whether it’s a one-nighter or a lifetime. Any defense of non-consensual sex seems to me motivated by insecurity, fear of not being able to gain consent. My experience has been that if I’m nice to women, I don’t have to force them into bed.
There’s a huge cultural tangle on the subject of sex, which I’m sure won’t be a newsflash to anyone. A lot of it is tied up in madonna/whore attitudes towards women.
In some parts of the past, a woman who was raped was either considered “damaged goods” and thus worthless, or was considered the property of the rapist afterwards. There’s still a lot of cultural tangle in considering a woman’s worth as tangled up in her “virtue”, which makes for some really ugly psychological stuff and some incredible stupidities, like “Rape is a fate worse than death”. I do believe that that’s where that notion comes from; there are the somewhat related concepts that if someone is a “good girl/woman” than this sort of thing won’t happen.
I see comments distinguishing between being raped as a virgin and being raped as someone who has had a lover in the past, and can only see that as an echo of the baggage that says that a woman’s virginity is her most important trait. But then again, I know someone who was raped (as her first sexual experience) who considered her virginity given to her first lover.
Personally, I spent a lot of time unable/unwilling to talk about my own experiences with assault, because I just didn’t want to deal with people telling me I was Scarred For Life and Damaged Goods and all that fun stuff. I didn’t want to be Lilairen The Assault Victim for the rest of my life; I see rape and sexual assaults of all sorts being the sorts of things that seem to convert people into objects: case study, the victim. It’s part of the cultural ugliness around sex, as far as I’m concerned.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by doreen *
You apparently have a different definition of violence than I and my state do.
Probably. I suspect that a lot of the “Rape=Violence” rhetoric has relied on sub rosa re-definitions/expansions of what “violence” means. To a Marxist academic (a la many a law professor), any transaction between two persons not of exactly identical economic status could involve “violence.” To a really disaffected feminist, any sexual interaction is “violent” because men are physically stronger than women or have more economic power. Proudhon said (I think) “Property is theft.” Catchy saying, provocative concept, but a meaningless idea for most of us who are not Marxist academics or Proudhon. Similarly, I suggest that violence, to the man in the street, means something a lot like what I suggest, i.e., hitting, punching, kicking, strangling. And – as in my example – I submit that if “violence” were the only criterion, fratboy no. 2, who may have been somewhat violent by restraining Mary and, um, invading her personal space with his, um, body part, still was less quantitatively violent (qua violent) than fratboy no. 1, who was very violent when he hit Joe many, many times; yet we all agree in our reality that fratboy no. 2 is scum and far more evil than no. 1. And that he should face a long prison term. What, other than sex, explains that.
Here’s another example: Tom walks up to a strange woman and, without her consent, touches her shoulder. Dick walks up to a strange woman and, without her consent, touches her breast. Harry walks up to a strange woman, and, without her consent, touches her vagina. If you wish, substitute “pokes his finger forcefully into” for “touches.” Do we have any doubt that Tom, Dick, and Harry will each be punished in very different degrees for what is, on the surface, an identical nonconsensual touching (which, for the sake of argument, we’ll agree is ipso facto battery/“violent”)? Do we have any doubt that the punishment ought to be sterner for Harry? But if so, what, other than the sex/lust component, justifies treating three equally-violent crimes so differently? Unless you re-define violence to include the notion that sexual violence is “more violent” – which brings us back to square 1.
quote:
Sorry, but to say that sex crimes are different for the victim than other assaults says nothing about the rapist’s motives, only about his effects.
Both are to some degree probably true; the victim is an object of sexual desire, and sees herself as such afterwards, and suffers the associated guilt/pain/fear that are linked to bad sexual experiences in our culture. If the rapist hadn’t reached puberty, hadn’t begun to experience sexual desire for women, hadn’t had that desire twisted or thwarted or mis-channelled in some unhealthy way, do you honestly believe that violence alone would, in any large number of cases, motivate him to rape?
