BECAUSE THEY SHOVED THINGS UP THE ANUS OF PEOPLE WHO WERE NOT CONSENTING
That’s why. That’s it. That’s really, really, really, really all there is to it. It’s torture utilizing sexual assault under the guise of “feeding” them.
Why would you even all this sexist? Like, it’s not even so much that it “ins’t the precise term” – it’s like, not even remotely sexist in any way.
It is, however, CORRECT to call the forced insertion of things up someone’s anus sexual abuse.
If you’re unable to articulate yourself on why you think this is wrong, maybe it’s not because it’s wrong, but because you aren’t understanding it correctly. You don’t even know “why” it’s “wrong” (according to you) – you just “feel” it is. You’re arguing in circles.
Putting things into someone’s orifice, any orifice, without their consent is rape.
First off, I’m in agreement that what happened in this instance sounds like sexual assault.
But the absoluteness of your definition bothers me. Doctors sometimes have to do invasive things without consent. Further, in extreme cases, I think doctors can still be behaving ethically while doing things directly against a patient’s expressed wishes (eg. a procedure on a protesting child, or where consent is complicated by a disability, or 1000 other hypotheticals). If a doctor is doing something for a legitimate medical purpose, I wouldn’t call such a procedure rape or sexual assault - regardless of the body parts involved.
Obviously this decision to proceed shouldn’t be taken lightly; the patient from their perspective may experience the procedure as though it’s a sexual assault - but that doesn’t mean that’s what’s happening; and it doesn’t mean that the doctor is guilty of sexual assault. The situation is potentially complicated.
On the flip side - and as appears to be the case here - a doctor who is doing the same sort of activity (putting something in an anus) without a justified medical reason (especially when the point of the procedure is, effectively, pain/discomfort/embarassment), then it’s much more natural to call what happened a sexual assault. In the case here, it really looks like they were looking for a way to abuse and humiliate, and putting the abuse under a medical guise made them think they could get away with it.
If you want to make a good case against something, you need to start with a good definition that nails just the offenses you want to hit. If you say this is bad because “people shouldn’t put things in other people’s anuses without consent”, then you’re putting it in a bucket with potential activities that are more “grey area”. If you say “these people were doing unnecessary medical activities as a thin cover for abuse” and “they chose to insert things anally because they knew it would be humiliating and painful”, then you’ve made the start of a much more powerful case.
This is some some epic derailing. Five paragraphs? Really?
And your last paragraph is ridiculously condescending. Thanks for the unnecessary ‘splainin’, dude. For the record, I only read the first couple sentences each of your first and last paragraph, so you wasted your time.
The report refers to “CIA medical officers”. If this were a military rank then it would require a medical-practitioner qualification, but for CIA I suspect that they just sent a couple of goons to a first-aid course and told them “You’re in charge of keeping prisoners alive”.
That’s true. But this doctor already explained in careful detail what the pre-requisites are for us to do that ethically. Here you go again:
And none of that was present. So it was at the very least an assault. But given that what they were doing has sexual overtones it was thus a good going arse rape as well.
Please stop now. Their behaviour was and is utterly indefensible.
There’s a distinction between “what they did here” and “the general practice of forced feeding”. You’re pretending I’m talking about the former, when in this case I’m talking about the latter. That’s a horrible thing to do - you’re ascribing positions to me I absolutely do not hold. It is wrong for you to do this.
Overall, you’re imagining that I’m defending them - rather, I’m nailing down exactly what these people were doing wrong. I’m doing so by attempting to clarify what the complaint is precisely about. I’m separating “what they did”, which is clearly wrong, from the general practice of force feeding, which is much more murky.
I didn’t. And if you’re rational and made any effort to read, you wouldn’t think I had. You’ve just imagined me saying a bunch of stuff I haven’t - and even after I’ve pointed that out you still can’t be bothered to try to understand my point.
So you’re lashing out at someone who, on matters of substance, agrees with you completely (as far as I can tell). The only reason for this is that you’re too lazy to read and understand what I posted.
Why is this so difficult to understand? I’m clearly not defending the doctors in this specific case. We’re all in agreement that these people were wrong.
In my posts here, I’ve just been trying to clarify “what would justify this sort of procedure (ie. rectal hydration without consent)” and clarify why those standards are not met here. I’m trying to remove wiggle room and pin down the offense exactly. And, rereading my posts I think I’ve been pretty clear.
