You are pretty much summarizing my position here. If you treat the physical trauma clinically, without emotional bias, rape generally does not involve life-altering physical trauma, the way a fracture of the spine or losing an arm or blindness might. Treat it on a level playing field. Treat the anus as you would any other bit of human flesh. If it affects walking, treat it similarly to a broken knee cap. If it is just painful for a week, treat it as you would a bruise on your tush. Etc. Don’t apply a double standard to two traumas that are otherwise similar in their physical consequences.
Well, assuming the surgery is volitional, I’m not comparing them. If you want to compare rape to an unrequested surgery, yes, I think that under the right conditions (passed out drunk verses general anesthesia, etc) they are very comparable.
It’s not a double standard because the physical consequences are not the only relevant issue. The emotional consequences also matter, and it’s not sensible to dismiss them as arbitrary and unimportant.
Parents can consent to surgery on behalf of a five-year-old child, but they can’t consent to sex on the child’s behalf.
I have never been molested, but I think that it is one of those experiences that I would feel traumatized over. So it really isn’t difficult to understand that those kind of memories haunt. But don’t you find it interesting why they haunt so much more intensely than say, being beaten with a stick by a bully?
I consider myself sexually free minded. I think sex is awesome, have never viewed it as dirty, I don’t think girls who like to sleep around are damaged or fucked up, or bad or whatever…I like to think of myself as extremely liberal about sex.
So, why is it that the idea of being raped gives me the chills in a way that getting mugged and beaten doesn’t? I’m learning a lot of good ideas about why that is from this thread.
I thought we got derailed into only discussing the physical aspect in isolation, and so that was my concern in the last few responses. I have never said that the emotional consequences don’t matter, nor have I dismissed them as unimportant. This is a misrepresentation of what I have said. I have argued that the emotional consequences are partly the result of societal norm, and that the emotional consequences would be lessened in a society that approached the problem rationally.
It’s a vicious circle. If we lived in a society where tickle-rape was taboo, the net result would be more emotional damage in the world. And the emotional damage would be self-perpetuating because people would continue to make the irrational argument that because emotional damage occurs, the act itself is the sole cause of it, when in fact part of the cause is the taboo itself. If we lived in a society where rape was treated with less hysteria, IMO there would be less emotional damage in the world.
The thought of being raped doesn’t haunt me more than the thought of being violently beaten. Vaginal tears and losing teeth rate equally on the badness scale to me.
But the thought of not being believed if I told someone I was raped kind of freaks me out, though. The thought of having people questioning my behavior (including myself)(even just silently in their heads) freaks me the fuck out too. The thought of having to go through a rape exam just so that I’d have a reasonable chance of winning in court if I decided to report it doesn’t thrill me either. And the thought of me feeling guilty if for some reason I decided not to report due to the sheer amount of work involved and the fear that somehow my reputation and relationships with other people could end up ruined doesn’t strike me as a bucket of falalahs. By not reporting the crime, then you have to be haunted by the thought that you’re essentially telling your rapist his behavior was no big deal, go ahead and do it to someone else, big fella. What a load to have on your conscience. But by reporting the crime, you often make your own life a whole lot harder.
I’ve never been raped, but everytime I think about it happening to me, I don’t think of the actual crime. I think of all of this other stuff. Stuff, strangely enough, that doesn’t even cross my mind when I think about being mugged or beaten with a stick.
Because getting beaten isn’t something most of us ever think is a good thing. We don’t associate it with love and pleasure and safety.
Take something someone loves. Do something to change it so that it’s painful or otherwise unpleasant. They will find it more unpleasant than if you started with something they already disliked.
Multiply that by a frillion and throw in lots of brain chemicals and voila. You have a traumatic reaction to rape.
