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I recently came across something while listening to a crime podcast that I have heard many times before. The adage that "rape is about power, not sex". I have literally heard this since teachers told me this in school. The most recent context as I mentioned was a crime podcast. Specifically the hosts were covering a case committed in Thailand I believe, and they were saying that the suspects favored by the police were likely wrongfully accused/targeted because they were illegal immigrants. As a point of evidence in favor of their innocence, the hosts remarked that the confession extracted by the police gave the motive as uncontrollable lust at seeing the victim behaving in a promiscuous way (making out with her boyfriend in public). The hosts pointed out that since science has proven that rape has nothing to do with sex, and only with power, this explanation was obviously false and the product of a coerced confession.
But upon thinking about this, how does this make any sense at all? If rape had nothing to do with sex, shouldn't we expect men and ninety year old women to be raped just as often as twenty year old women when attacked? After all, wouldn't it be an even greater assertion of power to assert your power over a male than over a female? Of course rapes of males by males happen, but to my knowledge generally in a prison or explicitly homosexual context, in either case where women are off the menu. I can't tell you how many cases I have heard where a couple is attacked, the man is killed and the woman is raped then killed. I don't know if I have ever heard of a case where a heterosexual couple is attacked, the woman killed (without assault) and the man raped then killed. Furthermore, doesn't rape require some level of sexual interest from the perpetrator (assuming he doesn't use an object or something else)?
I just can't believe how often this "fact" is trotted out as if it is completely proven. I can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could even theoretically be proven, except maybe by observing that heterosexual perpetrators were just as likely to rape men as women (which is not the case to my knowledge). How did such a fact come to be accepted without challenge? Is there some persuasive argument for this that I'm not aware of? What would the purpose of making this up be? Is it just to distance the woman's behavior/dress and general victim blaming from the crime?
One major problem that hasn't been mentioned yet with the idea that "rape is about power, not sex" is that this ignores, or deliberately downplays the fact that men and women actually commit rape at fairly comparable rates. Part of the motivation behind conceptualising rape as about power was to use rape as part of the ideological framework of feminist patriarchy theory - that men, and only men, commit rape, and do so as a tool of power to subjugate and oppress women. The violent 'enforcement mechanism' of patriarchy. Of course, this falls apart if you acknowledge the reality that women can and do commit rape against men in non-insignificant numbers.
The CDC periodically conducts and releases data on the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. In the latest report on data from 2016/2017, 2.3% of women reported being raped in the last 12 months. In the same report, 0.3% of men reported being raped during the last 12 months. Case closed, right? Women get raped significantly more than men. No, because there is a significant slight of hand going on. The NISVS uses a specific definition of rape:
Men who are made to penetrate a woman are excluded from this definition of rape. Instead they are listed under a far more innocuous sounding category of 'made to penetrate'. 1.3% of men reported being made to penetrate in the last 12 months. In other words, what most people commonly understand as being rape (that is, nonconsensual sex). In some years, men have even reported a high rate of made-to-penetrate than women have of rape (e.g. in 2011, men reported 1.7% made-to-penetrate in the last 12 months, women reported 1.6% rape in the last 12 months). However, this has not prevented dishonest or ignorant actors constantly taking the 'rape' statistics of men and women at face value and comparing them to one another to make generalised statements.
(Note - there are plenty of other ways to dissect the CDC data, and as a generally speaking the numbers are probably inflated across the board compared to reality. I will also add that these male and female victimisation rates are not even considering the fact that men are far less likely to conceptualise an experience as 'rape' or sexual assault, while women are far more likely to do so.)
Why does the CDC use what is apparently such a biased and misleading definition of rape and made-to-penetrate. Because the CDC's definitions and research were and are heavily influenced by Mary P. Koss, one of, if not the leading researcher on sexual assault and rape, and feminist. Koss has served as a long-term advisor to the CDC, and the CDC has pretty much adopted Koss' definition of rape wholesale. Koss essentially believes that men can't be raped, and that it would be inappropriate to call men who are raped, as raped:
Koss has been involved with advising many other prominent organisations like the FBI, the WHO and World Bank. Koss is also the origin of other feminist sexual assault and rape myths, including the claim that 1 in 4 college women have been raped, using extremely poor and biased research methods.
