Rape and the "Civilized" World

Accidental Thesis?

But he has a thesis and everything. Sort of. I mean—

"I don't however believe rape is always done merely to give the perpetrator a sense of power over someone, that's psychobabble IMO. I think men rape women they find sexy most of the time and can't screw any other way. If they weren't horny there would be no rape period. Anyone that says its about control has never had an erection, it's maybe about control and sex but SEX is always the main factor IMO"​

—it's a pretty clear assertion; I would very much like to see someone who says such things try to demonstrate the validity of such claims.

After all, I might excoriate our neighbor for the blatant ... er ... um ... whatever we might call that ejaculation, but at some point, yes, we do need to consider whether or not we are obliged to take pity on them; such a warped expression is either provocateurism or significant of cognitive antisocial processes. But raw condemnation generally has no positive effect in these circumstances, and tends to reinforce such beliefs whether they are genuine or merely adopted in the moment for the sake of appearances.

Still, this is not so pointed a thesis that we can begin to address its construction; hence, show us the psychobabble. Quite clearly, our neighbor feels confident enough in his outlook that demonstrating his point ought to be fairly easy.

Let us, then, encourage him to—or, more directly, simply demand that he—support his argument or withdraw it for the dry, crusty, fly-ridden excrement it is.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Without being a social scientist, he's actually doesn't seem to be completely wrong here. There must be essential sexual factors underlying the act: if a display of power were the singular motivation, one could simply physically assault another without any sexual interest. The crime of rape is in a way 'tailored' to females; the woman in the London pub for example was physically assaulted after she was sexually assaulted via a grope. Now, that's a layered crime, presumably with different activators - (inappropriate) sexual interest in the first offense, pride/chauvinism in the second - but the initial interest is implicit. Many interviewed offenders do Texpress a desire for power over women, but without some kind of sexual activating factor, why rape? there are crimes of violence against women without the sexual act, there are crimes of violence against women with the 'sexual act', if I can so put it in such a case, and so causation seems to be essentially heterogenous. Is it the popular objection to biological psychology that drives the consideration of power motivation so uniformly?

And before Bells attempt to excoriate me, the above isn't an excuse for anything.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Well I think it might be deviant sexual 'expression', or sheer lust in the vernacular. What the hell would be the right term? Not sure here.

Well, that's the thing. Bubba could simply beat me up, if my protestations of my understanding about the socioeconomic deficiencies in the South were insufficient to make an ally of him, but instead he chooses rape. So why is that? I mean, I could well feel the same thing - the beating bit, not the rape bit, if you follow me. Let's explore this.

Maybe Bubba has a sassy bitch mouth, and I think that he needs to shut it. But instead of wildly humping him over the fixture sink, as Big Tom two cells down seems to feel the need to - hey, Tom, how's it going, bit of rough with the wife today? yeah, me too - I just kick the everloving shit out of him; because he voted for Perot, for fuck's sake. I mean, really? Really, Bubba? Let alone make a random selection between two equally balanced assholes in that election, you had to obviate your own choice by picking the dark horse candidate that was going nowhere. But I don't think I have any imperative to fuck him. It's a bridge too far, and as I sit considering it now I don't think Extra Geoff - and that's its name, yes - could 'get the job done', if you follow me. There'd have to be some kind of essential interest in that, somehow. You might argue that after several months in the can without a constitutional that I could overlook Bubba's political foibles and perhaps see the sensitive, artistic soul inside, but I think that would still back up a kind of biological argument. (Backing up a biological argument about being "backed up", if you'll excuse the inappropriate pun.)

Yes but I think this supports my contention. I'm sure that much of the conscious reasoning is power: inmate interviews indicate this, although it must be said that we have to apply the same filters to what are essentially opinion interviews to interviews of non-convicts; I add to my discredit that I don't have a great deal of faith in the methodology of the practitioners of the social sciences. But power is certainly there. Still, if the expression of that power conflict 'resolution' if you will is a forcible sexual act, then I think that there is something to be said for a heterogenous causation - or maybe more accurately a multivariate multi-axis causation. Soldiers use rape as a tool of war (more inappropriate jokes filter up here; my upbringing on Benny Hill, no doubt) but I can say from observation that soldiers are indeed pretty horny. I think it's the same kind of liability: yes, there is the expression of power over a subjugated population, but the impetus is sexual, isn't it? How do you percieve Viagra as supporting causation through contention of power? That isn't an attack, I'm just not sure how it weighs out in this example.

