Monday, March 20, 2006

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.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with you. People just say that its about control and power because they don't want others to think sex is that wanted and craved for. Power and control? Ta loca! Why would the rapist have sex for power and control? Yea, it can happen, but the rapist had sex because he (or even she) wanted have sex! Simple as that! It's just brainwashing. These attackers want to feel the feeling of sex. Control and power is not always the primary goal. There are many more easier ways to feel power and control.

Anonymous said...

I think you might be missing the point. Sex is about power and violence in the SENSE that men don't care about women, in the SENSE that they think whatever they want from women they can take whatever the consequences to the woman, in the SENSE that women are created to provide them with sex and their needs don't factor in. The point is the patriarchal society that creates such an attitude. No one on this earth argues that sex is as casual as shaking hands, by the way, and the ease with which people enter into sexual relations in no way detracts from the fact that without consent it's horrific. You can't remove it from the culture in which it exists, and that's what you're trying to do. In this culture to FORCIBLY do something sexual to someone ALWAYS means you're demeaning them, from a very young age we're trained to know this, and that's really why rape is so awful.

Anonymous said...

to the poster above. STUPID FEMINIST! jesus! Where do these women get the idea that men think they have the right to women's bodies. And guess what? I've been objectified all my life by women so piss off with your all men want is sex from women and that's all women are to men crap.

Patriarchy = New World Order = The Bible = Bullshit that is not real meant for simpletons that don't do any investigation and run entirely on emotion!!!!

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Davis said...

Only a women would say rape is not about sex but violent. I even heard some dumb broad saying 'if I hit you in the head with a spade, you wouldn't call it gardening'. Well, last time I check, rapists don't hit people in the head with their dicks. That's like me saying: robbing the bank is not about money, it's about the thrill and the adrenaline rush; how stupid would that sound.

The logic is so common sense: Guys that get laid, DON'T rape, period. I've never heard of a guy that got laid on regular basis going around raping women. By rape, i mean actually rape, not the women's definition of rape: I feel regret or I was drunk and can't remember, so it must have been rape.

It's all about feminists control of the pussy supply. They don't want to admit or acknowledge men biological need for sex. Linking rape with sexual need would eventually lead to legalization of prostitution, and the feminists can't have that. Women control men with sex, not the other way around.

You say men are not entitled to sex, well fair enough, then I'll say that women are not entitled to a good men. But of course, they got knocked up by some bad boys and the govt. gives them all kind of free shits paid for by men. Men pay for everything, and yet they can't pay for sex, what kind of nonsense is that.

Anonymous said...

The reason why they push the myth that rape is about power is because they want to deny that sex is a need. Honestly, I believe if we had reliable, affordable plastic surgery so every man could be physically attractive to women, we could end the problems of rape and prostitution altogether. Not only that. Both men AND women would be so much happier.

Anonymous said...

I've been saying this for ever. Rape is about sex. It's about a LACK of power. It's about mental illness. Do you think for one second that all those marauders in history that took over villages, towns and cities didn't LOOK FORWARD to the rape part of pillaging and robbing? Give me a break. Men enjoy sex, free, paid, internet, date rape, real rape, pillaging rape -- any kind of sex. Rape is about sex as much as it is about control, violence, power, anger, and straight up mental illness.

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