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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?

I think basically any sober analysis will conclude that murder is fairly obviously worse than rape. However: I think most people will think that someone being a rapist (without additional information) makes them a worse person than if they were a murderer (again, without additional information).

I think a large part of the reason is that there are a lot of circumstances where murder is morally permissible or even necessary (self defence, military action, the cops shooting a hostage taker, not to mention the shitloads of revenge stories where we cheer when the protagonist murders the antagonist). There are no similar situations where rape is morally permissible (in most people's views). It's really hard to argue that you raped someone in self defence.

I don't think most of the examples you gave of "murder" are actually murder. Murder implies unlawfulness and malice and lack of justification.

Someone who murders someone else in a fit of [justified, but not to the point of murder] rage can still be regarded as less of a bad person than a rapist.

That's manslaughter, not murder. Examples: NJ ("committed in the heat of passion resulting from a reasonable provocation"), PA ("acting under a sudden and intense passion resulting from serious provocation")

I'd argue that raping the local women in the conquered lands of a heinous defeated enemy is mostly seen as not objectionable in most patriarchal societies especially if we apply the feminist definition of rape to the matter at hand.

Not quite. They may have understood that rape and pillage are bound to happen so the men can cool off, and looked the other way, but it was still morally objectionable.

I think "raping the defeated enemy's women is despicable, even if it is a normal incident of war" is a specifically Christian thing. The Iliad treats the practice as unobjectionable - the driving conflict is over whether the man who captured the girl gets her or his commanding officer does. Islam explicitly condones it, at least according to the simple, obvious reading of the Quran and hadith.

The Greeks took slaves during their conquests and some of the unmarried female slaves became their concubines. Even though the modern world might describe both situations as rape, the Greeks would have sharply distinguished this from e.g. randomly grabbing a fleeing woman and forcibly having sex with her during the sack of Troy. It's possible that the latter was also treated as unobjectionable but your example doesn't prove it.

This is a good point because almost all arguments in the American context are still within a “Christian” moral framework. Honestly think the right is better at making arguments that are foundationally pagan.

The left runs into an issue here that a women can be a free creature able to make her own decisions and then do something so unvirtuous and choose to fuck a dozens guys.

A lot of human rights the left like are just corruptions of Christian ethics. A Roman wouldn’t have a moral thought bending over his slave girl.

Morality laws and norms varied a lot over the course of the Empire. Augustus criminalized adultery, for example. And the later part of the empire literally adopted Christianity, although I assume that wasn't your intended comparison.

Is it really morally objectionable if no one's actually gonna do anything about it, including those who could do something about it?

Welcome to the real world, I suppose. If we were all prosecuting every morally objectionable act regardless of how inconvenient and impractical it is to do so, we'd have unlocked world peace a long time ago. Unfortunately, you need those soldiers guarding your village when you're the one getting invaded, raped and pillaged.

People frequently did do something about it, up to and including killing the rapist soldiers. Generally speaking, officers/generals who kept their soldiers from raping conquered women have often been portrayed as positive.

They also frequently didn't do anything about it, but AFAIK it has been a point of contention in many cultures. Definitionally, nobody can keep the conquerors from doing what they want in the moment (that's the whole point of conquering!), so the only thing you can do is portray benevolent conquerors heroically, and cruel conquerors negatively after-the-fact.

IMO the key difference to today is that it was overwhelmingly seen as one vice among many, not as that singular horrible crime that overrules anything else.

They generally limited it for pragmatic reasons and not for moral reasons such as offering terms of surrender without raping will get the city to not fight you.

Perhaps in part because treatment of civilians by conquering armies was just generally extremely poor- the looting, massacres, enslavement, etc would also not be acceptable today.

Sure. My reasoning is in the context of modern western society, in which very few people believe that central examples of war crimes are bad.

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