Koss may be just one (highly influential) person, but the bias in the conceptualisation and reporting of rape as exclusively or near-exclusively a men-on-women crime is much greater than that. In many jurisdictions, it is legally impossible for a woman to rape a man. This is because the laws in many countries or states specifically define rape as a crime that only a man can commit against a woman. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 in England and Wales defines rape in a similar way to the CDC, where rape is the nonconsensual penetration of the victim by the offender's penis. In India (Section 375 Indian Penal Code), rape is a crime explicitly defined as a crime that a man commits against a women. In the US, it varies state by state, some being better than others. In practice, some of these jurisdictions prosecute women-on-men rape (made-to-penetrate) under sexual assault laws, but even when they are theoretically equivalent to rape prosecution 'under a different name', they still often carry far less social sigma and often lesser sentencing guidelines. 'Sexual assault' sounds less heinous than 'rape'.
So in conclusion, rape is not only not about power, but it's also not exclusively a male perpetrated crime. However, there are significant social and legal barriers to recognising the reality of rape and the existence of male victims and female perpetrators. It's easy to think of rape as only something men do when institutions and society at large have explicitly defined rape as only something men can do, and then this is used to dishonestly support false narratives around sexual relations.
I don't have an informed opinion about this, but I find this strange for two reasons:
It's pretty well-established that men commit more violent crimes than women in general.
It's pretty well-established that men like sex much more than women in general.
Given these two facts, I'd predict that, not only do men commit much more rape than women, but the male:female: perpetrator ratio for rape would be even higher than for other violent crimes. The data appear to suggest otherwise. What explains this unexpected result?
(My best-guess explanation is that the CDC data is wrong somehow, but I haven't looked much into it, and I don't know why it would be wrong.)
To your first point, I would say it's an category error to group rape in with violent crime in general. Rape (against women) is really given a special status by society at large separate from other forms of crime. Rape is considered so heinous that even hardened criminals (i.e. the people actually committing violent crimes) find it shameful and disgusting. Rapists are routinely targeted within prison and beaten or otherwise attacked to the point often have to be removed from the general population. Rapist is as about low status as you can get in virtually every culture or subculture, including the criminal. Additionally, when men do commit violent crimes, they mostly target other men, and generally try to avoid victimising women. Even male robbers and muggers who otherwise proudly boast about their crimes are extremely reluctant to mention victimising women, only men, and those that do are ashamed of it and/or insist that they normally only target men. Lastly, the stereotype of violent rape in a dark alley by a stranger is extremely rare. The vast majority of rapes are 'non-violent', that is to say, they mostly occur between at least acquaintances where (especially) coercion, intoxication and dubious consent (i.e. social manipulation) are the modes of rape, which women are just as capable of men.
To your second point, I would first say that while I generally agree with your point that men have a higher sexual drive than men, it's not like women are completely dissimilar and don't have a sex drive, I don't think the difference is that big. But the real issue is how men's 'sexual agency' exists in context with society at large. Both men and women have it drilled into them that men have high libidos ('they always want it') and women are more prudish in general. Whether this reflects an underlying truth or not is immaterial here - the point is that this is the social context people operate in. For this reason, men have it drilled into them they have to seek women's approval (consent) for sex and generally have a greater responsibility for having 'ethical' sex for lack of a better term. This is ramped up to 11 in the current culture where 'consent training' for men is everywhere where men have to learn how to seek consent from women. Little to none expected of women inversely to seek the consent of men however - men are always up for it. Besides, men are physically stronger than women, so they can just stop her, right? Which conveniently ignores that rape is mostly committed through social coercion and manipulation which is just as applicable for women raping men, and a man who uses too much physical force against women is in a whole other world of trouble. Basically, society has always put great effort into enculturating men 'not to rape' (that is, seek respectful sexual interaction with women), while if anything we do the opposite with women.
Having heard and read quite a number of stories of male victims of female rapists, one of the most common themes among the stories is that the female rapists often are completely unaware that they are raping their male victim. They are so unaware of the fact that maybe their male victim doesn't want to have sex that the fact they could be raping them doesn't enter their minds (something that is much hard for similar men/male rapists to believe, but it does happen). A typical story is something like the man goes to a party, gets drunk, passes out/goes to sleep, wakes up a few hours later to find a woman having sex with him. He may avoid saying no and forcing her off him because he doesn't want to offend her, or he's personally accepted the narrative that men want sex (i.e. he blames himself the same way many female victims of rape do). Even if he does say no, he often won't resort to physical force, because men know that using physical force/violence against women regardless of circumstance is a big no-no. In the more malicious cases that do exist, the female rapist will often tell the male victim that she will publicly accuse him of raping her if he doesn't have sex with her. In the aftermath of the rape, the female victim often fails to conceptualise what she did as rape even well after the fact, and the man also struggles to conceptualise it as rape, even if he is traumatised by it. If he does tell his friends (both men and women), by and large they won't believe it was rape and that he actually wanted it, something that is much much less likely to happen under similar circumstances with a female victim. Which ultimately leads into one of the issues about trying to quantify rates of rape - men are far less likely to conceptualise a rape as rape, while women are far more like to do so.
