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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)
It’s always seemed very much that the idea is less the rape part and much more a fantasy of being able to have sex and not be responsible for it. That’s the thing they show in the scenes women like tend to show the woman having sex with a powerful and wealthy man, while not exactly her idea, she enjoys it. And of course since we’re talking rape the woman isn’t responsible for the choice. He raped her, after all.
Now I would consider this the female version of the male fantasy of having hot women hit on him and all but jump on him. The fantasy is different different from the male simply because women aren’t going to fight off most men.
But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.
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