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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?
I think one you're not really considering is that this argument was made countering a prior argument about what motivates rape. That prior argument being primarily the "Hydraulic Theory of Rape":
Man gets too horny and can't get off, so he commits rape. Or to put it differently, Rape is about sex: men need sex, if they can't get it honestly they'll steal it violently. How can we test this?
One way would be to see if Rapists have a below-average number of partners prior to the crime, so they can't get an "honest" release. That doesn't hold up consistently, lots of men who are prolific rapists have numerous opportunities to have consensual sex but choose to commit rape anyway. Numbers are seriously sketchy by nature, but have found that rapists typically have more consensual sexual partners than the average non-rapist. So that's a strike against the hydraulic theory, and points to there being a non-sexual element to rape. Which probably comes out as power, since on the list of human desires it can't be food or shelter and we've already ruled out sex.
Personally, I doubt we can attribute all rape to a single cause, and I'm not sure examining "rape" as a category makes sense as currently defined. Any more than trying to come up with a single category of motivation that explains shoplifting, embezzlement, wage theft, not returning a wallet you found on the ground, overcharging on utility bills, and taxation. To say that specific-act consent violations in an ongoing sexual relationship are motivated by the same thing as violent stranger rape as drunken date rape as mass rape in wartime. Some are probably more motivated by things like power or a sense of control or hatred than by anything in common with consensual eros.
I don't think you can really make this leap. The most prolific pirates of copyrighted media and music tend to be the most passionate fans of that media/music and spend more on it than the average person. I imagine a similar phenomenon could be taking place here - if an individual man has a much higher sex drive than average that would explain both sexually-motivated rape alongside a higher number of consensual partners.
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