This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Definitionally I think rape is defined by agreement/consent prior to and/or during a sexual encounter, which is a conscious and voluntary process, while pleasure and enjoyment are (mostly) involuntary and emotional responses.
Hopefully it's clear that a scenario where a woman expects to enjoy having sex with someone, agrees to have sex with them, and he's not very good and she has a surprisingly poorer experience than anticipated. If she later regrets that decision, and in retrospect should not have agreed to it, they still did agree to it at the time, so it is not retroactively defined as rape (by sane people).
What I'm considering here is the inverse scenario: the woman (or man) does not agree to have sex with someone, the other person forces it, and it's a surprisingly good experience. In retrospect they would have agreed to it (or, at least, would not have objected as strongly), but they still did not agree to it at the time, so it was definitionally rape, and the person who committed the crime is not retroactively absolved of their sins (which had a highly negative result in expectation even if not instantiated in this instance).
I don't think consent is a conscious and voluntary process. Even if we're supposedly defining the word... this new word doesn't seem to be what consent feels like to me.
Your language center's justifications are not always a good predictor of your deeper bodymapped feelings of whether you want to have sex. The actual predictor of trauma is whether or not the body and spirit are engaged or revolting, the language center just provides very circumstantial evidence of the state of body and spirit.
I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.
So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't necessarily think your inverse is fully analogous. We are not necessarily talking just about women who happen to like it during and afterwards, but women who specifically wanted to be raped because they really enjoy or believe they will enjoy that experience. My point is that if she actually does actively want it, then I'm not sure if it's definitionally rape, which I always was told meant forced and unwanted sex.
Furthermore, as another thought experiment that goes beyond just a definitional dispute, I believe someone who really wants to have an encounter like that will be acting differently and giving off different signals, so it's not entirely clear to me if a man who takes the bait is really a rapist, or someone who's on some level playing along with the game she is setting forth. Some of the dispute likely comes down to whether we believe that all consent is truly verbally communicated, or if there are levels of communication that go beyond that.
The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.
This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.
More options
Context Copy link
Well. It can still be forced even if you wanted it. And 'unwanted' can be complicated. The mind is rarely a monolith on such matters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link