Just figured I’d pop in with a reminder that women can and do commit rape. It won’t do to chalk the phenomenon of rape up to the male libido.
Great cite, Colibri – the quick Googling I was doing was mostly chalking the power dynamic theory of rape up to Brownmiller, so it’s useful to see an earlier reference.
As to the OP directly, you say you don’t want to debate the merits of the “idea” yet you allege that it is counter-intuitive and suggest that it requires a great deal of supporting evidence because of that counter-intuitiveness. Explain to me what is so counter-intuitive about the idea that forcing sex on someone is about domination. This seems like a fairly intuitive idea to me.
Yes. In 1979, Nicholas Groth published Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender. After interviewing 500 rapists, Groth created a five-fold motivational typology for rapists:
Power Reassurance: offender behaviors that suggest an underlying lack of confidence and inadequacy, or belief that the offense is consensual, expressed through minimal force and low confidence; Power Assertive: offender behaviors that suggest an underlying lack of confidence and inadequacy, expressed through a need for control, mastery, and humiliation of the victim, while demonstrating authority; Anger Retaliatory: offender behaviors that suggest a great deal of rage, either towards a specific person, group, institution or a symbol of either; Sadistic: offender behaviors that suggest that the offender gets sexual gratification from victim pain and suffering; Opportunistic: offender behaviors that suggest an offender who is out to satisfy immediate sexual impulses.
I suppose you can make an argument that sadistic and opportunistic rapists are really just about the sex, but I don’t think that’s an argument that Groth himself would really agree with, based on his quotes in this article.
Maybe the mantra should be ‘Rape is not motivated by sex but by violence’.
Are there any studies of prison rape from before the 70’s, and did they draw conclusions that the rape was used for domination and intimidation more than for sexual relief?
No one ever said that rape isn’t in any way about domination. What was posted is that “the motivation for rape has nothing to do with sex, that it’s all about power, domination, humiliation, or some other non-sexual motivation”.
If you need it explained to you why it is counterintuitive that a sexual act has nothing to do with sexual desires then you will need to find another teacher. It’s so painfully obvious that I don’t know how to more clearly explain it. Almost all crimes involve domination, but it would be counterintuitive to suggest the motivation for bank robbery was primarily about domination. In the same way everyone here acknowledges that rape involves domination, but it is counterintuitive to suggest the motivation for a sexual act is not primarily about sexual gratification.
This assumes that the rapists were fully aware of their own deep motivations, and would admit to them. This may not necessarily be the case.
However, this site mentions a study of the kind you describe:
Thank you Aholibah for providing the counter viewpoint and the link to the work of Groth. I was going to cite those myself.
As in most complex behaviors, the truth is probably somewhere in between the two viewpoints. Rape involves both power and sexual issues in varying degrees depending on the individual. IMO, power and anger issues are probably involved in the majority of cases - especially in the case of serial rapists - but not invariably.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. Many people of both sexes and all orientations enjoy consensual sex acts that are motivated by violence and violence that is motivated by sexual desire. They even have their own clubs. Trying to separate the two motivations in a simple mantra isn’t possible.
It seems from what has been posted so far that at least some rape is a sexual act with violent overtones, while other rapes are violent acts with sexual overtones.
So for the poorly stated second part of the OP, is there any supportive evidence for the idea that no rapes can be perpetrated primarily for sexual gratification, even if that gratification comes from victim pain and suffering?
So here’s one rapist’s story. What do you folks think? Do you think he was motivated by a desire for sex or by a desire for power? It seems to me that from the very outset, he conflates the two.
The cite’s provided by Colibri I think do a great job of answering the question, which authors/thinkers/theorists first started to set forth the argument that rape was more about power than sex.
It always seemed to me that the point of this argument was to try to make a fundamental change in the way people thought about this crime.
When I was a kid in the 70’s it was fairly common on television to see variations on the joke about “if you can’t fight it, lie back and enjoy it,” etc. People talked about (and–tragically–still do talk about) rape as sort of seduction gone wrong. Sort of like a really awful date, rather than as a horrific violent act like an assault or a murder.
