Rape Is About Sex! Duh!

One of the stranger claims made in recent days is that "rape is not about sex."

Over and over it has been said that rape is not about sex, it is about power and control. "Rape is best characterized as torture that uses sex as a weapon. Like a torturer, the rapist uses sexual acts to dominate, humiliate, and terrorize the victim". Perhaps one might understand that that is the victim's interpretation, but we are told that "Rape is not about sex to the rapist; it has to do with control and power."

Not just sometimes, but every time.

Hogwash. Utter hogwash. Despite my problems with Alas, a Blog, on this particular point which Ampersand is correct:

Men who rape women don't do it because they hate women, but because they don't give a **** about women (at least, not the women they rape). They want something, they take it, and they're by-and-large indifferent to how the person they "take" it from feels.

This is why the "rape isn't about sex, rape is about violence" analysis falls short. It's not true - not from the point of view of many rapists - and it denies the true horror of the situation. Many rapists don't rape because they hate and want to hurt women; it's not that personal. Rapists rape because they want sex; they don't consider the woman's feelings at all...

Now don't get me wrong. There are cases in which rape is simply used as a tool of violence, as a way to dominate or control someone. Homosexual rapes by heterosexual males likely often fall into this category (except in situations when men subsitute for women due to a lack of women), as would ritualistic rapes by serial killers and a large number of wartime rapes. But to argue that the casual rapist isn't raping for sex but for violence, power, and control is rather like saying that the mugger mugs people as an act of violence rather than because he wants their money or that the shoplifter shoplifts purely out of kleptomania or to get revenge on the store, not in order to, you know, get stuff free. Or that the person who murders witnesses isn't doing it to keep them from talking but just for the sake of the violence itself.

This is not to say that rape isn't an act of violence, power, and control, but to say that these are usually tools used to get sex rather than ends in and of themselves.

One argument against this is that sex is so available that no one needs to rape in order to get sex; therefore sex cannot be the motivating factor. Perhaps. But money is available as well, and people still steal. The issue isn't whether or not the rapist can obtain sex elsewhere. The issue is that the rapist's motivation is sex when he wants, with whom he wants, and how he wants. He apparently calculates that he can get a "better deal" by taking what he wants than through other means. Perhpas this calculation is wrong - to continue an analogy, lots of criminals probably make less through robbery than they could through honest work - but this doesn't change the fact of the motivation.

So why do we hear that rape is about power and violence?

Two reasons:

The most obvious is that we tend to look through the eyes of the victim, for whom the violence and the loss of control to the rapist is the major event. The victims are usually bothered by the violation, not by the fact that they had sex. So we tend to project the consequences of the rape and the victim's attitudes onto the perpetrator: the violence is what affected her, so that must have been his goal.

The second reason is more controversial, and is something that I more or less have thought up myself. To explain my hypothesis is really the point of this whole piece:

The more casually a society takes sex, the less of an impact the act of rape has in terms of sex. Therefore, in order to have rape be a serious crime, one has to redefine it away from sex.

Of course, one might argue that they didn't use to take rape seriously at all. I think it's not so much that as that people were in denial over it, suggesting that the woman either was lying or that for some other reason rape had not occurred. And it must also be pointed out that in the less humane societies of old, people were brutal enough that rape did not always seem so terrible in comparison to other things that people did to one another. In a society where pickpockets were hung publicly, the violence was casual enough that however seriously rape was taken, it wouldn't necessarily carry the same weight it does in our comfy modern times.

In any case, though, with sex being a privae topic and officially relegated to marriage and whatnot, the idea of forcing someone to have sex carried with it the idea of a pretty intense violation. Someone was being forced to go through a very private and intimate experience. But if sex is no more intimate than shaking hands, then rape is no more serious than grabbing someone's hand without their permission (or holding onto it, as the case may be).

Which leads in to the reason why we keep hearing that rape is not about sex. It is philosophically untenable to keep pushing the boundaries of the sexual revolution without making rape seem less and less violative by comparison, as the act which is coerced in rape becomes less and less private, personal, and valued in society. So the only way to retain the sense of horror at rape is to alter the rationale for rape being bad; that the goal is total violation, so that the violence becomes the issue; rather than the horror coming from the intimacy of the act which was forced upon the victim, which is the old rationale.

Thoughts?

That is all.