 

Back to your cells

Yes, I thought you were going to go there. What I'm looking for is a more technical term that, while being longer, carries implications as to causation or basis. Yes, it's rape, we already know it's rape, but rape is a carrying term or legal term for the phenomenon itself. What I mean is that proportion which corresponds or would correspond to the causes I'm suggesting.

Oh please! Clearly, Bubba's into the whole thing, or he wouldn't have come on to me so forcefully in the first part of this investigation of provocative analogies.

Tch. Six seconds brute consideration, two minutes' writing. That's just the value Geoff adds.

Well, I'm not sure about this. I think that one of the problems is our classification system, which I was going to bring up before but forgot in my charged consideration of the sweaty sexiness of a prison sink: we explicitly categorize sexual behaviour, on both sides of the gender (actual physical gender) divide. What was at a glance bivariate (hetero- vs. homosexual) is actually part of a semi-valued ordinal series ranging from complete homosexuality to heterosexuality, with various bisexuality in the middle - and, in fact, really isn't an ordinal series either, because - well, why do we call it a state? What are you measuring? Preference? Frequency? Well, that's really just a quantitative series with each individual sexual event being just a dynamic threshold state (do it vs. nope, not today). So the concept of human sexuality as expressed really constitutes a quantitative scale with high frequency at high heterosexual intercourse, a sort of variable slope and another smaller peak at high frequencies of homosexual intercourse. It's not a true binomial (or even an ordinal) like polledness in cattle. We use hetero-, homo- and bisexuality to describe ranges in behaviour, but it's not descriptive of the dynamic.

This is a long description of that basic joke about "gay until release", but the latter has real merit: preferences, like any behavioural trait, are subject to environmental modification. (Forget not that heritability only accounts for something like 30-40% of variance in sexual behaviour with respect to homosexuality.) For the rape to actually pan out, surely there must be erection (pardoning my term again), for which does there not need to be some kind of sexual impulse or attraction? In desperation, anything might be possible; hell, masturbation is a kind of reluctant acceptance that no willing partners are currently available. You might hate Marmite, for example - or would, if you were not raised in the upside-down part of the world - but if driven to it, you might devour it. Activity must scale with availability in some sense.

How powerful is it? Not as powerful in humans as elsewhere. There's the above example, as I read it. I've seen moose hump what must be very alluring knots in maple trees, and read about interspecies hybridization between wolves and coyotes in borderline areas where wolves are so rare that at some point they must look at a coyote in the mating season and conclude "Well, close enough". This is not to say that humans must be so subject to such influences that their behaviour is excusable - as I look down at my keyboard, I find that I am typing with at least one hand. But I think some of that pressure must surely be 'biological' or sexual, if you see what I mean.

Doesn't what?

The article argues that rape in war is not primarily about gratification; I agree but I think that we see it inaccurately if we argue for a primary basis in that way. The essential nature of stolen reproduction exists because sex does, in a way, if we consider it a sort of horrible evolutionary strategy, no less horrible for being that kind of process. The impetus is always there. If we procreated via finger-painting, I'm sure the Serbs could have drubbed up some watercolour evil to horrify us all. That situation seems to me like a power-resolution predicated on sexual impulse, rather than sheer power resolution as the current narrative seems to be put.

Sorry if the language seems cold, but I'm trying to phrase this as unemotionally as possible, with dark humour interspaced. It's just the way we roll in Cell Block B. Right, Bubba?

...

Well, I'm sure Bubba's shaking and sweating means he agrees.

No, I'd never argue that. It's just that I think without the essential impulse thereof, we could never have a discussion about it in the first place: I think the sexual explanation drives or liberates the expression of rape as power control. Not that I'm reducing this thing to an element of no value; obviously, all non-asexual organisms have gender. It's just that I see the biology as an activating factor, both physically and psychologically. That's not an excuse for the behaviour, of course.

 

Market Demand

Every once in a while, I recall a story about a co-worker fondly recalling the gift of a Zippo lighter a friend gave him; if I might skip the detail, suffice to say it's a passed-out teenager rape story. It was only years later that I figured out what I should have said: "Gosh, John, I didn't know you were gay ...."

