“Opening Post”, the post starting the thread. Used on quite a few forums.
Not particularly.
In fact, I think this “it’s about power” idea is the opposite of the truth most of the time. IMHO, men are much more likely to get power to get sex, than they are to have sex for power. When a man uses force to get sex from a woman, that’s exactly what he’s doing most of the time; force is the means not the end.
Most people male or female just aren’t that obsessively focused on gender politics. They do all sorts of things good and bad without a thought for “power”.
No, it’s not necessarily about power. It might be about money, it might be about (some skewed sense of) “honor”, it might be about children, it might be about any number of things, just about the same number of things it might be about when there is violence between people of the same gender.
Like I said above, what makes such violence wrong often has to do with questions of power and control. (It is wrong to exercise power or control without legitimate authority to do so.) But just because that’s what’s wrong with it doesn’t mean that’s what the act was about.
“About” is such an unclear term anyway. It can be “about” pretty much anything depending on the interpreter. My point is that matters of control or power aren’t necessarily the motivating factor in incidents of violence. The thief isn’t thinking “I’m going to gain power over this person,” rather, he’s thinking “I’m going to take this person’s money.”
What you said about research doesn’t ring true. Old research is readily available online, esp. for those of us with access to academic resources. So if you know about the research, please do point me to it.
There are. “Plain vanilla” rape and statutory rape are legally different in many jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions consider rape by someone who holds power over the victim (parent, teacher, boss, religious leader) more serious than rape by a stranger; the notion is that it has a “breach of trust” factor which doesn’t exist when some we’renotinthepit puts a knife to your throat. In statutory rape, the victim’s attacker is someone who should be their protector.
As a 25-year ED physician, I am likely to have seen as many rapes as most of the posters here. I do not represent that the rapes I see are a typical cross-section of all rapes, but I offer my observations:
Rapes are two broad categories: complete stranger assaults and known-relationship assaults. Whatever the legal and politically correct viewpoints, they are two different things. “Rape is rape” is a legal and political concept. It’s not a practical concept any more than “hitting is hitting” is a practical concept.
By far the commonest rapes are ones in which the parties are familiar with each other, however casually. By far the most violent (and outrage-provoking ones) are stranger rapes.
Provocative dressing does lead to heightened sexual desire in males. Most males will seek to find a release for that, preferring physical contact to masturbation, but they’ll settle for masturbation unless they are both impulsive and unable (unwilling?) to control their biologic impulse to copulate. In nearly every known-relationship rape I have taken care of, provocative dressing is not even close to a significant factor, in my opinion. It pales next to factors such as alcohol, drugs, provocative behaviour and poor judgment. (Poor judgment could be anything from voluntarily finding yourself alone with a man most women would judge as an untrustworthy companion to thinking that you’ll be OK saying no just before penetration even if both of you are naked, embracing, and well-lubricated, so to speak.) I’m not interested in sidetracking a discussion about whether or not any of these should mitigate blame; I am just pointing out they are more common factors that provocative dressing.
Simply using the term “provocative dressing” without defining the setting is insufficient. Provocative dressing in the workplace or in public is a different thing from provocative dressing when a couple find themselves (voluntarily) in her place and she slips into something “more comfortable.” As humans we interact verbally and non-verbally, and it’s silly to pretend anything short of specific verbal communication does not convey a message. It’s impossible to define what that message is without considering the entire situation.
Actually I think it’s closer to about 70% but considering that there are a lot of unreported rapes, due to embarrassment, would probably favor the stranger-rape scenario, it’s probably closer to 50%. People report rape, or most crimes, because they believe it’ll bring forth justice. If a stranger raped you and got away with it, reporting that would not only not solve anything, but make you seem vulnerable and volatile which people are afraid of being viewed as.
And then with the rapes between people that know each other… If sexual desires are inferior to control and power, then why would they usually be between a guy and a girl? People, especially guys, tend to want to feel superior and in control but they don’t do that by raping people (most of the time). Sometimes I may feel my dad is annoying and irrational and I want to show him that I’m can be in control, but I will NEVER rape him. I may have thoughts of “hitting” him but, without doubt, not rape.
In Egypt, sexual harrassment and sexual assault are nearly epidemic. 83% of women claim to have suffered some form of sexual harrassment or assault, and 60% of men admit to sexually harrassing or assaulting a woman. The majority of these women are very modestly dressed, including burqa. It doesn’t matter what a woman is wearing. What matters is mindset. Mona Eltahawy wrote a very compelling blog entry about being a woman in Egypt. Granted, it’s just anecdote but it demonstrates very sharply that clothing has little to do with it.
If I see you have a wad of money in your wallet, does that make it your fault if I rob you? Bullshit.
