Marley23 – perhaps you misread my question. Here it is again:
Indeed you have mentioned societal norms with regard to how rape is treated in society. You have not answered my question regarding whether or not those norms play a role in how much emotional trauma is experienced by the victim. The point is that, as I said before, societal norms can be just as much responsible for emotional trauma than the physical act itself, which may on its own entail only very minor physical trauma.
Part of it is because traditionally, only “good girls” could be raped (males were not recognized as being possible rape victims). People wanted to believe that rape was preventable, and there was (and still is) some degree of victim blaming…that is, you’ll have some people claiming that she was asking for it in the way that she was dressed, acting, location, or other circumstances. If a “good girl” was raped, and she can’t be blamed for it, then the rapist is an utter cad, and deserves the utmost punishment. A “bad girl” wasn’t ever really raped, because people thought that she deserved to be sexually assaulted because of the way she dressed, or lived, or whatever.
OK, so … what are *you *going to do about it? How in the bloody hell can one person decide to change societal norms?
Also, let me get this straight: are you arguing that it’s partly society’s “fault” that rape victims suffer trauma, because if rape was not seen as such a big deal, then the rape victim wouldn’t … care as much? Is that what you’re saying?
The two things are related: people regard rape the way they do largely because of the psychological harm rape victims experience.
Blaming social norms for the harm caused by rape is putting the cart before the horse. The rape causes the harm. Yes, people would regard and experience rape differently if social norms were different. But so what? There are reasons people feel the way they do about their genitals, and they’re not arbitrary or irrational. Rape can cause pregnancy in addition to whatever injuries might come as part of the assault (try getting pregnant from a wet willy), and in our culture, we think of sex as something personal that should take place when all parties are willing. There are other ways to think about it, but that’s one of them.
If you take any interaction that is generally a bonding ritual and you do it to someone to cause them pain and humiliation, that’s going to end up with special status.
Sex you don’t want is gross and it hurts. It also upends the standard goals of sex–bonding, pleasure, love, romance, reproduction–into something that’s just about pain, fear, and humiliation.
Take a family dinner. Family dinners are supposed to be about bonding and togetherness and sharing and all of that. Now say someone takes you from the street, drags you to a family dinner where they force you to eat things you don’t want, in such quantities that you are ill. They are holding you down and shoving disgusting foods into your gasping mouth while you are sobbing and crying and trying desperately to escape.
I do not believe most people would walk away from that experience with no trauma about food, about family dinners, about eating, etc. They may have suffered physical damage, too. Inhaling food, or digestive issues.
Taking over someone’s body, forcing them into acts they do not want, causing them physical pain, delighting in their humiliation, perverting social acts that generally hold significance for people–these are all going to result in traumas, great or small.
I can do nothing about it other than argue for rational thinking in forums such as this one.
Yep.
But please don’t extrapolate that to your own end. Rape is despicable, and I am in no way apologizing for it, nor do I wish to take anything away from its victims. But certainly if society was less emotionally biased about the issue, and if the taboos of sexuality weren’t elevated, sanctified and deeply embedded from such an early age, sex crimes would not have the same elevated status asked about by the OP, nor would they be as emotionally crippling. Again, the analogies are powerful – imagine if society decided tickling was taboo. Currently tickle-victims are not so emotionally scarred. But I would argue that they would be scarred if society treated tickle-rape the way it does sexually-charged touching, even if the physical trauma associated may be similar. The tickle-rape victim would feel deeply ashamed, violated, have flash-backs, etc, all because of societal norm.
What if I got drunk and my best friend decided it would be fun to make me eat a bunch of gross stuff, shoving it in my mouth, making me puke and they took pictures of it and showed them to me afterwards, since I don’t remember a lot of things when I’m wasted?
I think I’m going to side with Bruce Wayne on this one. I don’t think that rape hundreds of years ago left the victim as emotionally traumatized as they are now (that’s a guess and an opinion) because sex was viewed differently back then.
So what? An answer to the OP is what. And just to be clear: I am not blaming social norms for all of the harm caused by rape; they are part of the reason why there is a double-standard with regard to other physical intrusions.
I completely agree. This is precisely why I used anal-rape as an example in my own argument. I was very clear on that point. *
ETA: * with regard to pregnancy, of course – the physical trauma itself should be treated on the same clinical footing as any other bruising, tearing, etc that might occur anywhere else on the body due to physical harm.
Western society’s taboos regarding sex are much older than its current attitudes about rape. I don’t think the West came to regard rape as a primarily mental crime against the woman until pretty recently. Historically I’d say it was considered a property crime against her husband or father, and you can still see that today when you look at other cultures and see things like honor rapes or women who are killed or shunned after being raped.
It’s not a double standard. They’re two different things that are treated differently because they are dissimilar. The resemblance is superficial. That’s why it’s a faulty comparison.
Everything except the word “genitals” and “pregnancy” still applies, but you haven’t addressed that.
