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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)
The basic idea of sin is that there are certain actions which seem likely to cause temporary pleasure but will in the long run only lead to suffering. People generally are sinful, and virtually every conceivable sin has been committed at some point by someone who wanted to do it.
Wanting to get raped is similar to wanting to rape someone in the sense that it is an incorrect, invalid preference. In some senses those who want it to happen are worse off than those who don't--they have a longer way to go to get back to a healthy psyche and the capacity to form stable, healthy romantic relationships. If Sally wants to be raped and it actually happens, this preference may be reinforced and she'll probably seek out more dangerous, unstable, abusive men who trigger to some extent the same desire in her. It's a totally different kind of suffering but just as bad and spread over a much longer period of time.
Our current culture's fervor to recognize all preferences as valid has forgotten an absolutely crucial concept, which is that people can not only make mistakes but have harmful (invalid) preferences. People in general can truly "consent" to virtually anything, including flagrant acts of self-harm, but that doesn't make those acts okay or something society should encourage. It especially doesn't mean their preferences will remain static--someone who burns off their own hands in a fit of mental illness may recover from these disordered preferences in the future and regret their own actions. Consent doesn't carry forward into the future--that person cannot now consent to having no hands; the choice was made for them by their past self.
Sally may not ever fully recover, or recognize that she was harmed, but that doesn't mean she wasn't harmed. This is an uncomfortable position to take because it requires a sense of moral sovereignty. We know what's right for her even if she doesn't, and we say she was harmed even if she disagrees. This is already the position most people take regarding mental illness, even people who think morality/values are entirely subjective, and it has to be extended to less obvious mental illness too. We have to acknowledge that it's possible to have bad preferences, that there is such a thing as an evil action even if its only victim is the perpetrator, because if we don't then our moral philosophies (such as consent-only sexual ethics) will collapse under the weight of all the epicycles they will require.
This is a good argument. I'm certainly not trying to argue that rape is okay if the person enjoyed it. But in this case that would still imply that the appropriate social/therapeutic response to such a victim is entirely different than the response to a more typical rape victim, right? A thing happened to them and instead of traumatizing them due to something horrible that they hated happened, a thing happened to them and it wasn't immediately horrible but instead messed with their preferences and self-perception. Or simply brought to light that their preferences were already messed up. And it doesn't seem like the way to help them heal, the way that society is structured to try to help rape victims heal, would be the same.
Well, from a practical standpoint, I think women are very susceptible to social pressure and telling them that something was traumatic has a good chance of making it actually traumatic. Which ironically enough is what I want in this case--better to be traumatized by something terrible than to seek it out for the rest of your life. I guess there are probably a few people clear-minded enough to see through this, and they need to be dealt with more honestly, but as a society we have no consensus on these things so even something like "that wasn't traumatic but it should have been" is not something everyone will agree on. Probably more effective to say something like "that was traumatic and this is how you process trauma."
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.
Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.
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