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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 any discussion of rape, I think it is important to zoom out on homo sapiens as a species and ask if humans commit more rape than other species. Just to reach a baseline.

Because I think some of the default assumptions and first principles of feminism are not grounded in reality, evolutionary theory, or science, generally.

The feminist response to this is to dispute definitions. Since rape is specifically a show of power over another, animals without the cognitive machinery for complex culture, consciousness, and morals are simply engaging in mere forced copulation.

Any non-homosapiens species which may have the cognitive machinery capable for rape, clearly also has the machinery for patriarchy etc. and so the smoking gun is found.

There could be a real empirical disagreement here. It could be the feminist believes there is a sizable portion of rapists who, upon learning that their victim wants it would just completely change gears because the rapist's real goal is to be mean, not to get laid.

This definition has the hemlock problem where we can't say a person is raped unless we knew why the perpetrator engaged in the forced copulation.