I don’t need to “control” my “desires” in order to not commit rape. My desires are to have consensual sex with an attractive woman (or two). By turning the fantasy into a rape fantasy, the desire dissapears because an unwilling partner is a sexual turn off for me. My opinion is that if someone can maintain arousal through a rape, then power and control MUST be a very significant part or the motivation.
Your first hand experience as a man is worthless unless it is also first hand experience as a rapist.
Many if not most men will, if they are honest and introspective, tell you that their desire for power has profoundly influenced multiple aspects of their behaviour at various points in their life.
In his book Obsession , retired FBI profiler John Douglas describes all the different kinds of rapists. The experts who deal with rapists and their crimes every day apparently believe, based on their experiences, that not all rapists are primarily motivated by hate for women.
Because attributing rape to lust (following the Paglia argument, mind you) means that men really can’t help it; their sex drive is intense; it is a natural and expected consequence of male desire (she doesn’t say that rape is okay, but she does say that women have basically been too whiny about the whole thing).
If it’s power, that’s a choice, and therefore alternatives.
If that were how it worked, prostitutes would rarely be victims of rape. The rapist could easily just pay for consent and avoid commiting a horrible crime.
I’m claiming that anyone who is experiencing powerful feelings of sexual lust can choose to alleviate those feelings by themselves. If, however, it is accompanied by a desire to exert force or power over another person, masturbation won’t satisfy the lust. That’s where the desire to involve someone else in the orgasm comes in.
I should clarify, I don’t mean that the only reason to involve someone else in your orgasm is because you want to exert power over them. I mean that if there’s nobody around who will have sex with you willingly, and you’re overcome with lust, then you have a choice - masturbate, and relieve yourself of the lustful feelings, or forcibly involve someone else in your sexual release. If you’re not also hungry for power, you’ll choose the first option. If you are, you may very well choose the second.
I came here to GD to start an OP about this, glanced through the first page, and was astonished to see that there was already an active discussion about it.
I’ve never even understood this argument that “rape is about power”. Can someone break this down? I wonder if perhaps things that are really closely related are being falsely teased apart in this argument. The claim that rape is not about lust seems to me false on its face because it’s not simply violent - it’s violent and sexual. The rapist is forcing sex upon the victim. Sex and violence are closely related in a lot of circumstances - hence the fact that rape porn exists (among people who claim they have no interest in the real thing.) Or consensual forms of sex that still emphasize hurting people or denying them control - a lot of BDSM has overtones of control, and enacting rape fantasies among willing partners is not all that uncommon. I think sex is oftentimes very much tied in with aggression and it seems like a false dichotomy to try to separate them.
I suspect that for a lot of rapists, if not most, the feeling that drives them is a sexual one, at least from their own perspective. I think it’s obvious that they are driven by impulses motivated by aggression, but that’s not to say that the rapist’s thought process reflects that.
Can someone help me understand what the claim is? It seems ridiculous to me on it’s face - rape seems like a desire to hurt another person, but one driven by sexual impulses. It just happens to be that some people have sexual impulses tied in with violence. Certainly it’s not true that men just sometimes want sex so bad they decide to go get it whether their partner is willing or not (is that the idea that was being disproven when this argument became common?) But I don’t think it’s true that it’s somehow not really about sex at its core. And I don’t believe the notion that a rapist motivated by lust could just masturbate; after all, you could claim that men who frequent prostitutes could save money by masturbating, or that men who go to the trouble of picking up women in bars for meaningless sex could just masturbate. People are driven to do more than masturbate, and the drive is probably biological. After all, masturbation is not the same as sex. Certainly most people wouldn’t agree that it feels the same.
My problem with the “rape is about power” mantra, is that compartmentalizes rape to those evil people who hate women and/or are very very ill. I think when we do that we eliminate the possibility of understanding how endemic the capacity to perform evil acts is, under the circumstances that would motivate it.
These circumstances do include being among the powerless in a society and one can create a good evolutionary story for such a predisposition, even if it is just a story. They also include being outside of society’s usual constraints, immune from any possibility of consequences, such as in a wartime situation with troops of inadequate discipline.