As to the reliability of the CDC study, I will say that the CDC is pretty much the best, large-scale data available on sexual assault and rape. The issue is fundamentally hard to quantify by its nature and does rely heavily on self-reporting victimisation data. As I said in the original post, my suspicion is that numbers are probably inflated across the board - self-victimisation reports often have a false positive bias. I will say that this these numbers fit in line with the data that shows that domestic violence has gender symmerty. To go back to your first point a bit, interpersonal/relational violence (that is, violence against people you have a personal relationship with) is distinct from violent crime/violence committed against strangers/'the public'. By all indications, women seem to use interpersonal violence as least as much as men, and perhaps even more, while men commit the majority of stranger violence. This fits into my hypothesis that most violent crime being committed by men is strongly tied to the fact that men are both expected to be and are more agentic in public. Men often commit violence on behalf of women, or share the benefits of violent crime with women.
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Certainly some rape is about power. Someone rich and famous can easily hire the best call girls on the market. They can easily find enough women who will eagerly have sex with them. If they coerce a woman, then it's the coercion that is important to them, getting someone to do what they didn't want to do. Of course it's not solely about power, there are lots of things you can force people to do if you hold power over them. Why sex? Let's look at four situations:
Mr. Big summons Alice into his office, tells her her friend and subordinate Carol is a lousy worker that must be fired if she wants to keep her job. He summons Carol into his office and forces Alice to berate and fire her friend.
Mr. Big summons Bob into his office, tells him his friend and subordinate Dave is a lousy worker that must be fired if he wants to keep his job. He summons Dave into his office and forces Bob to berate and fire his friend.
Mr. Big summons Alice into his office, tells her she is a lousy worker that must be fired. If she wants to keep her job, she will have to give Mr. Big blowjobs every morning.
Mr. Big summons Bob into his office, tells him he is a lousy worker that must be fired. If he wants to keep his job, he will have to give Mr. Big blowjobs every morning.
Situations 1 and 2 are equally likely to happen. But it's hard to image situation 4 if Mr. Big is heterosexual. Or situation 3 if Alice is 65 and overweight. Or situation 3 if Mr. Big is gay. Is it just the sexual appeal of the victim? No.
If Alice is known around the office to be an easy lay, forcing her to fire her best friend is probably better than a blowjob. But if she's religious, married, a lesbian, has refused Mr. Big advances before, then exercising your power to get what you would never get otherwise is a real rush.
Does this apply to every rape? Probably not. Marital rape and date rape are mostly about getting what is "owed": I wined you, I dined you, I am owed sex in return. Or I married you, this means we both gave irrevocable consent to have sex with each other. "Her skirt was too short" rape is similar: she wore provocative clothing that night, laughed at our jokes and touched our arms, she agreed to go to Jake's house to continue the party, she must be a slut, and sluts owe people sex by definition.
Of course, if you squint hard enough you can kinda merge these two rape types: "I am taking what's rightfully mine, either because there's a framework I can use to justify that it is mine, or because might makes right, and I have might aplenty"
OR sexual attraction isn't totally fungible and therefore people will pursue an object of attraction even if it costs more than finding other, attractive people. (And/or people are lazy)
This would also explain why porn stars even exist in the first place. Or why some men pay a premium for certain Onlyfans models when free porn is so abundant. Or why celebrity sex tape leaks or the Fappening - the leaking of the nudes of multiple famous Hollywood stars - was such a big deal.
All these match up perfectly with sexual attraction not being totally fungible but not necessarily with power being a significant attractor (I have no power over Kim Kardashian because I went out of my way to watch her sex tape)
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In any discussion of rape, I think it is important to zoom out on homo sapiens as a species and ask if humans commit more rape than other species. Just to reach a baseline.
Because I think some of the default assumptions and first principles of feminism are not grounded in reality, evolutionary theory, or science, generally.
The feminist response to this is to dispute definitions. Since rape is specifically a show of power over another, animals without the cognitive machinery for complex culture, consciousness, and morals are simply engaging in mere forced copulation.
Any non-homosapiens species which may have the cognitive machinery capable for rape, clearly also has the machinery for patriarchy etc. and so the smoking gun is found.
