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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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This sounds just like a discussion we had in the Motte a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u66abs/comment/i5hi84w/

Here's what I had to say about it:

The reason I was surprised to hear you say that "sexual desire plays no role in rape" is provably false is that I've heard this my whole life, and from many not-so-feminist sources. It's just something I never even really thought to question. I feel like it's just common knowledge that rape is about power, not about sexual desire. But the fact that it's common knowledge doesn't mean that it's true, and it doesn't mean that it hasn't been helped along or put in place by feminist or other progressive advocacy.

So now that you talk about it, it is interesting that feminists simultaneously:

  • say that rape is about power, not about sexual desire
  • advocate for increasingly lax standards of rape, like even if a guy gets his girlfriend to say yes to sex after she said no the first time. Or if a guy goes home with a drunk girl from a bar.

Like, if 2 is rape, then it obviously wouldn't be about power any more than any normal sex would be. Because from the guy's perspective, it is just normal sex, he's not going out of his way to rape anyone. So either there's more than one type of rape, one of which can be driven by sexual desire and one is not, in which case we should acknowledge that the two are different. Or else sexual desire does play a role in rape, in which case we need to accept that that carries additional baggage that many feminists don't want to admit.

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