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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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