Two guys sharing a sexual experience, using a passed out underage female as a sex toy. Doesn't get much gayer than that among the blind closeteers and heterosupremacists.

One could suggest the rape was about sex, but in this case it would have been that homosexual experience. The reduction of the teenage girl to a sex toy—a tacit consequence of the narrative—is the power play.

Indeed, this is akin to one of the dumbest ideas I could ever suggest: Raping for social acceptance.

No, really. Consider the guy in high school, for instance, whose friends all tell them that this girl likes him, or he oughta bang that girl at the party tonight. So he rapes her—maybe she was passed out, or her mouth said no and her eyes said yes, or she's just another little bitch crying rape, or whatever—and the real gratification and sexual affirmation he gets from talking about it. Again, tacit, but utterly apparent: There, I did her. Am I cool enough now?

And therein lies the power play.

Countless generations of men have regarded the power play as nothing more than mere passion. You know, love, sex, intimacy. Which explains the bruised wrists, the handful of hair pulled out, and the scratch marks on her throat where he held her down while slobbering all over her, bruising her genitals and internal organs, and reminding her how much he loves her.

And what many men want is trigger power. There are some women who will "let" a man rape her because her mind and brain trip over each other under such difficult circumstances. If a woman knows what's about to happen, slips into shock or a protective mode, and just like when she was a little girl getting used by daddy stays quiet like a good little girl is supposed to, well, it shouldn't be rape in some people's minds.

The Japanese, for instance, hardly have an exclusive lock on the market, but it is most consistently apparent in Japanese porn; honestly, I can't think of such pornography I've ever witnessed that doesn't rely on sublimating the power play. One simply need launch their torrent client, search the word "molest", and watch, depending on what networks the client is accessing, the hundreds to thousands of results that return.

With the Japanese share, which is considerable for this and other such terms, you find yourself wondering what it is you're looking at. Some of the scenes must be staged at private facilities, but there are some frightening implications in there suggesting that many would simply walk by a rape taking place in public.

But here is the key on this particular porn marketplace: The power play is the centerpiece.

It's always the centerpiece. Really, you don't need to read the blog post that goes with this one, but I happened to be horrified enough in June, 2008, to write the following:

I'm not really sure where to start. Obviously, with a shudder, but beyond that, flip a coin or spin a bottle. Tokuda's character is predictable enough, "a tactful elderly gentleman who instructs women of different ages in the erotic arts", and while we might, at first glance, find merit in a series title like Maniac Training of Lolitas, the central issue of what seems so wrong about the genre is found in the follow-up series, Forbidden Elderly Care.

What? I told you to stop reading a while ago, didn't I?

A representative for Glory Quest, the studio that releases Tokuda's films, notes the fierce competition in Japanese pornography: "There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers' hearts." I do confess, though, that my heart is not so much captivated by pornography. It seems a different sort of satisfaction.​

Whether it's "child" rape, molesting on the bus or train, the reluctant wife, the raped wife, the frightened daughter in law, ad nauseam, the theme is consistent: If you persist long enough, she will relent, and when you are done she will thank you for forcing her.

And it is consistent because this is what consumers want.

One can easily suggest a primal instinct; men are, after all, genetic mutations whose first purpose in existence is the delivery of seed. Psychoanalyzing that would be an excercise in deep macabre. You know, it shouldn't be funny, but if all the world is a stage and we're just watching the performance for the spectacle, it is dark, brutal slapstick.

To the other, at least Japanese porn isn't as accidentally homoerotic as Middle Eastern porn, where inexperienced cameramen think men want to see a masculine pucker and sack bouncing too and fro on the screen. (There's a reason professional pornography looks so weird and uncomfortable; the inexperienced still perform more natural congress, which results in pucker and sack shots galore.)

If we might get creepy for a moment, as if this subject isn't already difficult enough, I had one of those frightening conversations with my mother some months ago, in which she was talking about having read Fifty Shades of Gray. With all the superficial news coverage of the phenomenon, (ahem!) her eyes were opened. That is, explaining to one's own mother that yes, these contract slavery relationships exist, but no, they're not romantic, is not an experience anyone should look forward to. She had no idea that these relationships existed outside fiction until the news told her otherwise. But television news isn't acutally going to report the deeper truth. To the other, I simply will not show my mother amateur pornography from this sector; she's not about to sign into a D/S relationship, so I'm not going to keep the discussion going with her. But it was a bit unsettling to hear my mother talk about the alleged romance of such situations.