But I just keep getting accused of defending rapists or whatever. I deeply regret posting on this terrible, terrible forum. From here on out I guess I should switch to “YouTube” mode where I never, ever scroll down to the comments.
My post was on topic, reasonable, and actually wasn’t overly wordy - it’s just a complicated subject. But I obviously did waste my time talking to you (since you’re a jerk) and posting here in general (since nobody here apparently wants to read a post before yelling and accusing).
OK. Firstly all the pre-requisites I stated in the previous post. None of which were present. Not one, so it should have stopped there.
To have to resort to rectal rehydration if it could actually be done ethically, there would also need to be no iv access equipment; no intraosseous drill; no surgical cutdown kit; no central venous access kit; and no equipment for subcutaneous rehydration. Then, finally we’re stuck with the rectal route as a last resort. That’s run down rural Africa conditions not those of a facility run by a global superpower. And only for fluid, not for food.
(To be clear, I interpreted your previous post as calling me out for “trying to excuse this abuse” or something. It was not my intent to defend what I think was clearly abuse - and if your intent wasn’t calling me out, then my previous reply to you was wrong. You’ve actually done a great job through this thread of doing exactly the kind of clarification I hoped for in the initial report).
Absent consent or an ethical justification that’s a common assault. Still wrong.
There needs to be an additional overt sexual overtone to it when it comes to putting things in mouths for it to be rape, since they’re a more versatile part of the body. Otherwise brushing your wriggling wailing toddler’s teeth could be classified as rape too …
That was sort of my point. Torture doesn’t need to be sexual to be wrong. Nobody gets waterboarded and says “Well, at least it wasn’t sexual!” So focusing on that aspect of it (or the semantics) as much as some commenters here are doing is somewhat derailing, IMHO.
Men and women don’t both have buttholes? Or is it that non-consensual anal penetration isn’t rape in the case of one gender/sex/identity/whatever versus the other/an other/whatever? It’s a violation of a sexual nature in any case. Because the anus is an erogenous zone in both/any sexes, and because anal rape is a primarily sexually motivated act of violence whether or not it’s used as state torture. Also as @dacree mentioned, it’s the unlawful forceful insertion of a foreign object into the body (I might qualify it with orifice, but that’s not particularly necessary).
Sexism was a bad grasp for a word I don’t know even exists. Sexism is bias based on gender. There must be a word for bias based on sexual preferences (and I don’t mean gender). Not everyone associates the rectum with sex. Many do, and that’s great, but just because they do they shouldn’t assume everyone does, which leads to the fallacious logic that anything anus-related is also sex-related. That’s what I mean by bias based on sexual preference. If there’s a more accurate term, please share it.
Enough do that non-consensual penetration of that orifice constitutes rape in many jurisdictions. And you should be grateful that is so.
Sometimes something that comes with a label gets used for other purposes. It’s only a feeding tube if you can actually feed someone with it and we’ve already established this isn’t a viable route.
If the person who this was done to wants to say, “Hey, I wasn’t raped, they just painfully inserted things into my anus” then I will 100% respect their decision on whether the violation of their body was sexual or not. We generally jump to the conclusion that shoving things into people’s anuses against their will is rape.
If you think it is derailing to talk semantics, then why are you talking about the semantics of rape? I don’t think the conversation came off the rails because one of the doctors in the post said this was merely torture and sexual assault, I think it came off the rails because people decided to call that idea of sexual assault into question. Torture is torture, sexual or not, just as you say, so why argue whether or not it was sexual assault in the first place?
Rape isn’t about sexual gratification for the rapist. That may happen, but it’s not the base motivation. The point is power and control: using intimate and non-consensual physical behavior is a great way to show you have power and control over someone.
I’m only talking about semantics to point out that it’s not a great idea to make overbroad statements like “any time something is put into one’s body without permission is rape,” as another poster did, not only because it’s inaccurate, but because it invites exactly this kind of hairsplitting at the expense of the real issue. That being that the torturers’ medical excuse for “anal feeding” holds no water and reveals (yet again) something extremely disturbing about the psychologies of the people running these detention programs in our name.
It’s like when Andrea Dworkin wrote “Violation is a synonym for intercourse.” She was and continues to be widely misinterpreted, because that statement was so poorly thought out and phrased. You can’t even bring up her work without someone — not even just MRAs, but normal people! — barking about “man-hating lesbian feminists,” and suddenly the discussion veers away from what she actually meant towards whether feminists want to castrate all men or just some of them. Accurate non-hyperbolic language preëmpts all that.