I mean jesus, I shared a whole box of Thin Mints with a girl friend on the bus when I was seven or so. I loved Thin Mints! Then I went home and promptly barfed. I’m 39, and the very thought of eating mint makes me gag. What would I feel if I felt I needed to eat mint in order to have a loving, stable romantic relationship? I can remember how good I thought mint was once, but I’m not capable of feeling that way again. Obviously, it’s not necessary to like mint, so I can just avoid it (and avoid thinking about it until I type out a post like this. Bleargh). We can’t avoid sex nearly as easily (and most of us don’t want to), especially if we want to have an SO or get married or have children.
I just don’t find it odd at all that people are traumatized by rape to greater or lesser degrees. Other people could probably have eaten two boxes of Thin Mints and never vomited, or even if they vomited might still love mint.
My late husband was deeply traumatized by his experiences with open heart surgery. I still have visions of being a child in the local swimming pool and watching one of my classmates get hit by a car. Maybe it’s curious why some people are more bothered by others, but rape is hardly an outlier when we’re trying to figure out why people are bothered at all.
Sex is special. It feels so freaking good. That’s one of the reasons we get so damn emotional about our partners…because the way they can make our bodies feel. So, emotion and sex are already married. So, yeah, sex is different. So rape is different. I think I am starting to wrap my head around this a bit.
One night, when I was younger, about 20 I think. My fiancee and I were in bed, and I woke up to him fully fondling my genitals with his fingers. Full insertion. My reaction was absolute disgust and anger and hurt. I don’t know where all of those emotions came from, but they flooded me immediately. I calmed down and explained to him that I really didn’t like that. The idea that he was doing that while I was sleeping really got to me. We always have had a very healthy, active, terrific sex life. But that one act shook me.
I find this topic so fascinating. I’m all over the map on it right now. Each poster’s points sway me back and forth. I think I will just stop posting and wait. Maybe I can learn something if I stop jumping in all antsy.
ETA: Whoa. When I hit submit, only Stoid was above me. Just now seeing jsgoddess and YWTF’s posts.
According to some folks on this very fine board, being beaten by bullies is endlessly traumatizing.
In any event, this thread is all over the place, but I’ll no less attempt to address all of it as succinctly as my long-winded self can. I’ll skip the obvious “It’s not just betrayal, it’s assault” response, primarily because I did already. An assertion I am seeing here is that people tend to elevate rape to a higher level of offense than some other sort of violent act. I don’t think that they do. The issue with rape is that it combines a lot of malevolent, harmful acts into one, in a way that very few things (if any) do.
My response to this “social norms” argument is: ehh, “yes” and “no” and “so what?” Flatly, to most people, sex is special. The degree to which some find it special varies widely, of course, but for most, sex is far less familiar than a hand shake. You don’t have to be some uptight Puritan to believe that sex is special enough to want to safeguard it, and only issue to those you find desirable. When someone takes it from you, it’s worse than someone taking some other thing from you. It’s analogous to the distinction between a stolen necklace, but one is the last present your dying father gave you, and the other is something you bought yesterday, because you thought it was cute and matched your nail polish.
This means rape combines being assaulted, having something meaningful taken from you, and in many cases, very serious betrayal.
So rape isn’t some “special status” thing. It’s a thing that manages to combine many bad things into a single act. That is why rape is so bad.
Edit and Disclaimer: You know what. I seriously quoted what I wanted, walked away from my computer, came back and posted a reply. There are now, of course, a jillion other responses. Apologies if this is redundant.
Lot’s of things are special, to larger or lesser degrees, to different people. Someone just after your post suggested that getting mugged is less traumatic than rape because people love sex, and people don’t love being mugged. Well, first of all, that’s a false analogy – people love sex, and some also love being able to walk at night in the in poorly lit areas alone (I for one love this). Being mugged or beaten in such a situation would be incredibly traumatic for me, and ruin something that I really love, and (perhaps unfortunately) experience more than sex. Similarly car accidents. Whether people love driving or not, it a necessary aspect of modern life for most people, and getting into a bad car accident caused by a bad driver can be horribly traumatic (I speak from experience). Now I obviously can’t speak for everybody, but I personally at least, am one example of someone who would “choose” rape over some other evil things that happen in life that are not nearly as taboo. And yes, I do love sex. But it’s a question of mental attitude. If confronted by a rapist, and assuming I don’t have cause to think I’m about to be killed, I would view it as a physical violation not much different from being pinned down and wet-willied. Again, I probably don’t speak for many people other than myself, but I am being sincere.