There could be a real empirical disagreement here. It could be the feminist believes there is a sizable portion of rapists who, upon learning that their victim wants it would just completely change gears because the rapist's real goal is to be mean, not to get laid.
This definition has the hemlock problem where we can't say a person is raped unless we knew why the perpetrator engaged in the forced copulation.
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A big part of that belief is that progressivism is uncomfortable with declaring sex off limits under any circumstances and so tends to define sex acts it’s uncomfortable with as being about power, instead.
And every ideology to some extent or another does something similar; some religious people frame their tax complaints about being opposed to government funding for planned parenthood because they’re uncomfortable with opposing taxes.
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I think one you're not really considering is that this argument was made countering a prior argument about what motivates rape. That prior argument being primarily the "Hydraulic Theory of Rape":
Man gets too horny and can't get off, so he commits rape. Or to put it differently, Rape is about sex: men need sex, if they can't get it honestly they'll steal it violently. How can we test this?
One way would be to see if Rapists have a below-average number of partners prior to the crime, so they can't get an "honest" release. That doesn't hold up consistently, lots of men who are prolific rapists have numerous opportunities to have consensual sex but choose to commit rape anyway. Numbers are seriously sketchy by nature, but have found that rapists typically have more consensual sexual partners than the average non-rapist. So that's a strike against the hydraulic theory, and points to there being a non-sexual element to rape. Which probably comes out as power, since on the list of human desires it can't be food or shelter and we've already ruled out sex.
Personally, I doubt we can attribute all rape to a single cause, and I'm not sure examining "rape" as a category makes sense as currently defined. Any more than trying to come up with a single category of motivation that explains shoplifting, embezzlement, wage theft, not returning a wallet you found on the ground, overcharging on utility bills, and taxation. To say that specific-act consent violations in an ongoing sexual relationship are motivated by the same thing as violent stranger rape as drunken date rape as mass rape in wartime. Some are probably more motivated by things like power or a sense of control or hatred than by anything in common with consensual eros.
...If I'm understanding this passage correctly, the people advocating the "hydraulic theory" are treating rape as a deterministic phenomenon, a medical condition that can be cured or prevented. This seems almost exactly as stupid as claiming that rape has nothing to do with sex at all.
Two Aggies are working on a house. One is hammering in nails, but every second or third nail he looks at in disgust, and throws away. "What's wrong with those nails?" asks the second Aggie.
"They made 'em backward," says the first. "point's on the wrong end."
"Well quit throwing them away, you idiot! We'll use those on the other side of the house!"
That's what this dispute reminds me of: people getting the question obviously wrong, and then other people correcting them with an alternative that is also obviously wrong.
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I don't think you can really make this leap. The most prolific pirates of copyrighted media and music tend to be the most passionate fans of that media/music and spend more on it than the average person. I imagine a similar phenomenon could be taking place here - if an individual man has a much higher sex drive than average that would explain both sexually-motivated rape alongside a higher number of consensual partners.
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It's true that we can't attribute any of those crimes to a single cause. There's not really any reason to reduce crimes to causes is there? People steal because they want things, and people rape because they're horny.
I've never heard a coherent defense of, "rape is about power not sex" that appealed to truth. They all appeal to something orthogonal, like, "it's good therapy" or "it brings positive social change." The slogan is not even wrong, it's just a tool.
I don't go as far as to say it's a tribal signal though.
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In an old thread about this, someone linked to Steve Pinker's AMA, in which he had this to say;
https://www.old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a67x4/i_am_steve_pinker_a_cognitive_psychologist_at/c8ug2in/
Anyways, years ago there was a thread in AskReddit, in which someone asked rapists why they rape. It was a long thread, but one component that was noticeable was that it clearly had nothing to do with power. This, of course, pissed off a ton of people, and the thread was shut down and later scrubbed because it was deemed harmful. I think some 'psychologist' had come out to say that the thread could encourage more people to rape? Anyways, that seemed like a significant moment where the tide began to turn for open discourse on Reddit.
I remember reading the archive of that askreddit. The dominant theme was that almost every one of those rapists was 1) male 2) young and 3) not seeing himself as committing rape. That tends to add up to it being about horny and not power.
Much of the backlash to the thread was that other commenters responded with sympathy. The stories had convinced many users that some cases were in a moral gray area. This was connected to a feminist opposition to rapists being allowed to communicate with the general population in an affirmative space, and some disgust at hearing the stories and the misogynistic views implied by them.
