An argument in favour of teetotalism
According to an Ipsos Mori poll commissioned by the Home Office, a rape victim who has been drinking should be held responsible for her rape - or so think 11% of respondents. A further 25% think that she should be held "partially responsible".
So, ladies, don't drink. Because a full 36% of your fellow country-people - that's over a third - ( Read more... )
its not a popular view, but rape has almost nothing to do with sex or lust. its about power. one person projecting thier power over another. the way the women dresses is largely irrelivant, like you said rape occurs in muslim countries (again in men and women) and the women there by and large are covered up top to toe.
now these statistics i believe are as a result of ignorance, few people know someone who has been raped or having had the chance to study the subject. does anyone actually believe someone deserves it? i doubt it. its more of 'well what did you expect' attitude, there are bad men around - you have to protect yourself.
*unsuprisingly most of the men who have been raped who i have worked with its been stranger rape. but then maybe the view is 'well they shouldnt have been cottaging then'
rape is an evil and violent crime, and you will struggle to find anyone who disagrees with that view. look at the way rapists are treated in prison.
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When stated like that, no, I probably wouldn;t find anyone who will tell me to my face that they think rape is OK. Although as you yourself say, a lot of people think of rape as a purely sexual act, and in that context they are in fact quite prepared to dismiss rape - especially spousal rape - as "natural", stemming from the man's rightful needs and the woman's refusal to service them as is her moral duty.
But it's naive to suppose that a closed question ("is rape evil - yes/no") asked publically is an honest reflection of what people really feel about a subject. This poll was details, anonimous, and with built-in gradations and colours of opinion, so I think it's a much more reliable indication of underlying attituted.
In any case I don't think what we're looking at here is necessarily attitudes towards rape so much as attitudes towards women. Women who behave in transgressive ways in public, doing things that have traditionally been the preserve of men - drinking, smoking, displaying sexual feelings through flirting, displaying aggression through nagging and so on - are seen as deserving of punishment, be it through rape or violence.
So when women get raped, it's only "what was coming to them", which actually serves to take responsibility off the rapist in almost *every* case - because anybody can be accused of transgression. In traditional societies where transgression is harder because women are more constrained in the actions, they just shift the golaposts of transgression: she was talking to a man, she drove a car, she showed her ankles, she "dishonoured" the family etc.
The wider context is one of punishing women, as I said in another comment on this thread. What I think they're being punished for is the cognitive dissonance inherent in believing in things like human rights, or universal love, or any of the other fancy ideals that most religions and ideologies believe in but don't act on, and then denying half of humanity the benefits of those high ideals.
Men essentially rape women to punish them for being oppressed, and these survey results show that some people at least think that that's OK.
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I know what that is trying to say - that women don't get raped because they're too attractive for men to resist - but the idea that you can separate sex and power like that always bugs me. Since when was sex not about power - the power to attract, to fascinate, to physically dominate, to trust, to explore boundaries, power over one's own body and the power to consent - and so on and so forth.
I know the "not about sex, about power" statement is intended to be a statement against rape and has been a very important one in certain contexts, but I think it plays into the idea that there is on the one hand sweet gentle cuddly definitely-not-rape sex, and on the other, violent stranger-rape, and actually, that's a really dangerous idea that (I believe) lots of rapists hide behind. "OK, if I were being really honest with myself, I'd have to admit that wasn't my finest hour - I probably pushed harder than I should have; I wasn't carefully enough about making sure she was into it; I didn't check that just because she was OK with that, she was also OK with that; I maybe was a bit forceful then; I reacted really badly when she said that and maybe our last desperate break-up sex wasn't the best idea ever ... but you know, it's not like it was actual rape or anything. I wasn't deliberately jumping on her to overpower her and hurt her. She was really hot, any guy would have done the same!"
It's true that when something is incontrovertibly recognised as rape and someone is incontrovertibly recognised as a rapist, the public scorn is probably second only to how people respond to child molesters. But people will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid recognising an act of rape as such, and to call an act of rape by another name, and I think the blanket statement about rape not being about sex plays into that and has probably outlived its usefulness in certain contexts.
(hello, hope you don't mind me butting in - I followed a link that creases left on sinsense's journal and recognised you from ailbhe's. So very, very in agreement with your comments here!)
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I think you bring a really important aspect of the issue into the discussion here, which is that our attitudes to rape are largely determined by our definition of it. It's easy to express outraged condemnation of some perv jumping out of the bushes, but that doesn't describe even 1% of rapes.
It's much harder for us to accept cases like that of Lisa Grier King, or of prostitutes who get raped. Harder still is to extend the critical thinking into all the times that women find themselves engaging in sex that is not of their choosing, whether to keep the peace, to please, to be popular, because they're stranded and can't leave, because they're paid to, because it's their duty...
Problem is of course, on that definition so many men will have to think of themselves as rapists, and so many women will have to think of their lovers, sons, friends, fathers as rapists, it's an impossible idea to sell (kind of like environmentalism). Apart from anything else it will necessitate a clear examination of, as you say, the power relationships inherent in sex, and how little of it women still have in today's world. Which is a big ask, so I'm not holding my breath.
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For clarity, is it your assertion that if any of the foregoing form all or part of the motivation for participation in a sexual act, then the act is by definition not freely chosen and is therefore rape, or that these are factors which may influence the classification of an act as rape when taken with other circumstances?
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To answer your question, a sexual act that is imposed on a person against or despite their will is rape.
It becomes a lot more straightforward of you don't look at it through the lens of the actions of the woman - which is of course why people don't, because it's so starkly unambiguous then - but analyse the actions of the man.
Put quite simply, to initiate and follow through on sex with someone who DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE SEX is rape. It doesn't really matter to me if the power imbalance involves a gun, a £20 bill, some strategic nagging, a car parked in lover's lane, or what. If a man has sex with a woman who DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE SEX (but yields, relents, gives in, succumbs, surrenders, or any of the other lyrical euphemisms we employ to excuse rape) then that man is a rapist who's just raped.
What possible reason would a normal healthy human being have for wanting to engage in such an intimate activity with someone who doesn't want them, anyway? If one allows the fact that a woman is a human being with feelings and emotions to enter one's mind, and just how scared and impotent it makes her feel to have strange hands affecting an ingress into the private intimate space underneath her clothes, then even a teenage visit to the cinema and trying to get to second base begins to look as creepy as it actually is. The fact is, women are taught to be coerced into sex from puberty, and men are taught to coerce them. Is it any wonder that nobody knows where the line really lies, when it lies nowhere?
It's so crazy ass crazy that only our culture of wilful blindness could have come up with it. At least in Africa, where they cut off women's clitorises and labia, every act of penetration is overtly painful, punishing rape. There is far less ambiguity. Here, we want men to rape women and enjoy it, and impose this cognitive cat's cradle on them whereby they have to do it to prove their virility but have to believe that they didn't do it to prove their humanity.
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