Here are the things I think of that are “special” about sex, that make rape “different”, assuming all else is equal (level of physical harm, societal taboo, for example):
The possibility of pregnancy (only applies to vaginal intercourse
You could also possibly add:
2) Sex is an enjoyable act associated with certain powerful biologically-driven brain chemicals tied to emotion.
I will give a slight nod to that, sure. But like I described long-windedly above, there are other enjoyable acts (arguably less, but by degrees) than can be ruined that don’t engender the same hysteria.
Right, but an objective & neutral evaluation of an injury done to a human being wouldn’t operate from the assumption that the subject of the diagnosis had no emotions. You don’t have to be angry to recognize that another person is angry. And you don’t have to be biased or irrational to recognize that a lot of human behavior is necessarily emotionally-driven, and that on the spectrum of human behavior and emotion, there is one overarching emotional cocktail that is more powerful than all the others, and that it’s the one that fires when love and sex are involved. They’re just the most powerful stuff we have operating on us, which is borne out in a thousand different ways; look at the world of artistic expression, for instance.
I submit that you don’t know this about yourself, while other people do know their own answers.
You are attacking a line of discussion where I am focusing on the physical trauma in isolation. As I have said before (unfortunately on these topics people tend to get up in arms because they project things onto what you’ve said, so you have to keep repeating yourself) I have in no way suggested that the emotional trauma isn’t real or important.
I am open minded, and since I have never experienced rape, I cannot know for sure. But you don’t know nearly enough about me to possibly form that opinion about me with any confidence.
I’m pretty confident, as it turns out. You’re holding open the possibility that you’ve in fact been raped, but you’ve been talking about what you would hypothetically feel like if you did? I mean, you just said you haven’t been, so.
Anyway, what I’m “attacking” (which is interesting, that you chose that phrase, but I’ll let it slide since I’m not actually doing so) is that you said
as if the fact that the true damage isn’t physical, as you’ve defined it, ought to be a significant distinction.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone who has ever received a wet willy and penetrative sex would find the prospect of being forced into one or the other remotely similar. Being on the receiving side of penetrative sex can hurt even when it’s consensual if things aren’t quite right. Even having my ear boxed once, which hurt like a motherfucker, didn’t hurt as much as a couple of consensual sexual things that didn’t go quite as planned (stupid cervix).
I don’t like the anal rape analogy because stuff going up the opposite way feels really, really icky to many individuals–even gay men–as at least one poster has stated that anal intercourse is not even the norm amongst them.
And I’ve read that the biggest emotional problem with rape is that the pleasure is still there, at least physically. You can still have an erection and even orgasm from it. And, yet, the person is definitely hurting you.
You’ve just associated the most pleasurable thing you can feel with being hurt. How the heck is that not supposed to cause emotional problems?
Just in case you weren’t aware, this sort of ‘psych 101’ smugness can be pretty obnoxious. I’m not trying to start a fight, just in saying, in case you weren’t aware. No legitimate psychiatrist should ever pretend to draw this sort of inference from so little contact. The pipe is just a pipe.
I thought I already told you – you are sniping a quote from a conversation in which it was my understanding we were discussing the physical trauma in isolation. What don’t you get about that? If you want to discuss my opinion on the emotional trauma, pick a quote where I discuss it.
I think the point is that you are misinterpreting him. Other people here, who have been raped, know exactly how they feel about it. You, on the other hand, claim to know how you’d feel about it when it hasn’t happened to you.
And what you call psych 101 smugness is just basic social skills.