I don’t know that having a semantic debate over whether rape is “about” violence or sex-redefined-as-violence is helpful to women or men. I understand the ideological motivations for such a debate (no one likes or courts violence, some like or court sex, therefore characterizing rape as non-sex shifts the presumption in favor of the putative rape victim). Also not sure that courting status as a victim is a healthy trend. Pretty certain that classifying as rape things that are clearly, clearly not rape (“Any sexual attention that is unwanted . . . is a form of rape”) is a tactic that may yield short term gratification to would-be victims of mere mashers, but in the long term is horrible for women and men. Rape is serious because . . . it’s rape. Redefining or politicizing rape diminishes, and does not increase, the odds that serious sex crimes will be taken seriously. Society at large won’t likely continue to mete out very serious punishments for crimes that they don’t perceive as very serious; and rendering quasi-criminal “unwanted sexual attention” in a bar is not going to strike anything like a majority of the populace as being as serious as the Central Park attack.
There are. It’s called victims’ services (or something similar, depending on where you are) and when you report the crime, you’re set up with a counselor who works with you to deal with the system and your feelings about being stabbed, mugged, having the loved one murdered, etc.
From my point of view, one difference is that people tend to report things like stabbings, theft, murder, etc. And I do believe rape is underreported - so, the rape crisis lines may help those people who do not report rape, but still do need to talk about it.
My point of view, I used to be a volunteer for a rape counseling hotline. I got a lot of calls from people who I doubt were going to report, but still needed someone to talk to…so they called the line.
To respond to a later post of yours - I also got calls from women who were raped decades ago, and due to the culture of the time, couldn’t talk about it, never dealt with it, and now it was having a huge effect on them, still that doesn’t mean that every woman (or most women) need to have counselling, it’s just that some people who really could have used that kind of help couldn’t get it. I completely disagree with “rape makes a permanent victim and the best a person can do is have something sort of like a normal life after extensive therapy.” Everyone deals with things in their own way. And for some, it is extensive therapy - for some it’s internal, and for some it’s something in between. And the idea that all that’s left for someone who has been raped is a broken life is completely repugnant (and obviously untrue).
I believe what wring meant by “unable to achieve sexual gratification consensually” was not “unable to find a consenting partner” but rather “unable to enjoy sex if the partner is consenting”.
**
You are not the first man I’ve known to make comments like this, but it shocks me every time. Do you honestly believe that rape is merely physically unpleasant?
Vaginal penetration can sometimes be painful for a woman even when she is aroused, fully consenting, and her partner is showing the utmost consideration for her comfort. In cases where a woman is not aroused, not consenting, and the penetration is being performed by someone who cares nothing about her comfort…well…“not enjoyable” isn’t the term for it. I am lucky enough never to have been raped myself, but I know my vagina well enough to know with absolute certainty that were I in Mary’s situation I would be left torn, bloody, and in terrible pain for days. I am sure that for some women it would not be as physically bad as that, but I don’t think it would be the equivelant of a quick poke in the belly to anyone.
Uh, that’s not the world we live in. I suppose you may be posting froman alternate dimention, but in the world I live in fratboy no. 2 has little reason to worry about even being reported to the school, much less the police, and stands very little chance of ever being charged with anything at all.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lamia *
You are not the first man I’ve known to make comments like this, but it shocks me every time. Do you honestly believe that rape is merely physically unpleasant?
Actually, no. And that’s why I posted that scenario in my alternate-world hypothetical. In reality, I think forced sex falls along the contiuum of moderately to very, very physically unpleasant/painful, and almost uniformly mentally unpleasant/painful at the time and for awhile after.
And who says I am or am not a man?
Vaginal penetration can sometimes be painful for a woman even when she is aroused, fully consenting, and her partner is showing the utmost consideration for her comfort. In cases where a woman is not aroused, not consenting, and the penetration is being performed by someone who cares nothing about her comfort…well…“not enjoyable” isn’t the term for it. I am lucky enough never to have been raped myself, but I know my vagina well enough to know with absolute certainty that were I in Mary’s situation I would be left torn, bloody, and in terrible pain for days. I am sure that for some women it would not be as physically bad as that, but I don’t think it would be the equivelant of a quick poke in the belly to anyone.
Again, it’s a hypothetical. Not to get too graphic, but let’s assume fratboy no. 2 took every precaution that a caring inamorato would; heck, you can even hypothesize foreplay, Astroglide, whatever. The only difference is . . . he doesn’t have her consent. Now, that could happen (in hypothetical land, or even in an “acquaintance” situation), and Mary could come through not much more physically scathed than if she had been with her boyfriend – but no one, and I mean no one, would suggest that this exculpated fratboy no. 2, assuming lack of consent were shown. Can you even imagine his lawyer standing up and saying “Acquit him, because he’s suaver than Valentino, even when he’s raping, and he made a point of not leaving any physical damage?” Only in my (hypothetical) example would such an argument be plausible – and my whole point is that we all agree that my hypothetical leads to neither the morally right/comfortable result, nor the one that would actually take place in the case of an actual rape, with conceded lack of consent, but with no serious physical harm.