Surreal, if the idea of rape as being more about power than sex seems counter-intuitive, I think it’s because the people arguing for this position are trying to make a fundamental change (for the better in my view) about how people think and talk about rape.
I often heard this idea (or some close variation of it) expressed as a high school and college student in the 80’s. This really is just my personal take on it, but I always got the sense that the idea was to change the way people thought about rape by taking it out of the realm of sexual/erotic and putting it into the realm of the violent.
Look, I don’t have cites for any of this, I’m just reporting my sense of how conversations about rape have changed over the past 30 years.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. I hope, Blake, that my last post makes it clear that I am capable of understanding that a desire for sexual gratification on the part of the rapist can be an element in some rapes. It would be foolhardy to deny it, and I did not intend to. So you are right to bring me back to the actual OP as posted. The problem is that I viewed the OP as a ludicrous strawman, presenting an intentionally inflammatory overstatement of the power dynamic theory of rape. I lost track and thought we had moved on to discussing ACTUAL power dynamic theories of rape (as opposed to the OP’s unsubstantiated claim of what the power dynamic theory of rape says), which, it seems to me, are not counter-intuitive. Okay?
No you didn’t. You were not directing that request for an explanation at some discussion that had moved on, you specifically addressed your request “to the OP directly”. That is an exact quote.
So please don’t ‘Pete’s sake’ me. If you wish to address a topic which has moved on from the OP then do so. If you specifically address an enquiry “to the OP directly” then accept it with good graces when I point out that the OP never made any such statement.
Blake are you refering to Sadomasochism and its derivatives?
If so then this is something I am aware of, and know that violence is not motivational within such groups. The motivation is allways sexual even if the activity has a violent element. That said the mantra should probably include the term non-consensual.
Is there any form of non-consensual living human to living human sex that is not Rape?
If not then what is wrong with saying Rape = non-consensual sex ?
That is the part of it that comes under “violence that is motivated by sexual desire”.
However there are also more extremist groups that you are apparently not familiar with where the sex acts that are motivated by violence. These are the extreme self-mutilators into such things as breast piercing, and I mean breast, not nipple. These groups admit that the driver is the violence, and often they derive no sexual pleasure from what they do. Often associated with childhood sexual abuse the sexual mutilation and associated sexual intercourse is seen as a means of making their sexuality their own again. These people undertake violent sexual acts or allow themselves to be subjected to violent acts for the violence aspect with little or no sexual motivation or gratification.
Obviously the boundary is not distinct and at some point BDSM becomes self-abasement and vice-versa. But I fell quite justified in stating that many people of both sexes and all orientations enjoy consensual sex acts that are motivated by violence as well as violence that is motivated by sexual desire.
Ok, Blake. Let me try to put this more clearly, since I obviously failed the first time, when I tried to graciously thank you for redirecting me to what the OP actually said.
The “for Pete’s sake” bit came out of my taking some offense at the way you worded your otherwise justified correction to me. Let me restate here that I appreciate your reminder of what the OP said. You were correct. I was wrong.
The remainder of the post was not an attempt to weasel out of being wrong. It was an apparently unsuccessful attempt to explain why I made the mistake of miscontruing the OP’s statement in the first place. I was trying to say that because the discussion had moved on to the actual (nuanced) power dynamic theories of rape as opposed to the OP’s strawman-esque characterization of those theories, I had lost track of what the OP had NOT claimed to be counterintuitive in claiming that power theories of rape are counterintuitive. My original aggravation at the OP’s characterization of the power dynamic theory of rape remained, however, and led me to an equally unacceptable mischaracterization of the OP as having suggested that what was counterintuitive was that rape is entirely motivated by domination and not at all motivated by sexual desire.
(I suppose what I would like to know is whether Surreal, like me, finds the idea that rape is always motivated to a greater or lesser degree by a desire for domination perfectly intuitive.)