Controlling that capacity to do evil is the function of society.
Look at it this way: When people have sex, of course there’s sexual desire involved. But when it’s consensual, it’s not called “rape”. So when people use the word “rape”, they’re not talking about the lust, or the emotions, or the sexual aspect of it - as a rule, the law doesn’t have a problem with sex or lust. They’re talking about the force aspect of the act, the nonconsentuality of it. So the statement “rape is not about sex” really means that the force and lack or consent is what makes the act a crime, not the lust or even the sex itself. It doesn’t mean that people who rape don’t have lustful feelings or that they don’t want sex.
Yes, I think so. It’s intended to counter the argument that people who rape do so because they’re so overcome with lust they lose control of themselves and shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions. This is, of course, ridiculous. Lust may cause a person to make bad choices, but they’re still that person’s choices to make.
I think it goes further than that, though. What makes sex good and desirable is the mutuality (is that even a word?) of it. It’s the sharing of pleasure. In my experience, at least, there’s nothing that results in a the loss of an erection quicker than seeing pain or unhappiness on a partner’s face. I am at a complete loss to imagine how forcing sex on a woman could be sexually gratifying in the least unless I was getting off on the dominance or sadism of the situation. I think that’s what “rape is not about sex” really means. Sure there’s a sexual aspect, but the rapist isn’t getting off on the sexual aspect of the act. He’s getting off on the dominance aspect.
It is, in many ways, similar to saying “Fighting is not about bloodlust and the desire to inflict pain, fighting is about anger and power”.
You could claim, with some legitimacy and accuracy, that there is a human capacity for experiencing a thrill and taking an active enjoyment at hurting another person. You could also state that at least some people seem to have an active cruel streak that causes them to take pleasure in causing other people pain.
Nevertheless, you could sure make a strong case for (nearly all) fighting being about anger and power. People fight because someone is preventing them from having their way and/or they are angry.
I think there are probably a few men who do not like women very much (or who do not concern themselves very much with what any other human being wants or doesn’t want) but who lust for them, and because they completely do not give a shit about the fact that nearly all people wish to retain the right to consent or refrain from consenting to sex, they may rape if they lust for the victim and figure they can get away with.
But while you might think that such a rape is more about lust than it is about hate or power, it’s still not really a consequence of lust per se. The rapist in this case doesn’t rape because of the intensity of his lust, he rapes simply because he wants sex and doesn’t mind raping to get it and has (or thinks he has) the opportunity to do so and get away with it. Much like a schoolyard bully who takes your lunch money not because he’s hungry or poor but because he wants money and has no moral problem with taking it away from you if he figures he won’t get caught.
The attitude of not caring how your actions affect others is about power. It’s about asserting that “I’m sufficiently powerful that I don’t have to care”. Thus, it’s still about power when such a person rapes even if the momentary motivation is simply “I want that”.
Since the subject of Ted Bundy was brought up, I’ll step in here with what I have read about that case.
Ted Bundy had a girlfriend at home. If he just wanted sex, if it was lust that drove him, why would he leave his girlfriend at home and cruise the streets looking for potential victims? Why, when confronted with one woman who’d learned a rape aversion technique, who upon being approached by Ted responded as if she wanted to have intercourse with him, did he walk away from that situation?
Ted had impotency problems with his girlfriend. There was testimony from one of his victims actually that he couldn’t perform after dragging her into the bushes. Supposedly, a lot of Ted’s problems had something to do with his unnatural relationship with his mother.
IMO the case has been made for rape as power/anger/hate over lust precisely because of men like Ted Bundy. Not all rape is solely about power, as date rape and marital rape generally involve lustful feelings towards a potential partner whose wishes go unheeded but stranger rape falls firmly into this category in my mind.
I think the case can be made for power as the motivating force in the cases of both Date Rape and Marital Rape. One can envision the rapist as frustrated by the lack of acquiescence and forces the issue to gain control and power as well as sexual release.
I say again, the statement “Rape is not about sex” or “Rape is not about lust” means - or should mean - that the thing about a sexual encounter that makes it the crime of rape is not the sex or the lust, but rather the force and lack of consent that accompanies it.