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Enormous and acrimonious rape thread

I don't see why rape within a relationship can't have a power motive. There are some relationships where control of one partner by the other is a huge issue - for example relationships in which violence, or controlling jealousy occurs. I don't see the dichotomy that you see.

Personally, I think rapes can be about both sex and power to varying degrees depending on the case. And I'm sure there are cases of perpetrators who obtain sexual satisfaction through abusing their power over the victim. Its not an either/or thing to me.
 
Depends on the kind of coercion, I should say. Or at least the law says. For duress (coercion) to invalidate a consent, the criteria are:

1. The threat must be of serious bodily harm or death
2. The threatened harm must be greater than the harm caused by the crime
3. The threat must be immediate and inescapable
4, The defendant must have become involved in the situation through no fault of his or her own​

BUT, at that point it's irrelevant anyway, since if sex was obtained by threat then that qualifies as rape right there and then, and you can skip criteria 2 to 4 for duress anyway.

So really, all that remains there that isn't already included in the normal and pretty clear definition of rape are cases when, I guess, someone was coaxed to consent without any actual threat being involved. Which really just isn't rape (if begging and pleading were a crime, most husbands would be in jail;)), and has little bearing on the cases that are.
 
Drachasor said:
That is a significant problem with that figure. There are massive differences between indecent exposure, sexual touching, and rape. Granted, the later two can do have a fuzzy area distinguishing them. The problem is most statistics don't seem to count them separately.



Non-consensual sex -- "sex" defined broadly, seems to be a good enough definition to me.



Non-consensual sex -- "sex" defined broadly, seems to be a good enough definition to me.
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Even with an agreement about the definition of sex you still need to define consent. In the case of say people who are drunk it is nontrivial. Also age differences.
 
HansMustermann said:
Maybe, but at that point you're extending the analogy in a direction which isn't analogous to what it's supposed to illustrate any more. The whole point was that those people hadn't run out of pussy, much less out of sex (in as much as that's even possible without losing the use of both hands;)), so analogies with an alcoholic who's run out of means to get booze are not just distorted analogies but actually polar opposites to what they're supposed to illustrate.

So on the whole it's not a very useful analogy.
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It wasn't intended to be a perfect analogy, your hungry man one was also not perfect.

In fact that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that if X has a legal means to get A and does get plenty of A that way, yet they choose to do it by illegal means, then simplifying it to just "they wanted some A" is over-simplifying and obscuring some relevant details.
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This is what you originally said:

In fact they weren't sex-starved at all. They were actually getting more sex than the average guy anyway. So it's a bit hard to make sex the primary motivation, when those people ARE getting plenty.
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I don't actually disagree with most of what you have said / concluded, I just think it is a poor argument to jump from 'a person has a lot of something' to 'therefore, if the person seeks more of it using illegal means, it must be because of reasons other than they just want more of it'.

You are also imposing an objective assessment (that someone is 'getting plenty' based on comparison with the average) on what is fundamentally a subjective judgement. An alcoholic's view on what constitutes plenty of alcohol will be very different from the average.
 
Getting back to point number 2:

Kevin_Lowe said:
So for example if you could show that people who watched movies that trivialised rape or had gratuitous rape scenes were more likely than a matched set of controls who did not watch such movies to commit sexual assaults, then you'd have evidence that such movies should be censored.
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No. Correlation does not equal causation. It could simply be that people more inclined to rape are also more inclined to watch such movies. In fact, the movies could even make people less likely to rape by providing an outlet. A recent study suggested that could be exactly the case for violent video games, for example. Of course, other studies suggest the opposite, so it's far from a settled question. But the point is that simply showing a correlation is not evidence that movies should be censored, and could actually mean the exact opposite.
 
Granted, one sentence in that message was indeed that, but then it wasn't the only one. I think that at least in the bread loaf parable... err... analogy ;) I had gone into the more relevant aspect of availability, rather than just leaving it at getting more or less than the average.
 
hodgy said:
I don't actually disagree with most of what you have said / concluded, I just think it is a poor argument to jump from 'a person has a lot of something' to 'therefore, if the person seeks more of it using illegal means, it must be because of reasons other than they just want more of it'.

You are also imposing an objective assessment (that someone is 'getting plenty' based on comparison with the average) on what is fundamentally a subjective judgement. An alcoholic's view on what constitutes plenty of alcohol will be very different from the average.
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I agree, it is not unreasonable that someone with a sexual appetite extremely above the norm would both have more consensual sex than the average, and be more likely to commit rape.
 
Cuddles said:
Getting back to point number 2:

No. Correlation does not equal causation. It could simply be that people more inclined to rape are also more inclined to watch such movies. In fact, the movies could even make people less likely to rape by providing an outlet. A recent study suggested that could be exactly the case for violent video games, for example. Of course, other studies suggest the opposite, so it's far from a settled question. But the point is that simply showing a correlation is not evidence that movies should be censored, and could actually mean the exact opposite.
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I did actually specify a matched control group, if you read what you were replying to again. The idea would be that you get two matched groups, expose one to the stimulus, and see if that group then commits more sexual assaults than the other. Otherwise as you say, you wouldn't be able to differentiate correlation from causation.

Such studies are in practice almost impossible to carry out, of course, which is part of what makes me wonder how anyone can act as if they have certainty that such materials have any effect at all.
 
In doing some reading in the area of forensic sexology (admittedly some years ago), authors like John Money disputed the statement that "rape is about power". He said it was about sex. Specifically that serial rapists are suffering from specific paraphilias and the pathology is very similar to that of serial killers. (he maintained that in most cases, serial-killing should be considered to be a form of paraphilia)
There are several different types of serial rapists and they have very different psychological motivations.

