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Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
I don't think this is a topic that is THAT secret. It's well known that rape victims sometimes orgasm and feel awful about that, and that is by no means a completely taboo topic in therapeutic communities. (It probably is in many relationships though.) Neither is it at all obvious whether that would make the ordeal overall more or less damaging. If it helps to think of this from a male perspective (I totally assume 98% of people here are male but maybe you're not), think about the female guards at Abu Ghraib torturing male prisoners via sexual touching etc. It's easy to imagine getting turned on in the house of your enemy, and it's just another power your enemy has over you in addition to electric shocks, waterboarding, dogs etc.
The part where a victim just shrugs it off and feels fine, that story I find much less likely and here's where it's complicated. The victim may well feel and tell themselves that they're fine, but then go and act differently in their lives (this is basically the life of many porn actresses). This is damage or impact that the victim can't acknowledge. Is there also sometimes a case where a rape victim can just shrug off what happened and go back to life as it was, just an experience for the wank bank, never to be considered any further? Hmm. Sounds conceptually possible. But then so is it possible to imagine someone who doesn't mind any kind of crime happening to them. It is hard to know quite what to do with that possibility.
I think that's the meat of my claim/conjecture though. Not just that it feels physically good in the moment, but that they literally are happier as a result of the encounter than they were before. Or at least would be absent the social ramifications. You can imagine it happening for any type of crime, but it seems highly implausible for most crimes, but rape seems like the scenario where, because things are so complicated and unstraightforward, you'd have more variance: with some people being damaged by it way more than something simple like being mugged, but some being damaged way less and possibly negative.
If they are not consenting in their minds, something has just happened to them they didn't want or ask for. Most normal people are never going to be happy about that. If they are consenting from the word go, but don't indicate it, then, well, that's just a weirdo.
To be honest I find it easier to imagine someone who shrugs off being beaten up because it gives them a good story or makes them feel more alive, than I do this.
And who's to say that they're normal? Some people are weird. I'm not even slightly suggesting that this is the typical case, because it's obviously not. But some people are weird.
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