**Uh, that’s not the world we live in. I suppose you may be posting froman alternate dimention, but in the world I live in fratboy no. 2 has little reason to worry about even being reported to the school, much less the police, and stands very little chance of ever being charged with anything at all. **
I noted before that there does seem to be a faction, especially at the academic level, that has a lot emotionally invested, for some reason, in believing that scads of men are overtly raping women in great numbers, with impunity. That’s kind of a weird thing to want to think. I submit that they aren’t, at least not in the more civilized parts of the world, and that the Let’s Go crowd (thankfully for all of us) probably needn’t be printing their rape crisis numbers quite so prominently. Still, I shouldn’t probably have used a frat scenario, as it opened the door to claiming that Mary suffered date rape, that date rape is vastly underreported, that colleges love date rape and encourage its perpetrators so as to foster the football program, whatever.
I still believe fratboy no. 2 is looking at a lot better chance of career-inhibiting jail time or scandal than no. 1. The scenario you posit, where fratboy no. 2 is unjustly spared lethal injection, turns not on whether his rape of Mary is bad or not, but on whether it was rape at all – i.e., any dispute would turn on consent (they were drunk, Mary went up to his room voluntarily, he claims she wanted to put out) and not the issue of what quantum of violence he’d inflicted on Mary, and whether that was appropriate. In my hypothesis, it’s taken as established (both in the alternate and real world) that Mary did not consent, did not lead him on, did not intend to have sex; heck, he admits what happened, just as does fratboy no. 1 (admittedly, things aren’t as neat in the real world, but the point was to argue the clear fallacy of Rape=Violence Only, not the murky question of “What is effective consent as between drunken adolescents?”).
But take, if you prefer, my Tom, Dick, and Harry example. Or an example of a rapist who leaps out of the bushes (so there’s no issue about lack of consent at all), and has his way with the lady jogger, but (again) in the most gentle way possible, one that leaves her with physical injuries that are minimal compared to those of a male jogger whom the rapist (also a mugger) attacked ten minutes ago, bashing him about the head. I’m still betting we’d all think rapist’s attack on the woman was much more heinous. We always have done so, and pretending to evaluate rape as only a violent crime, or a non-sex crime, only leads to hypocrisy, IMHO.
The reality is, sexuality is very different from other human interaction, and I don’t think the emotional weight of it is simply cultural. We are mammals after all, and mammals seem singularly obsessed with and consumed with strange sexual ritual and behavior. Plus, being sexually abused as a child, even once, has WAY more of an impact than being beaten once or twice. It can screw up your feelings about sex for decades, regardless of whether or not anyone harries you about it. So I don’t think sex crimes really can be treated quite like other violent or coercive acts.
That said, I don’t know any rapists, so I can’t speak to whether it’s about sex or power. Probably both, and probably there’s a wide variation among rapists. I have no doubt that many if not most feminist theorists and feminist intellectuals have gone way overboard at various points in their explication of rape, and just about anything that gets into that excreble realm in academia known as “theory” (note: has nothing to do with “theory” in science or even “theory” in philosophy). I also have no doubt that if not for that movement, a truly shocking number of horrid injustices would have continued to go largely uncovered.
Side note: did you know that male orangutans greet each other by exchanging penis yanks?
The debate has, unsurprisingly failed to reveal anyone who advocates rape or its tolerance, and no one’s contested the suffering of actual rape victims. So we all agree forced sex that is clearly without consent is really bad (why society believes this you can continue to dispute, but fortunately it does) and ought to be punished and we ought to do whatever we can to eliminate rape.
