I doubt you can come up with a situation where my semantic description doesn’t apply to rape. Like your one about the soldiers raping the women. It’s still about sexual dominance. Conquering another tribe is about dominance. Back in the day they used to kill the men and take the women to expand the tribe.
True, but I don’t think a 21 year old teacher sleeping with a 17 year old student is rape.
Or about profit. Or about hatred. Or just about getting sex. The rape-is-always-about-power claim is purely ideological, and denies reality.
Power is always a part of the dynamic, so is sex. Profit is about power, you gain power relative to the power of your investment. Getting sex when someone else doesn’t want to give it to you is about having power over someone to get what you want whether they want to or not. Hatred is about imposing your power on someone else.
Regardless there is no dynamic you can point to where having ‘Power Over’, isn’t a part of the relationship.
I think the ‘rape isn’t about sex’ meme overgeneralizes, but is useful in every case where people look at the suspect and the victim and say something along the lines of ‘Who would want to rape her? She’s so ugly!’ or ‘Why would he need to rape someone? He can have sex with any woman he wants!’
Just the thought I was having. A person in his 20’s who rapes old age pensioners surely cannot be doing it for the sexual aspect?
why?
I’ll admit that my doubt is only borne from personal incredulity, because I can’t relate to anyone who gets sexually aroused enough to want to rape the average pensioner I have encountered. I just find it more believable that it is a “power kick”, rather than a sexual one, that they are getting.
Me neither, which is why I included and worded it as such. I wanted something as far from assault-rape as possible that still carries the social label of “rape”, even if oft’ modified with “statutory”.
He certainly could. There are people with a fetish for old women.
Well my argument essentially is that they are not mutually exclusive.
I could never make the death penalty an option for serial rapists/pedophiles for the simple reason that it would give them an incentive to not only sexually abuse their victims but to kill them to avoid being caught.
Also, it’s obviously a pathology at play for both offenses. These people are mentally h ill, which is not to say they should be coddled, medicated and released- far from (in fact I think killing a would be rapist or child molester is justifiable homicide). The surgical or chemical castration followed by therapy and electronically monitoring is the only way I would be in favor of their release ever as otherwise they’re probably not going to stop until they’re too frail or too dead to assault again.
So if rape IS about sex (either exclusively or mostly), is a male molester whose victims are boys necessarily homosexual or bisexual? (I’ll leave the related questions that would bring up to other threads.)
Yes, I would say so. Though the whole sexuality thing as identity has always struck me as rather hoaky. I’ve had sex with both genders, but I much prefer women.
If they’re, say, 15… well, probably.
If they’re, say, 5, I would simply say the molester is a pedophile. I assume one word could be made up for pedophiles solely attracted to little boys, but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve, apart maybe in scientific studies. On the other hand, using the word homosexual to refer to both people attracted by adults of the same sex and people attracted to little boys would be seriously lacking. Each time someone would mention “I’m homosexual” (people ra
If they’re, say, 15… well, probably.
If they’re, say, 5, I would simply say the molester is a pedophile. I assume one word could be made up for pedophiles solely attracted to little boys, but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve, apart maybe in scientific studies. There are much more reasons why a specific word is needed to tell apart people attracted to children from people attracted to adults than reasons why a specific word would be needed to tell apart the subsets of these categories. Even though it could cause some confusion or occasionally disappointment we could get rid more easily of the homosexual/heterosexual distinction than of the pedophile/non-pedophile distinction.
Life with parole is really life with the possibility of parole, it is not the guarantee of parole. If the parole board hears his case and each time decides not to grant parole, this is not the same as the killer getting life without parole, with no possiblity of ever getting out.
So a guy rapes an eight year old. He thinks “If this person testifies against me, I’ll get the same sentence as a killer, life in prison with no parole. But if I kill this person, they cannot testify against me. If I get convicted for the killing, I’ll get life without parole. But without their testimony, there’s a chance I’ll get off.”
If that isn’t an incentive for a rapist to murder their victim, I don’t know what is.
That is ridiculous. Cite me an example of a case where the guilty party was convicted solely on the evidence of a child witness. No DNA, no fingerprints, nothing but the testimony of the 8 year old victim.
It doesn’t matter a whit what you personally think is or isn’t rape. What matters is what the law considers to be rape.
To those who call for castration: I had thought that civilized societies had abandoned maiming as a punishment. But if you want to bring it back, let’s bring it back for all the other crimes, too. Let’s tattoo a big “A” on the forehead of adulterers, lop off the hands of thieves, flog disruptive students with a cat-o’-nine-tails, etc.
Or society can provide assistance to the victim and incarcerate the perpetrator. If the perpetrator is no longer a risk to society and has met the requirement for parole, then a monitored parole should be in order. I’m guessing someone who’s convicted as a serial rapist of children won’t ever qualify for parole, though.