[The psychiatrist response] (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/xf5c2/reddit_are_you_aware_how_dangerous_the_askarapist/) makes an overly-sophisticated point (contrary to the more commonsense opposition described above) that was eaten up for some reason. Arguing that rape is about power and that raping a conscious person means you get off on hurting or horrifying people (I'd argue that this is partially true but is itself sexual), he claims that the rapists in the thread were getting off on horrifying an imagined audience.
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A lie repeated over and over becomes truth, that adage is self evident too, given that there is no evidence that Goebbels actually said anything of the sort. This my favourite rebuttal of this myth. An excerpt to add on to what you've described in the 2nd paragraph:
There's something similar on stalking as well, its often not due to any consciously learnt behaviour as it is an act of impulse and primal instinct.
I think that while most(?) people do take this as fact, despite the efforts to "unlearn" the supposed entitlement have yielded no tangible results, a part of the effort is to regurgitate this trope that "men in power" is always a bad thing, even dangerous and predatory towards women.
I find this paragraph to be incredibly naïve at best and kinda dumb at worst.
Of course people who are already powerful, who have had a little tase, will want to express that urge throughout their life. It is blindly obvious when you look at how the elite operate.
Of course raping someone who is of lower status than you fulfills this urge more perfectly; the lower status makes it better, not worse.
This whole passage seems to come from someone who has never actually had a fraught social interaction in their life.
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I feel like the train of logic might be:
Rape is bad,
But sex is good, (at least, we can't say otherwise without sounding uncool, like old-fashioned prudes.)
So rape must be rooted in something bad (power) instead of something good (sex.)
People will readily believe flimsy and implausible theories that make the world seem to work in a more just way. (See also: Todd Akin.)
Notice that, if rape is about power and not sex, the rhetoric can push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy, and not on concepts like self-control like religions of old (that are bad because they are hierarchical).
Rape is about power, not sex = another instance of academics trying to do their distruption of eternal fascism.
What does "push on the notion of deconstruction of the hierarchy" mean? I'm familiar with left-leaning ideologies saying "hierarchies bad" and calling everything fascism, but what does the power-sex question have to do with it?
The main focus of the New Left is the analysis of hierarchies, power and how different groups and concepts and words interact with each other in the creation of hierarchical organization, born from the desire of finding, analyzing and deconstructing every structure that can remotely generate fascism again.
While sex is a biological function, and so is extremely difficult to dismantle without sounding as a crazy ideologue, power was the perfect word to use.
If rape = power we switch the focus from "maybe males biologically leans to lust, sex and degeneration, and that is life" to "Patriarchy and male dominancy derive only from the fact that exist a hierarchy of male power that provokes rapes, oppression or discrimination"
If it is the second case, this hierarchy can actually be deconstructed through education, word-renaming and all the usual instruments, causing another crack in the Hierarchy.
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The one could instead simply say, "sex is good, if its consensual" without resorting to sophistry like, "intercourse without consent isn't sex."
Now, there are very important aspects of sex where the consent and desire is important. For example, I would not expect incels to get off on rape for the same reason they don't get off on prostitutes: they wish to be desired. I don't think those are the kind of considerations feminists have in mind when they say "rape isn't sex."
Focusing on consent might be counterproductive though, if another goal is to e.g. taboo age-gap relationships between older men and younger women. "Power differential" discourse has all of the tools necessary to simply declare such relationships rape.
While we're at it with the whole "deflate common feminist talking points taken as fact" thing: I'm dubious about this as well. Obviously human connection matters to people, but I think this is emphasized for the same reason "rape is power" is - i.e. the ruling ideology prefers stories that downplay sex differences.
Here's another theory: incels are more likely to be less socially adroit, anxious, avoidant types who rationalize their general avoidance of risk via the most socially palatable (almost virtuous!) explanation.
If you've gone multiple decades without any sexual experience why be adamantly opposed to paying for it just to get the monkey of inexperience off your back? It makes much more sense if you're just scared.
If a man is reluctant to ask women out because they can't take the fear or risk of rejection, why would I need a separate explanation for why they don't take part in a likely illegal process that ends at the same place?
First, let me clarify my invocation of incels: I wasn't making an empirical claim about the real community. My sentence should be read as tautological: "There are some people who wish to be desired" and I used "incel" as the closest-match within inferential distance. I think enough incels fit this profile that I wasn't being dishonest. Since my post was arguing that "consent is not an important aspect of sex aka intercourse," I thought it honest to give a case where consent was the vital concern.