In any case, I once again affirm that you were correct in pointing out that my question about why the OP does not find this idea intuitive was not in keeping with what the OP had in fact actually posted. And I maintain that you were unnecessarily harsh in wording that correction, and therefore deserving of a “for Pete’s sake.” I don’t believe that anything I had posted up to that point justified your speculation that I might need explained to me the “painfully obvious” fact that “it is counterintuitive that a sexual act has nothing to do with sexual desires.”
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the idea that rape is always motivated to a greater or lesser degree by a desire for domination perfectly intuitive.
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I don’t find that intuitive. Or at least no more intuitive than the idea that all sex is motivated to a greater or lesser degree by a desire for domination. Imagine a situation where a woman agrees to have sex with a man, goes on to get drunk, goes to his room, makes out, has a few more drinks and then passes out before having sex. I don’t find it in any way intuitive that a rape that follows is based in any way on domination rather than a simple desire to have sex. Intuitively it would seem that it is motivated solely because he is horny. It could be based on domination in some cases, but I wouldn’t intuitively see that as being a motivator.
Perhaps I would accept it as intuitive that all overtly violent rape is always motivated to a greater or lesser degree by a desire for domination perfectly. But to do that I would also need to accept that all violent crime is always motivated to a greater or lesser degree by a desire for domination perfectly, including robberies.
As for this . . . In fact, the OP has not yet explicitly acknowledged that he believes rape is motivated to some degree by a desire for domination. Secondly, if everybody here finds it just as counterintuitive to believe that rape is about domination rather than sex as it is to believe that a bank robbery is about domination rather than money, then that’s the first I’ve heard of it. Perhaps someone else could chime in on this one.
It seems to me that if the sole motivator here is a desire for sexual gratification then the man would masturbate. IMHO, in order for having sex with an unconscious partner to be a turn-on, there’s got to be some kind of power/dominance thing happening. Clearly, it’s not about giving pleasure or feeling intimate because you can’t do any of those things with an unconscious partner. And clearly it’s not just about reaching orgasm, because you can do that without committing rape. My intuition about a guy who would have sex with an unconscious partner suggests there are some power issues at work.
Let me guess, you’re a virgin? Because I find it hard to believe that any experienced adult could believe that masturbation is a substitute for sex in terms of gratification.
Considering that the standard interpretation before about 1970 was in fact that rape was about sex rather than domination, it is rather hard to say that that is counterintuitive (even if it is probably wrong). What is “intuitive” may depend strongly on cultural factors.
After all, facts such as the earth being round and orbiting about the sun are counterintuitive. Obesity due to overeating may be “intuitively” attributed to gluttony, while emotional problems or physiological factors may be the root cause involved.
It might be interesting to note that Surreal made the OP and then the 7th posting and that’s it. (Just my observation).
Something being counter-intuitive does not necessarily mean a principle is incorrect. Just thinking of a few quick examples:
the Earth appears to be flat and
the Sun appears to travel around the Earth.
Still, whether it offends your intuitive sensibilities or not, both statements are dead wrong.
:: stepping off my soapbox ::
I am a sexually experienced adult, and I find masturbation an infinitely preferable alternative to bad sex. And sex with an unconscious person would be bad by any definition as far as I’m concerned – by which (just to be clear again) I do not mean simply morally bad. In what way could sex with an unconscious person provide a more satisfying orgasm than masturbation could, unless you’re getting off on the very fact that this person is unconscious?
Colibri, good point. Perhaps this whole intuitive/counterintuitive thing is unproductive for the purposes of this discussion.
GEEZ Great Minds Think Alike strikes again. Sorry for stating something you posted while I was typing. :smack:
Okay, just to state another quick example (to save face), a car travels from City A to City B at 60 mph. It returns from City B to City A at 30 mph. What was its average speed ? 40 Miles Per Hour.
Again, it may be counter-intuitive but it is the correct answer.
Still can’t believe someone posted those examples while I was still typing them !!! :smack:
No doubt that person thinks faster and definitely TYPES faster !!