The rest is as Apos points out, theory, which usually ends up being (a) academic wankery for wankery’s sake, or, worse, driven by some agenda. The agendas behind various theories of rape range at the extreme from vilifying all men as rapists, to an understandable (but still special-pleading) attempt to enshrine rape as “more” heinous or criminal or blameworthy (and its victims more deserving of sympathy/compensation/whatever) than we already think they are. This isn’t the only realm in which people seem to perversely compete to be a worse victim than the guy down the block (think of the surreal genocide debates, when “winning” constitutes proving that more of your people were wiped out, or were wiped out for a more invidious motive, than the other guy). It’s also an area where criminological policy tends to get especially mixed up with dogma and with crime victims’ demands to have their particular “stories”/sufferings acknowledged and “validated.” Which complicates things even further because as we’ve discussed, most of the public, most lawmakers, probably feel a more visceral reaction to a rape anecdote than to a barroom brawl anecdote or mugging anecdote, and are more likely to let this horror/desire to avenge the victim influence policy – which can bollix things up in a criminal justice system that we claim turns in part on a dispassionate desire to vindicate society’s interests, and not the vengeance/virtue of a wronged individual only.
Anti rape laws, biological or sociological theories of rape, and rape victims’ own experiences, all have their place, and should be given a fair hearing; but conflating the three distinct categories doesn’t necessarily conduce to illuminating discussion.
You are apparently under the impression that statements of the type “Rape is about violence and control” refer to a conscious motive on the part of the rapist. They do not. But to say that rape is only about sex implies that any man, when sufficiently horny, might become a rapist . I don’t think that badly about men.
About criminals not caring about controlling victims - sure the criminal wants money or goods.And they make choices in how to get it. The first choice is not to get it legitimately, but that’s not the last choice. Why does one criminal choose to stick a gun in someone’s face, while another steals cars, or one burglarizes empty houses, while another does home invasions? Because some want to see fear, and others just want the money.
No, I don’t think a large number of rapes are motivated by violence without sex entangled somewhere (although some are). But you’re at least partially conceding the point here. In what way is the desire twisted, thwarted or mischanneled , that doesn’t have to do with power, domination or control?
The crimes may be equally violent . But they do not have equivalent effects on the victim, and that is also a component that is used to justify punishment, whether sex is involved or not. If I am kidnaped and held for three days with no rape and no injury, my kidnapper is punished more harshly than a man who punches me in the face. If someone steals $5000 worth of property from my store, he is punished more harshly than if he stole $20 worth, and the man who stole $2 from me at gunpoint is punished more harshly than either. You are mixing the effects on the victim, which very much have to do with the sexual nature of the crime with the motives of the rapist - which may have little or nothing to do with sex as sex.
Nobody’s going to say that “unwanted sexual attention” in a bar is the equivalent of the Central Park attack. But that doesn’t mean that “unwanted sexual attention” should never be a crime, in any of it’s variations . Certainly, some shouldn’t be criminal- those that stop quickly, but equally certainly, some should be criminal- those instances that become stalking. The fact that a punch leading to a bloody nose isn’t at serious as murder doesn’t make the punch not criminal.
**
I think the odds are pretty good that you either are or are not a man. If you’d like to make some specific claim about your sex or gender then please go ahead.
**
As has been pointed out by others, no violent crime is judged solely on the extent of the physical injuries suffered by the victim. Rape is not unique in this regard. Even if it were, I don’t know what difference it would make to your argument. Perhaps that is because I am not sure what the point of your argument is meant to be. You have thrown out a lot of statements, claims, questions, and examples, but no clear thesis. What is the case you are trying to make? That rapists are motivated by sexual desire? That certain groups have exploited fear of rape for their own agenda? That rape victims should stop whining unless they were seriously physically injured? Looking back over your posts I must say that they resemble nothing more than stream-of-consciousness rambling on the general subject of rape. If you’ve got a point then don’t hide your light under a bushel any longer. Put it out here in plain English for all to see.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Huerta88 *
**
As someone has already kinda said (it may have even been you, Huerta88, I don’t remember at this point), when people talk about rape being about power, not sex it’s a statement about the invalidity of the “I couldn’t help myself” rape defense. This defense implies that the need for sex is so great, that people can be driven to violence without it. What I said about masturbation was meant to demonstrate that, even if simple horniness could drive someone to perpetrate violence, since the human body cannot tell the difference between an orgasm achieved through masturbation and an orgasm achieved through sex with another person, rapists still choose to be rapists by committing violence against another person instead of finishing themselves off manually.
Justhink, I’d like to respond to some of the things you said, but I can’t find one intelligible idea in any of your posts.