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Notes -
There’s another explanation, which I think is preferable: a person’s social value is linked to their reproductive potential, a woman’s reproductive potential is 100x more important than a man’s biologically due to pregnancy (which we grasp intuitively), a woman’s psycho-sexuality is more sensitive to acts of aggression, and society must control mating in order to function.
We don’t have to say “a woman’s value is her body”, we can say “a woman’s body is especially valuable, and the damage of rape is uniquely evil to a woman’s mind and her society”.
Since spousal rape was legal almost everywhere (the definition of rape included that perp isn't the husband), it's evident that society cared about certainty of paternity, not woman's emotions. They didn't have paternity testing, or even pregnancy testing nor postcoital contraception. Now we have all that, but customs are old and even feminists keep parts of it.
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First, I want to note that my use of "body" here is a kind of metaphor for reproduction, which it sounded like you understood.
Next, I want to make sure I understand your point, so I will paraphrase what I heard:
Certainly, (b) is correct, because we don't make a big deal out of male rape victims.
The reason we also know (a) is correct is because rape is worse than murder, because most people get mind-killed about the subject and low-decouplers write extensive mental gymnastics (masquerading as arguments) asserting that rape is a special case that has no analogue.
In an alternate world where the same emotional valence was not applied to any rape but was instead only applied to, say, domestic abuse, we could say (a) is false.
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