As a for-instance, one type is deluded insofar as he thinks he is actually in love with the victim, and that physical consumation will cause the victim to love him back. These rapists rarely harm (but usually threaten) the victim and often pursue a relationship after the rape, sending letters, phoning, etc.
One of our local individuals, the so-called "South Side Rapist", maintains this very thing in interviews.
There are other types as well, some of whom are very violent and who are "turned on" by resistance. These often kill the victim and may be classified as serial killers though the pathology is slightly different.
As to the reporting-percentage thing...
As most know, I'm in campus law enforcement, and here at the university the "one in four" statistic is posted all over the place. Indicating that 25% of females enrolled will experience rape during her four-year enrollment.
I have commented before that this seems vastly unlikely unless one defines "rape" to include "consensual sex which you later had regrets about".
I have seen feminist literature on campus claiming this very thing....
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
My tentative hypothesis is that this is an article of dogma that started out as a way of trying to undercut all variations on "she was sexy and that's why she got raped", which incorporates an element of factual truth in that rape is not merely normal sexual attraction gone out of control, and an element of total rubbish in that rape is linked to some extent in at least some cases to satisfying the sexual desires of the rapist.
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This is just my uneducated opinion but I've always saw rape as the dominance over the other person (male or female), is what is causing the arousal. People role play with this because even in a typical sex drive, the struggle for dominance or being completely dominated, is arousing to many. However, in a typical sexual relationship, the boundaries are respected, where-as in a rape situation, resistance to that dominace is a motivator.

The appearance of the victim, male or female, has been argued to death. If the victim's appearance was a common factor, I would expect to see an inverse corelation between oppressive and rape occurances.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
...1. "Rape is a crime of power/violence, not of sex".[/b]
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I believe, in another thread somewhere, I refered to that notion as "feminist claptrap".

I think we'd find that rape, most often, is fundamentally motivated by sexual impulses. Though power/violence can also be involved.

The claim that rape (of all things) would somehow not be- when 99% of all the other remaining things that men do from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep ultimately are- motivated by sex has always, well, smelled rather fishy to me.
 
I don't think the question of motivation all that interesting really and is almost always discussed in a dumbed-down and/or political manner. I think the question of what differentiates a person who will rape from a person who will not rape to be a much more interesting and useful question.

For example, holding "rape-supportive beliefs" like victim-blaming and believing that women find sexual violence arousing are predictors of self-reported sexual aggression.
http://www.johnbriere.com/83JRP17.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1981.tb01075.x/abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q108k28040221861/
 
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Bikewer said:
In doing some reading in the area of forensic sexology (admittedly some years ago), authors like John Money disputed the statement that "rape is about power". He said it was about sex. Specifically that serial rapists are suffering from specific paraphilias and the pathology is very similar to that of serial killers. (he maintained that in most cases, serial-killing should be considered to be a form of paraphilia)
There are several different types of serial rapists and they have very different psychological motivations.

As a for-instance, one type is deluded insofar as he thinks he is actually in love with the victim, and that physical consumation will cause the victim to love him back. These rapists rarely harm (but usually threaten) the victim and often pursue a relationship after the rape, sending letters, phoning, etc.
One of our local individuals, the so-called "South Side Rapist", maintains this very thing in interviews.
There are other types as well, some of whom are very violent and who are "turned on" by resistance. These often kill the victim and may be classified as serial killers though the pathology is slightly different.
As to the reporting-percentage thing...
As most know, I'm in campus law enforcement, and here at the university the "one in four" statistic is posted all over the place. Indicating that 25% of females enrolled will experience rape during her four-year enrollment.
I have commented before that this seems vastly unlikely unless one defines "rape" to include "consensual sex which you later had regrets about".
I have seen feminist literature on campus claiming this very thing....
Click to expand...

An interesting article on false claims.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2011/09/18/rape-myth-1-shes-probably-lying/
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Inspired partially by the unanimity in the The Rape of Men thread, and people's expressed disappointment that it didn't turn in to a gigantic, multi-page slap fight like most other threads with rape in the title,
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Your initial premise contains an error. No one was disappointed that the thread was dropped, they were curious as to why. Then went on to offer reasons outside of "rape-bickering" for lack of interest in the thread.
 
bookitty said:
Your initial premise contains an error. No one was disappointed that the thread was dropped, they were curious as to why. Then went on to offer reasons outside of "rape-bickering" for lack of interest in the thread.
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I was kind of disappointed. I thought it an interesting perpetuation of sexism by feminists.
 
A couple of years ago, I did some sums (not my forte...) and figured that considering the about-50% female population of the school, and the numbers involved.... That even with the lowest-accepted reporting rate we should be getting perhaps a dozen reports of sexual assault per year.
However, we have had none for at least four years. We had one report of a so-called "date rape" then, just one, and again no reports whatever for some years prior to that.
The one reported incident came down to a "he-said, she-said" situation.
"He got me drunk and had his way with me."
"We got drunk together and had consensual sex."

No evidence. No claim of force. No injuries. No witnesses. Coitus admitted.
The case was not taken up by the local prosecutor. It would not have been provable.

But that's the one reported case in about an 8-year period, where simple statistics indicate (if the one-in-four statistic was correct) we should have been handling at least a hundred.....
 
I think there's a slight issue with the first point.

No one that I'm aware of has ever said that rape is not about sex; they're merely stating that it's not the PRIMARY motivation. The power/dominance over another being IS the primary motivation, but it's not the only motivation. Getting sexual intercourse is surely part of it, but it is by no means the primary motivation.

IMO.
 
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