Part of resolving our neighbor's question involves untangling the neurotic skeins that confine the issue to its context. "Deviant sexual expression"? Okay, you know, if he doesn't want to call it rape, we can simply call it "sexual violence", "predation", and other associated terms. It's all the same, and the more significant facet would be which divisions and reservations he requires for the discourse, and why.

Also, notice the focus on anal sex in the prison discussion. It's not a question I would want an answer to, but I suspect our neighbor has never performed fellatio.

In the end, what I think it comes down to is that many men are instinctively protecting something they don't reasonably understand. To wit, a lot of would-be rape advocates finally come around when they father a daughter. Even then, though, it's often an aspect of ownership culture.

The closest I've ever been to being sexually violated is breaking the terms. We'll skip some of the details, but there was once a conversation after we were finished that went:

"Mmm. Where's the condom?"

—What condom?

("Er ... the condom we put on you before you started fucking me?")​

To this day I couldn't tell you if it fell off, was taken off, or what. I never did find it, but I know it was on him at one point. This isn't the sort of violation of terms that is going to cause me much distress, though it was also a reckless throw so there was some nervousness over my next STD panel.

It may be a violation of terms, and I do include such within the boundaries of rape, but I personally do not escalate that occasion to rape. In truth, I didn't really think about it again until they were drawing blood for the screening, and, oh, yeah, there was that.

Kind of like at the end of the day, in America, a white person is still white, at the end of the day, I'm a man. The whole question of "violation of terms" occurs in a thoroughly different context for me.

But I can tell my fellow men this much: There is a difference between accidental gag reflex in a moment of enthusiasm and the sort of deep-throating that goes on in forcible oral sex. And to say that having someone vomit on your genitals is a purely sexual gratification seems rather quite perverse; it is also unsatisfactory as an explanation. That is, why is forcibly compelling someone to vomit on your genitals by choking them with your penis sexually gratifying?

Constipation is one thing, but nobody is that full of shit.

In the end, I think you're witnessing an instinctive barrier receiving a neurotic moneyshot. That is, anything to make rape romantic.

 

@ Bells and Geoff,

Okay here is a rape scenario that i am sure happens way too often. Teenage girl (16) at a party with friends(she knows all of them pretty well) and she drinks too much and passes out, her best friend leaves her there because she too trusts that she will be okay passed out on couch. The guy's parents are out of town (he is eighteen) and he has the run of the place so is not concerned about any repercussions from any authority. The perpetrator had also been drinking and smoking pot but was fully aware of his surroundings and notices this passed out girl (a friend) and decides to have sex (rape) her without her even knowing that the act had even taken place at the time it was being done. The girl (a virgin) wakes up sitting in a bathtub naked with cold water from shower washing over her and two guys, one who is the rapist and another guy who the girl does not know are standing there watching as she comes to and it is at this point that the girl realizes that she has been violated because her private parts are aching.

My question is this, " Was this about power and dominance Bells, or was it as simple as a moose humping a maple knot, Geoff?

 

Well, it's the term itself. My impression is that the word seems to have an atavistic life of its own, like a

Understanding. We foster it in terminology also.

That's certainly part of it: I think it's more like the 'proximal trigger'. Bubba has some underlying urge, and in a way it turns into 'why not do something evil? Yeah, this'll do.' Is there such a thing as a 'rage erection'?

Please: I have a very pretty face. I'm sure that was no consolation for poor Bubba, mind.

Our conversations often seem to go this way, don't they? Does everything have to be in the gutter?

I'm glad you came down off the high horse from the first part of this section; misplaced outrage is for a different thread.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Now, while the above obviously occurs - although much of it was a surprise for me - I don't know how common that basis is. What you're citing here sounds like a form of sadism. Is that common enough to explain rape as a phenomenon? I do think however that this is where the psychological and biological bases for rape meet and mix more thoroughly: it's less 'sequential trigger'-form, which is where I'm leaning. I couldn't say which model is a better explanation, but it probably could be modeled, somehow.

