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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38176 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I recently came across something while listening to a crime podcast that I have heard many times before. The adage that "rape is about power, not sex". I have literally heard this since teachers told me this in school. The most recent context as I mentioned was a crime podcast. Specifically the hosts were covering a case committed in Thailand I believe, and they were saying that the suspects favored by the police were likely wrongfully accused/targeted because they were illegal immigrants. As a point of evidence in favor of their innocence, the hosts remarked that the confession extracted by the police gave the motive as uncontrollable lust at seeing the victim behaving in a promiscuous way (making out with her boyfriend in public). The hosts pointed out that since science has proven that rape has nothing to do with sex, and only with power, this explanation was obviously false and the product of a coerced confession.

But upon thinking about this, how does this make any sense at all? If rape had nothing to do with sex, shouldn't we expect men and ninety year old women to be raped just as often as twenty year old women when attacked? After all, wouldn't it be an even greater assertion of power to assert your power over a male than over a female? Of course rapes of males by males happen, but to my knowledge generally in a prison or explicitly homosexual context, in either case where women are off the menu. I can't tell you how many cases I have heard where a couple is attacked, the man is killed and the woman is raped then killed. I don't know if I have ever heard of a case where a heterosexual couple is attacked, the woman killed (without assault) and the man raped then killed. Furthermore, doesn't rape require some level of sexual interest from the perpetrator (assuming he doesn't use an object or something else)?

I just can't believe how often this "fact" is trotted out as if it is completely proven. I can't even begin to imagine how such a thing could even theoretically be proven, except maybe by observing that heterosexual perpetrators were just as likely to rape men as women (which is not the case to my knowledge). How did such a fact come to be accepted without challenge? Is there some persuasive argument for this that I'm not aware of? What would the purpose of making this up be? Is it just to distance the woman's behavior/dress and general victim blaming from the crime?

In an old thread about this, someone linked to Steve Pinker's AMA, in which he had this to say;

It's the "moralistic fallacy," the idea that we should shape the facts in such a way as to point to the most morally desirable consequences. In the case of rape, the fear was that if rape has a sexual motive, then it would be natural, hence good; and instinctive, hence unavoidable. Since rape is bad and ought to be stamped out, it cannot come from "natural" sexual motives. My own view is that these are non-sequiturs -- rape is horrific no matter what its motives are, and we know that rates of rape can be reduced (in Better Angels I assemble statistics that US rates of rape are down by almost 80% since their peak). One surprise that I experienced upon re-reading Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book "Against Our Will," which originated the rape-is-about-power-not-sex doctrine, is that idea was a very tiny part of the book, thrown in almost as an afterthought (Brownmiller said she got the idea from one of her Marxist professors). Most of the book is a brilliant account of the history of rape, its treatment by the legal system, its depiction in literature and film, the experience of being raped and reporting it, and other topics. It's also written with great style, clarity, and erudition. Though I disagree with that one idea, I would recommend it as one of the best and most important books on violence I have read.

https://www.old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1a67x4/i_am_steve_pinker_a_cognitive_psychologist_at/c8ug2in/

Anyways, years ago there was a thread in AskReddit, in which someone asked rapists why they rape. It was a long thread, but one component that was noticeable was that it clearly had nothing to do with power. This, of course, pissed off a ton of people, and the thread was shut down and later scrubbed because it was deemed harmful. I think some 'psychologist' had come out to say that the thread could encourage more people to rape? Anyways, that seemed like a significant moment where the tide began to turn for open discourse on Reddit.

I remember reading the archive of that askreddit. The dominant theme was that almost every one of those rapists was 1) male 2) young and 3) not seeing himself as committing rape. That tends to add up to it being about horny and not power.

Much of the backlash to the thread was that other commenters responded with sympathy. The stories had convinced many users that some cases were in a moral gray area. This was connected to a feminist opposition to rapists being allowed to communicate with the general population in an affirmative space, and some disgust at hearing the stories and the misogynistic views implied by them.

[The psychiatrist response] (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/xf5c2/reddit_are_you_aware_how_dangerous_the_askarapist/) makes an overly-sophisticated point (contrary to the more commonsense opposition described above) that was eaten up for some reason. Arguing that rape is about power and that raping a conscious person means you get off on hurting or horrifying people (I'd argue that this is partially true but is itself sexual), he claims that the rapists in the thread were getting off on horrifying an imagined audience.

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