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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38806 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Is there some persuasive argument for this that I'm not aware of?

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":

There is a simple and surprisingly durable myth about what causes men to rape women. It goes like this: if a man is too horny, from sexual deprivation or from being constitutionally oversexed, he will lose control in the presence of an unguarded woman. Through the early days of psychology as a science, this basic assumption remained the same. When Richard von Krafft-Ebing wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he assumed that rapists suffered from either ‘priapism and conditions approaching satyriasis’ or a ‘mental weakness’ that allowed lustful urges to escape their control. It was a simple matter of hydraulics. If the pressure was too great, or the vessel too weak, a horrifying crime would burst forth.

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.

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.

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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