The horror thereof is really astounding. Fundamentally, I'm an evolutionary biologist/ecologist and geneticist: maybe that means I see things too much through my background. A colleague of mine, on hearing that I really hated other kinds of primates, squealed 'Ohmigawd! You're an example of the competitive exclusion hypothesis!' Personally, I just think I don't like other primates. Maybe there's a kind of myopia in my field. But it doesn't mean I'm necessarily wrong. Also I think rape in war can have a heterogenous causation itself: the act of violence of war being inclusive to the process. Damn, I think I'm lacking the language to develop these concepts here. But also, fundamentally to the act, is rape chosen as a more effective weapon of humiliation, or from some biological impulse. I tend towards the former explanation more so than in domestic or conventional rape (if such things can be said) but then again, one could also just shoot the women and children of a conquered people. Warning: Godwin's Law! When the Nazis committed the massacre of Jews, Romani, communists and homosexuals, there was certainly some rape, but generally just sheer industrialized murder. The point is that there are cases where violence is divorced from rape and cases where it isn't. Maybe that's a pedestrian observation, however.

Well, we share a cell. If you knew Bubba like I do, you'd know that he's a caring, divorced father of two who was studying to be a mechanic, and that doesn't take a punch very well.

Oh, in no way! It's no different than murder or theft: no excuse permits killing another person save self-defense, and I don't think that scenario is possible in the case of rape. It's like the 'uncovered meat' defense: well, the meat in the supermarket was uncovered, and so I stole it. One could ask if the culprit was hungry, but even in the absolute biological scenario there's no excuse for rape so long as one has a hand or a hole in the wall, if you'll excuse the crudity. No, I imply nothing in that respect by speculating on a biological trigger or underlying activation. I do know that rape can occur in nature, of one form or another, and so I think it might help us understand the issue. I suppose, theoretically, in some illusory long-term way, any clues we might divulge about the biological basis for rape in humans could be used to identify at-risk-offenders for pre-treatment, but then again they were also predicting personal jetpacks and the cure for cancer fifty years ago and those are not commonplace or real, respectively. Well, it's a maybe, anyway.

But I think that part is telling: men can choose to control themselves, ipso facto. They do. I'm only interested in the causation: from a legal perspective, humans also have an impulse to murder and rob each other, and those things could certainly also be said to result from triggers defined from genetic process, but it's not a legal excuse to do so.

 

That was a fascinating story there that I didn't read, but in point of fact I'm interested in intelligent discussion of causation. You know, how language works n' such. I realise this runs a bit counter-current to the notion that language needs to be dumbed-down for some elements of the 'market' (useful term there; thanks), but hopes spring eternal that the adults will get the message even if the children don't. Someone was asking about psychobabble earlier. Well.

 

Geoff if you could give an example regarding your speculation that some rape may be as simple as a moose humping a maple knot on a tree, please do. I did give a scenario above and was hoping for your take on that particular scenario.

 

Thank you for your response and now waiting for Geoff's.

You know what makes it even worse is the guy felt no remorse and the girl blamed herself for years. What does that say about our society?


Finally, Bells and Geoff, I really enjoy the back and forth between you two. The wit, humor and intellectual prowess is admirable but then I get all askeered that there will be broken glass everywhere!

 

I think I'd choose somewhere between the two extremes - not dominance and not knot. It's not dominance because he didn't physically dominate the victim. What he's done, from the coldly written evolutionary perspective, is 'stolen' a copulation. I'd call that more about sex than dominance. It's still illicit sex, which is to say rape, obviously; but don't get bogged down in the unemotional language of the biological description of the phenomenon. Talking about the extremity of 'inappropriate' acts of sex in the animal kingdom is not undermining the reality or the horror of sexual crime. Dark brought up the biological impulse, and although his description wasn't complete, I think this is a salient aspect of the crime.

 

Which? The legal description or the putative biological trigger? I'd call the latter, without looking at what I already wrote, a biological trigger for rape or illicit/illegal sex. I'm sure there are better descriptions that take better account of causation, however.

He could do the latter via murder or simple assault. When does prison rape occur? - which is to say, at what point of the incarceration cycle? A month, or a year in? What are the sexual predilections of the perpetrator? My suspicion is that conventional studies of this may not account for factors that might imply any biological basis, out of fear that such a position would infer justification.

No, you invented Bubba. =) I merely extended the analogy colourfully.

The 'really?'s. We have to keep objective about the subject.

When did I say rape wasn't a phenomenon? Finding causation - or even supposing it - doesn't mean that rape is not a 'thing'. Is that what you're concerned about?