Now onto your reply: I think risk-aversion fits the incel profile exactly. What did you mean by virtuous? Normally, I consider "moral" and "virtuous" to be synonyms. I'm not sure if "I wish to be desired" is really moral, but I would say it is flattering, because it doesn't require admitting cowardice. I think most incels claim to be smart (forbidden knowledge, woke/redpilled, etc.), but do not claim to be moral.
I think you're right that incels don't take kindly to the idea that they are cowards, so I do feel a little confused. My current best-guess is that by calling incels cowardly, you are making empirical claims (for example: that they have agency and can change their lives), and so you are contradicting incel orthodoxy. I'm not sure if incels even can get offended, by anything.
It's relative: "I don't go to prostitutes cause I wish to be authentically desired" comes across far better than "I'm too scared to ask out a woman so I'm probably going to be too scared to risk the illegal sex market and that's the
onlymain reason I'm not objectifying someone".One involves a positive (though not exceptional) trait and panders to the ideology of the biggest incel critics. The other is just - to use your word- cowardice.
TBH: I wasn't even aiming at "incel orthodoxy" so much as the mainstream orthodoxy that prefers and promotes this particular explanation. As I said: I think that orthodoxy is driven by the same thing behind the "rape is power": a refusal to reckon with sex differences and the messy issue of distributing sex.
"Incel orthodoxy" is quite rightly seen as the silly product of depressive and polarized thinking and ignored in other places (e.g. the idea that looks are all that matter or that average men have no hope in the sexual marketplace). I didn't even think I had to debunk it, since most people take it with a grain of salt.
My skepticism is precisely that we're being asked to take avoidants at their word that - conveniently- the risky thing they're too scared to do actually doesn't interest them at all and wouldn't help in the slightest. But only in this case.
When they say dating is hopeless cause women rate 80% of men as unattractive or their chins condemn them to genetic oblivion everyone suddenly agrees with me that maybe we can't just believe such people and they may be rationalizing their failure/avoidance.
Now I'm confused because you added objectification to the mix! Are you saying incels believe "we don't see prostitutes because objectification is wrong?" Because I certainly never have heard them say that. I think incels mostly say (a) "we don't see prostitutes because they aren't authentic." An alternative reasoning, (b) "we don't see prostitutes because objectification is wrong" seems mututally exclusive, completely incompatible. I do agree that (b) panders to their critics, but I've never seen it. And of course, professing (a) lets them hide from perhaps the true reason, the aptly-lettered (c) "we don't see prostitutes because we are cowards"
Ah now I understand! You're saying that since mainstream orthodoxy is already in the business of calling incels deluded and (perhaps unconsciously) running from the truth in some cases (chins), why would we take them at their word for other cases (prostitutes)! That's a good insight I've never heard articulated before.
If I had to guess, it's because you're assessing incels from a descriptivist POV. You identify psychological factors (avoidance) and see how those cause the relevant behaviors.
The mainstream position is normative, saying, "incels deserve their lot in life." The easiest way to fit the chin issue into that narrative is to call them liars; but the prostitutes issue isn't really an issue. I don't think most people think about the nuanced beliefs of incels.
Maybe I'm wrong about the mainstream position and I've actually described an "anti incel" position -- I'm not sure.
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Oh, yes. I'd say that it's probably best if "consensual" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sex to be good. (Of course, I care less about avoiding sounding like an old-fashioned prude about this, which may explain my strategic freedom here...) Otherwise one ends up playing word games with "consensual" in order to take sex acts which would seem to meet the straightforward definition of the word but are nevertheless bad and condemn them based on the only criterion considered valid, and make that criterion seem less and less sensible in the process.
I've expressed the sentiment before that I'm afraid that overloading good-affected concepts may lead them to collapse, and I would rather not have such a thing happen here.
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The reason rape is worse than murder is because a women's value in society is her body. When feminists say, "a woman is worth more than her body" they are speaking normatively, or more accurately, saying "a woman ought to be worth more than her body." Undoubtedly, feminists will deny this, and say that no, they really mean a descriptive to be. "Rape is about power" therefore asserts the worth women.
When opponents of sexual redistribution say "sex is not a commodity" they are also speaking normatively. They will deny this, but prostitution's position as the oldest profession implies that descriptively speaking, sex simply is a commodity. Women intuitively understand the value of their sex appeal, as any cursory glance at social media reveals. I also have funny anecdotes of female friends volunteering egregious details of their sex lives (apparently women talk to each other about this) and once she figured out I wasn't gay, she was imminently disgusted at me. The implication here is that since I enjoyed hearing it, I was being a free-rider.