The evidence being what???
I’ve certainly made that argument before, and I stand by it as true for at least a portion of rape victims, based on my own experiences. My rapes didn’t hurt me nearly as much as my friends and family telling me how devastated and psychologically damaged I must be did. I told them over and over how I wasn’t, really, and they kept telling me I was in denial and repeating that I must be a wreck…and eventually I believed them and started behaving and feeling like a wreck.
Now, is it possible to be horribly affected by a rape even if others don’t know about it and tell you you’re horribly affected? Absolutely. But I suspect that at least some of that - some of it, perhaps not all - is because of socially learned judgements about rape and rape victims screamed inside your head by your super-ego.
WhyNot, I am sure that people can overreact to the rape of a friend or family member based on what they think that person is going through. And I’m sure that kind of patronizing or overdramatizing behavior can be harmful. It can’t help when some people describe rape as worse than death. But I don’t think that’s responsible for most of the harm suffered by most people who get raped.
You are convolving the whole matter with a women’s rights issue, and you are opening up a can of worms along with a red herring. Indeed there was tremendous hypocrisy and contradictions, just as how sanctimonious church ministers of today sometimes rape young boys. Yes, what society says and what it does are not necessarily consistent. Women were given some very mixed signals. They were often told that their virginity was sacred, yet that they themselves had little say over it. These mixed signals served the males’ subjugatory purposes at the time. The mental affect on the rape victim was, as I would predict, terrible, especially when societal norm dictated that she was at fault and a pariah. All of this was a result of a society obsessed with elevating sexuality, but the purposes were more male-oriented than they are now.
Human flesh is human flesh is human flesh. The nose and the ear are dissimilar, but the dissimilarity is superficial, because they are both human flesh owned by the victim, with similar density of pain receptors. We do not apply wildly different standards to physical harm done to the nose or the ear. If we did, there would be a double-standard. The asshole is not much different from the nose or the ear, other than societal norm.
I did in my ETA (which you may have not seen). Physical trauma is physical trauma, whether occurring on the knee or in the butt.
The good news is I’m not hungry for dinner anymore.
This is true, but again, so what? If I lose a toe, I’m probably not going to be crippled for life. If I lose an arm, I will. A crack in a tooth isn’t a big deal, a fracture of similar size in my spine might be. An infection in my ear is a temporary annoyance, an infection in the tissue of my heart could kill me. I won’t go blind if you punch me in the arm, and I won’t choke if you wrap your hands around my ankle. Flesh is flesh, but that doesn’t mean it’s all the same. More importantly, it does not mean there is a compelling reason to treat it as if it is the same. You might as well compare rape to arthroscopic surgery. They both involve things being inserted into the body, so shouldn’t be treat them both as crimes?
If anything, wouldn’t it have left them feeling worse because sex was viewed as so much more sacred than it is now? People really prized virginity before marriage, for example, in a way that we don’t really do today.
I think this is pretty apt. If you walk down an alley and someone beats you to a pulp, you will likely be traumatized, perhaps afraid to walk alone and in certain areas. You may have flashbacks, but likely not while you are being beaten at some other point. If someone rapes you (stranger or supposed ‘loved’ one) you get to conflate pain and trauma with one of the most potentially pleasurable experiences known to humankind. You aren’t likely to want to get beaten by a boyfriend, but chances are you’d like to have sex.
I didn’t know this was difficult. I’ve never been raped, but I’ve been molested a time or two and those memories have never left me.
I’m really not sure how you would verify this. What wasn’t different, in relation to women, and how much of that was internal or the people in power’s interpretation of events (as well as historians’)? Maybe this is the case, because (some) women were seen as subhuman chattel, internalized this, and therefore thought they had no agency over their own bodies – which is still a pretty common reaction from rape victims who are also victims of abuse or other rapes, or who have internalized guilt from their culture or religion.
But how many actual stories and first-hand accounts do we actually have from these women? And how do they compare to women who have been raped, in modern times, in cultures where they are also seen as chattel or ‘unrapeable,’ who are numb to pain and consider rape the price to pay for being a woman, or suffering from Stockholm syndrome in regards to their abusers or even an invading army?
It’s probably true that “(Wilbo) (doesn’t) think that rape hundreds of years ago left the victim as emotionally traumatized as they are now (that’s a guess and an opinion) because sex was viewed differently back then,” but that could be accurate for two reasons.
It could be that rape actually wasn’t very traumatizing years ago. Or it could be that only now do people talk about the effects of rape in truthful ways, and Wilbo has it backwards.
It’s another in a long line of questions posed in this forum that could be answered fairly easily by listening to the sorts of things nearly every rape victim says. Why do we treat it like a special class of emotional trauma? Because that’s how it feels when it happens to you. Is this “merely” a societal norm? I guess. So is murder. Flesh is flesh, dead is dead. Then it happens to you.