That's probably true - in fact, that's an excellent point. If you were going to model the phenomenon, I imagine you'd be looking at a bivariate left hand side of the equation, fitting terms for sexual assault (as a threshold effect) and sadism as a quantitative. I have no idea how one would deal with the inherent assumptions of distribution in that case, but I'll bet somebody has. A similar system must have been modeled at some point.

Naturally - but I think it still indicates a separation of violence and sex, even against members of the opposite sex (which is fundamentally male-against-female, naturally). There still seems to parametric 'space' for a differentiation.

Well, a quote you had earlier described war rape as 'not completely' about sex, as I recall. That may have just been an error of language: either way, the standard inference of power is where it's at in the dialectic. But that still leaves room for other than the symbolic or strictly psychological - which is also the area in which biology and sex meet on this issue. I think that a majority or great plurality of the cause is power as such, but it's my suspicion that those cases that involve sex primarily - and under the current dialectic I think it's hard to say which are and aren't, since I don't know what their sampling methodology and cause assignment are - and many of those cases assigned to power confrontations implicitly involve sex as a behavioural trigger. It must be, in some way, since I assume carrying out a rape is much more difficult for the perpetrator than sheer physical assault and leaves more evidence, besides being of such a specific nature compared to any standard physical assault (i.e. a club in the head from behind) that surely sex itself must be the cornerstone of the dynamic.

That quote lays out some of what I suspect are the shudderingly evil consequences of what I'm calling the biological trigger: offspring from rape are kept if it is thought that they could be included in the perpetrator's 'gene-group'. It's sickeningly like the takeover of lion prides by outsiders, in which offspring of the exiled males are killed and new ones fostered on unwilling females - or however unwilling a lion is, compared to a human woman. A bullet in the head, or a beating, or a gassing generates no children. I think it supports the sick biological imperative of the crime in a nasty highlight: here, here are females that I have conquered for reasons of sex, and look, some of them have children and if I like those offspring enough, I can incorporate them into my own gene-group. I'm actually making myself cringe with this argument, but it does seem possible, at least prima facie.

Oh, absolutely not. People have horrifying urges all the time - against the jerk in the checkout line, or the woman that cut you off, or the guy that's trying to have you fired. None of the above triggers mean that you should have license to murder them, or even to beat them up. Think about it: and so much less so because you wear a tight skirt. No, we can and legally are expected to understand and control all other impulses to violence and to any assorted evil or mayhem. There would be no reason to grant such license from the more distal basis - and I avoid what I perceive as the legal term cause here - of sexual urge. I'm urged to greed also, but I can't steal, and wouldn't in any event. That would be wrong. I know of no conception of morality or legality that would excuse rape specifically; in fact, and pardon my terms here, there always exists a relief to such urges. It's even more inexcusable, if that's a phrase.

The first part of your statement I agree with: there is a personal dynamic. Some might be more or less susceptible, or at least that's one of the possible inferences from my argument about a biological trigger based in a kind of evil 'game theory'. But could you elucidate the meaning of your phrase at the end there? It was sort of an isolated statement and I didn't follow your inference.

Well, speaking as someone with I suppose some kind of insight into this, that defense is utterly wrong. We have biological urges to a great many things, and rape is not somehow 'permissible' because of the binary nature of our gender system. We control our other urges to what our morality rightfully calls 'evil' and what our society calls 'illegal'.

I think it appears that way when we look for a single factorial cause. Unfortunately, few statistical systems are so simple and it we're talking of causation, I think that the implicit biological trigger must be real. The position isn't actually outrageous when you stop to consider; there are the dishonest among us who might use it in such a way, of course. Is that part of your objection? A sort of 'Pandora's Box' of extrapolation? Well, to that I say that one could make evolutionary arguments about any number of crimes: that doesn't justify them, or absolve the guilty in any way and of those, rape is surely the least excusable.

 

Nothing good. In fact, it says nothing more than soul-wrenching, screaming horror.

We pride ourselves on having made such strides. And we have, surely: compared to many societies, we have made prodigious leaps of rights.

And we have still failed.