"Men undergo some experience and feel raped" is just about the most pathetic anecdote ever, so I might as well go all in and give an example of that, too. One time I gave money to a panhandler and I felt unsafe. It's unclear to me if feeling unsafe was important to my overall vibe, but it bared remarkable correspondence to a drunk college girl:
he didn't use force
I regretted my actions afterwards
I felt like a chump
I think the last bullet point here is very important to "the feeling of being raped." What's extra funny is already having crystalized these beliefs, I came across this clip (Did you know Chris Hansen had another show about catching a different kind of criminal?), so clearly jaded men like me aren't the only ones trivializing rape. (To those not aware of the context: the woman was a victim of identity theft and lost a lot of money).
To recap, if rape is about sex then an uncomfortable truth would come to light: that a woman's value is her body.
Why the link to TvTropes? In fiction, there's a much clearer reason why rape is considered worse than murder - the readers are, unconsciously or not, prudish in nature and find violence more acceptable than something of a sexual nature.
Another reason why it intuitively feels worse than murder is that I could imagine myself (if the conditions were sufficiently extreme) perhaps killing another person with my own free will. Not so with rape; even though the act of murder itself is worse in my ethical calculus, rape categorically reveals the base nature of the perpetrator in a way murder doesn't.
I'd compare it with somebody who has their pet cat put down so they could cook and eat it. Morally not much worse than cooking some calamari, but it really says something about how messed up the person is.
Technically, there are cases where rape could be justified; it's just that most of the ones that are actually physically possible* are also so bizarre that one can assume they're negligible. The most plausible one is probably "fuckhead kidnaps man and woman, fuckhead tells man that unless man rapes woman - and no explaining to get her consent - fuckhead will shoot both man and woman".
And of course, all of the above deals with dictionary rape, not statutory rape, which is a huge mess and can be totally free of moral turpitude (the case I know off the top of my head went "girl seduces boy, boy asks for ID, girl provides fake ID, boy has consensual sex with girl, boy arrested for raping girl over girl's protests"; I think some nations' laws even have the insane edge case where if a minor forcibly rapes an adult, the adult is guilty of rape because strict liability).
*I'm thinking cases like the myth in Africa that having sex with a virgin cures HIV. If this were true, which it is not, there would be some hard moral questions in the case of HIV-positive individuals whom no virgin wanted to have sex with.
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I don't understand your objection. Are you saying people who read in particular find rape worse than people who don't?
I see TvTropes as being about fiction in general, so does your claim also apply to be who watch or play their media?
Although TvTropes is "about fiction," it is cataloging real phenomenons. I was making the (not so controversial, in my opinion) claim that society sees rape as worse than murder. That works of fiction portray this truth is downstream of real societal attitudes. "Why link to X" feels like a wrong question, unless you provide an alternative Y or have a compelling argument to leave it in plaintext.
Yes, I understand that. I just don't think TvTropes is a good source for those saying what is or isn't an attitude. It feels a bit too...removed? Yes, removed.
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There’s another explanation, which I think is preferable: a person’s social value is linked to their reproductive potential, a woman’s reproductive potential is 100x more important than a man’s biologically due to pregnancy (which we grasp intuitively), a woman’s psycho-sexuality is more sensitive to acts of aggression, and society must control mating in order to function.
We don’t have to say “a woman’s value is her body”, we can say “a woman’s body is especially valuable, and the damage of rape is uniquely evil to a woman’s mind and her society”.
Since spousal rape was legal almost everywhere (the definition of rape included that perp isn't the husband), it's evident that society cared about certainty of paternity, not woman's emotions. They didn't have paternity testing, or even pregnancy testing nor postcoital contraception. Now we have all that, but customs are old and even feminists keep parts of it.
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First, I want to note that my use of "body" here is a kind of metaphor for reproduction, which it sounded like you understood.
Next, I want to make sure I understand your point, so I will paraphrase what I heard:
Certainly, (b) is correct, because we don't make a big deal out of male rape victims.
The reason we also know (a) is correct is because rape is worse than murder, because most people get mind-killed about the subject and low-decouplers write extensive mental gymnastics (masquerading as arguments) asserting that rape is a special case that has no analogue.
In an alternate world where the same emotional valence was not applied to any rape but was instead only applied to, say, domestic abuse, we could say (a) is false.
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Rape is obviously about sex. Date rape wouldn't be the most common form of rape if it wasn't about sex.
As for why people claim otherwise, a few theories:
Sex is a basic human biological drive. If a starving person steals a loaf of bread, we tend to consider their actions at least partially justified, because they were driven by biological need. If rape is about sex, this opens the door to potentially justifying or exculpating rapists in certain circumstances.
