Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
53m ago
Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.
I would argue that women have always thought it's wrong, so it seems more like the notion that women's feelings should be considered is peculiar historically. And I don't think it's that peculiar, or that Christians have been particularly better about not raping and treating lower class women as public goods. It is definitely not a uniquely Christian innovation that women have some say in who they marry; Christians are not the first people ever who recognized female agency and gave women rights.
Your reference to Jewish legal codes and Islam makes me think we're going to go down the same road we've gone before, where the worst and most uncharitable readings of what other religious books say should be taken literally, without context, and as exactly what all those people really believe and those with a more humanitarian reading aren't really following their religion, whereas Christianity (and the Old Testament in particular) should be not subjected to similar treatment.
I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
1hr ago
I'm skeptical that Christianity (or Western civilization) is the sole difference, though I know this is a popular theory (with Christians). Yes, large parts of the third world are rapacious hellholes, but there are ancient and contemporary non-Christian societies that do not seem to have been such.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
2hr ago
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.
Have we really known this? What large fraction?
It would be uncharitable to say you are typical-minding here, and I am not trying to establish myself as some kind of saint by saying "What the fuck?" but really... what the fuck? To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.
Obviously there are men who get off on it (I know there are men who will stick their dicks in anything warm), but I'm unconvinced, even if this guy found 72 of them, that they aren't akin to rapists and pedophiles... sure, we all know these urges exist in the male population, and they aren't super-rare, but neither are they... normal.
It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists?
It only vindicates them if you agree with them that this is in fact the natural state of men and we'd all do it if given the chance and that every husband secretly hates his wife. That's certainly a view unironically held in parallel, horseshoe-like, by a certain strain of radical feminists and ultra-misogynists, but the problem is that they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.
And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement
Well, yeah. I doubt even our he-man woman-haters will be able to muster much of a "This wasn't actually bad" argument. How do you defend it? She was unconscious so she didn't really suffer? She's female and therefore should be available for any use to which her husband sees fit? You have to go pretty far out there to defend the indefensible. Some things don't engender disagreement even between liberals and conservatives.
If I had a nickel...
It wouldn't be a lot of nickels, but it would be more than one.
The concise response to this is "balderdash."
The less concise response is basically the same with more words: people (like me) who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property are not the "Women Are Wonderful" simps the latter like to characterize the former as, but merely arguing that we are all human beings and part of rising above our monkey natures (which should be our goal as a species with starfaring ambitions) requires not viewing every relationship as transactional and every other human being as an instrumental good. This includes treating women as Sex, and whatever bad thing you think women treat men as.
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