Not failed as in some societal formats where, when the starting gun for the emancipation race was sounded, the runner just wandered off. But we have not run our race quickly, and timely, and right. We have failed. Women make a fraction that of males in the workplace. Sexual division of labour is far from equal, and likely to remain so. We congratulate ourselves on progress that would make a dignified delegate wince and change the subject of the discussion. There is the temptation to say that there is no solution, to throw up our arms and walk away, muttering. The problem is enormous, dauntingly so. To achieve this end, we must change not only economics, but even perception itself. And, given the plethora of assholes that I encounter I must conclude that surely they are representative of the human experience. They are the norm! There are so, so many and each one opens like the swelling of a uniquely folded, foetid flower: rank and proud, farting out stale gas in lieu of sensibility and sensitivity. Taken all together, this human garden of (shall we say) 'earthy' delights delights in nothing so much as its own aimless, voiceless noise, each asshole farting for themselves a warm wet symphony. It would be easiest, most hygienic and probably safest to just turn away: my job is safe, we can say, from the stink of confrontation; my family is unaffected; I am going to be all right.

But that is not possible. That is not our destination. It is our fate to turn our noses into the wind, as it were, and to meet this collection of farting assholes straight on; unblinking we must face into the rush of noxious nonsense and the gaseous remnants of the undigestable that they fling at us unthinking. We are the elect. Without us, there can be no equality, no spirit of humanity. Our job, as theirs assuredly is done, is not done. We might cover the stink of capitalist thought with soap, or sanitary wipes, or maybe even the pointed application of a kind of philosophical binaca: but that is not completion. We must march into the rushing spray and cry no more!, and was that turnip?

Thanks.

 

Two Cents

To: Quinnsong, Bells, GeoffP

re: Two cents​

​

Sorry, I was waiting for the answers requested before tossing my two cents into this morbid fountain.

If this was about a moose humping a maple knot, well, the only men not capable of masturbating are coincidentally very likely to be incapable of raping.

If this was about getting off, the rapist could easily rub one out.

But to that rapist, there is another demand. It's like a fantasy scenario to help (ahem!) "spice up the romance". And when rape becomes as simple as a moose humping a maple knot, there you have your answer.

The reduction of another human being to a sex toy is the power play.

All I can tell you is that those two guys in your scenario would be better off, and do everyone else a favor, if they just got over their ego dystonia and came out of the closet.

After all, that's a very risky and extremely harmful way for two men to share a sexual experience with each other.

Or else they're just dangerously antiscoial with a neurotic overdose of misogyny.

The woman is just a symbol in the rapist's experience.

And if one needs to reduce other human beings to maple knots or fleshlights or other such accessories and symbols in order to get off, we're looking at an extremely dangerous paraphilia.

I had a conversation once with a friend who is a retired police psychologist. He was talking about one of his cats that, for whatever reason, would kill a mouse or bird, and then try to hump the corpse. The question of psychoanalyzing the cat came up, and I reminded that it's a cat; even if we could put it on the couch and tap its subconscious, it would be a soul-freezing experience because, well, it's a cat. No, really, trying to comprehend feline priorities according to an individual's perception of human dececncy and dignity would be a bit like Ren Hoek smacking his Happy Helmet with a hammer ... in super-slow motion.

My point with that bizarre paragraph is simply that we are not cats and dogs. Necrophilia among humans is an entirely different phenomenon.

And I mention that because in this question of rape as a sexual or dominance issue, it might be worth considering that some men who approach it from the question of a sexual act are willing to reduce every man on the planet to a brainless machine. To the one, men generally resent being reduced to machines, but, apparently, that needs to be modified to say that we resent being reduced to machines by a woman, but if a man does so while trying to argue for our natural right to rape, well, hey, we're happy to be considered brainless machines. To the other, as I explained to the misandrists in that discussion, "you're escalating the argument from 'Seek help' to, 'Men should be locked up'."

What stands out for our purposes, I think, is that a woman is just a symbol in that brainless machine argument. High heels, cleavage, clothing. Men are "literally animals"? And "animals don't ask permission"? This is what it takes to justify rape as a merely sexual act?

When we reduce another person to a mere tool or symbol to facilitate our personal gratification, there's more going on than just a moose humping a knot, or a hormonally charged cat celebrating a successful and useless hunt. (Really, it's not like the cat actually ate the thing; and my cat would hunt mice sheerly for the cruelty—I'll never forget the confused look on her face when I wrapped the paralyzed, bleeding mouse in a bag, took it outside, and sang that my last ditch was my last brick.)