If rape is about sex, this implies victims who dressed or acted sexy increased their odds of victimization, and this is too much like victim blaming.
An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality. Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape. History shows that many men, under the right circumstances, could. Look at the aftermath of almost every successful military conquest in history, for instance.
As a further corollary to #3, imagine you could somehow do a study where you asked the following question and got a totally honest answer from the study participants: "Imagine you have just committed rape. What do you think was your reason or motivation for doing so?" I think the average female answer would be something like "I hated that person and wanted to ruin their life and make them feel violated." I think the average male answer would be something like "They were just so incredibly sexy and I was just so turned on I lost control of myself." I think men and women will therefore tend to model the motivations of rapists differently because they get different answers when they try to introspect about what could possibly drive someone to commit rape.
remember that the current FBI definition of rape is
"penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim."
So if a woman were to tie a man up and have sex with him against his will, it would not legally be considered rape by the FBI, unless she penetrated his anus.
However, "made to penetrate" sexual assault, which is how the CDC defines women having sex with men without their consent is apparently much more common than previously acknowledged.
Indeed, in my own experience, I find that I have been "raped" (i.e. made to penetrate without my consent,) by four women in my lifetime. Always while I had been asleep. In one case, a new girlfriend mounted me while I slept without a condom, even though I had been meticulous in my use of condomes. In a second case, a different girlfriend tried to put a condom on me after I had passed out drunk. She woke me up with sex and the condom fell off at some point. In a third case, a girlfriend invited her friend to perform fellatio on me while I was sleeping.
#metoo functioned as a major redpill for me because I had a close friend falsely accused of rape. As I began to understand exactly how feminists now define rape, I gradually became aware that according to the feminist definition of the term, I had been raped by four different women in my life, and sexually assaulted by others. The absolute hypocrisy and lack of awareness deeply disturbs me to this day, since all of those same women who raped me are strong feminists who jumped on the "believe all women" bandwagon.
I don't know what the answer to the social problem of rape is. However, I do know firsthand that modern academic feminism is built upon glaciers of bullshit over decades and their approach to the problem consistently make society worse because of a deep rooted denial of reality.
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I would blame it mostly on this tbh. In order to prevent claims of sexual difference from being used to justify disadvantaging women feminists have crawled into a dangerous hole: denying them altogether.
This "problem" can be seen in many other places - most notably in the claims that men are "shallow" in their looks-based preferences or are, even more fantastically, predators who want nubile young women for purposes of emotional manipulation.
If that shocking failure of cognitive empathy is showcased with vehemence amongst feminists every day I'm not surprised they'd deny claims of sexual difference in desire or the role it plays in assault.
From a purely rhetorical and tactical perspective "this is an evil abomination" is a better sell than "this is an aspect of male sexuality we need to watch and keep under control". Because the latter has been associated with not just limits on men but on women especially, for prudence's sake. After all: they are the party at risk.
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With regards to (1) there is some equivocation between the biological meaning of a drive (in which case sex is a drive, as any scientist would tell you) with the spiritual or moral meaning of drives. If "sex is as important as food" really was an axiom of most people, then prostitution would be legal and sexual redistribution would be in the overton window. So I don't think bullet (1) is valid. Your other points seem solid though.
The point I am getting at is roughly the "sex is good/important" progressive viewpoint @YE_GUILTY stated above, though perhaps he articulated it better.
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This sounds just like a discussion we had in the Motte a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u66abs/comment/i5hi84w/
Here's what I had to say about it:
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Rape is about power, just like any other violent crime. - Adam Carolla explains.
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Rape is obviously about sex, which is why the most popular targets of rape are the most popular targets of sexual desire, that being pretty young women, and not Jeff Bezos or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who would both be vastly more impressive conquests in terms of the power displayed.
To be fair though, Bezos and the rock are vastly more impressive conquests in part because they would require a lot more power to victimise than pretty young women. I think power is one dynamic at play in that sense, but it can't be the be all and end all - it requires more power to target a pretty young girl than a feeble old woman too, but victims of rape are way more likely to be under the age of 35 than over 65.
"Rape is all about power, not about sex" always seemed kind of callous to me though. It feels like a cope, although an incredibly disturbing one - you often hear it said after a person sees the victim for the first time, and to me it comes across as something like "Wait what? This ugly person got raped and I can't get a date? Rape must be about power, there is no way the rapist found her sexy." Which is also why I think people just go along with it - they don't want to even consider where this meme came from or why it's so popular, because they don't want to learn it is that cope.
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