I went with a cop for ten years. Every freaking time he caught someone in an act of rape, the rapist would start blaming the victim. The typical police response was “Hey. You don’t need a partner if you got a good hand.”
Montel interviewed a 25 year old guy who was in prison for knocking up a ten year old. He claimed he did it because “she dressed like Brittany Spears.” Montel pointed out “No matter how she dressed, she didn’t make you pull down your zipper.”
I do not care if a woman is walking down the street naked, that does not give anyone the right to lay one finger on her.
BTW, the correct term is “sexual assault,” which includes all unwanted sexual activity.
Not distinctly to do with the OP, but concerning the assertion that rape is a nonsexual crime that is about power, psychologist Stephen Pinker suggests that it is a reproductive strategy for marginalized males who are unlikely to have reproductive success in any other way. I recently ran across this list of supporting bullet points in his book The Blank Slate:
He goes on to say that this nonsense about rape being non-sexual is actually highly dangerous and damaging to women, because they never expect rape from “nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class”.
As to why people actually propagate this myth, it comes mainly from those who want to promote sexual liberation by demonstrating that everything concerning the sex drive is good and healthy, therefore nothing that is bad or unhealthy could be truly related to sexuality, therefore rape is completely asexual.
Pinker’s goal in making this distinction is not to assign any blame but rather to help prevent rape by properly recognizing the motives and situations that can lead to it. The Blank Slate, pp 360-371.
I gather you’ve accepted that “women + revealing clothing → higher probability of rape” (as stated in your first post in this thread) has gone from “by no means is it necessarily true” to “in most cases, it is not true”.
Do you have evidence for that belief? Because I’d suspect that just the opposite is true–people are less likely to report a rape by a friend or acquaintance out of embarrassment or fear or not being believed.
Just curious, have you actually read the book, or just reviews of it? You have to be really careful when it comes to reading about innate behaviorism; critics often experience a complete and total intellectual shutdown when they encounter a scientific discussion of topics that they previously took on faith (i.e. the ‘rape-is-power’ dogma). Ghiglieri is a proponent of biological determinism to some extent, but he AFAIK never argued any of the positions attributed by the quote and certainly did not align himself with conservative politics.
Not sure about this one. The quoted bit there is more of an argument against framing rape as something that happens when you cut through an alley at midnight rather than while staying at a friend’s place.
I think the reasoning behind the power-over-sex argument is that, when a popular guy or even a celeb is accused of rape, you’ll inevitably hear someone scoff, “Why would he need to rape someone? He could have any woman he wanted!” It’s silly, really, to separate the two, though, as if sex and power aren’t an element of consensual sex.
The trend is definitely this way. I don’t know a state by state breakdown, but the movement is towards bringing rape and other forms of sexual assault together under the single classification of sexual assault, and having different gradations within that, depending on factors such as age, relationship between the parties, degree of violence, use of weapons, penetrative acts involved etc.
I really have to disagree with that last statement. If someone is having sex only because power was applied, then it isn’t truly consensual (leaving aside fantasy roleplaying). Power is related to rape in the same way it is related to armed robbery… just a means to an end, not the end in itself.
Acquaintance rape has a much higher incidence of non-reporting than stranger rape, not least because many women are still not believed in the acquaintance rape situation, and also because it leads very often to a situation where groups of friends are split, so the support system a raped woman may need to rely on risks being divided often against her by her accusation.
There’s also evidence showing that in many cases where a woman is acquaintance raped, she is not aware it has happened - she is aware there was sex, and that it was not fully consensual, but not that it was a criminal act. I can look up the cite when I get home, but an alarming number of women who described situations which fall under the legal definition of rape (or sexual assault depending on the state) were unaware that a crime had been perpetrated.
Yeah. Earlier this year, I read the Ms. Report on rape, called “I Never Called it Rape” that had instances like you describe. And anecdotally based on talking to people, the way you describe it (knowing something wasn’t right, but not necessarily labeling it to others or even to oneself as a criminal act) sounds very familiar.
That’s probably where it is from. I cited to that pretty heavily in something I wrote a while back.
There’s also come scary numbers from young California males about what they are entitled in their views to do to women, and what they would do if they did not fear punishment…
I’ve cited from lawyers and psychologists. It confirms research statistics collated over hundreds of studies and several decades. No-one here has come up with cited research to oppose the figures or conclusions that are summed up (with cites and links) in the Wiki page I linked earlier.
If you’d rather ignore the evidence, fine - that’s your *opinion *and you’re entitled to it. At least you’ve admitted you’re ignoring the evidence.
No, it’s not necessarily about power. It might be about money, it might be about (some skewed sense of) “honor”, it might be about children, it might be about any number of things, just about the same number of things it might be about when there is violence between people of the same gender.