I have to strongly disagree and side with @L_Mariachi.
Sex is not special merely because of its cultural appraisal as being such. Sex is intrinsically special because even as a non-reproductive act it is a crucible for emotional connections welded by the oxytocin that surges through us during the act.
Forcing oneself on someone through this same means is an affront to our very biological basis for one of the deepest forms of social connection. It is a betrayal on the limbic level and thus a violation far more destructive to the victim’s emotional well-being than a mere blow to the head or gunshot to the chest.
In the passage I quoted above, I read it as suggesting that sex is special only because our culture has deemed it so, just as culture has deemed the word ‘fuck’ to be inappropriate, i.e. a ‘curse word’. My contention is that while the latter is a valid example of arbitrary cultural standards, the former is not.
Our reverence for the act of sex is not extrinsically conferred by culture, but something intrinsic to our neurobiology as social animals. It has been with us, H. sapiens, before the advent of culture itself.
To be honest, that principle hasn’t been always consistently applied. It obviously applied to cases of murder where the victim had no one to talk in their name, but for example, the increasing sensitivity to cases of domestic violence, once those have been considered less acceptable by society, and therefore more often reported, put into question the integrity of usual doctrines: in many cases, the victim of those violences is under the influence of the perpetrator.
The fun part being that, once the law community came aware of that issue, they had to document about BDSM practices, in order to be able to distinguish them from abuses. Even if they were uptight and reluctant.
But your assumption is that all rape is a power play.
Some rape is all about asserting dominance, but much is simply about getting one’s rocks off regardless of consent. This doesn’t make one motive somehow better than the other, but it’s reductionist to elide the difference. Being drunk and horny is not the same thing as, say, claiming your position in a prison hierarchy.
It’s an academic distinction at any rate. They’re all bad, just in different ways. I don’t see the point of conflating all the multifarious motives into one.
@anon67050589 has this one right, at least of the stories I’ve read that analyzed the motivations of rapists in the aftermath of their crimes. Sexual pleasure is not their primary motivation. It’s dominance.
What drives this need to assert and claim dominance, and why in this way? Who knows. Each of us can be grateful for being unable to imagine it.
The reverence aspect is conferred by culture. And not all humans have the kind of oxytocin response you’re talking about with their chosen sex partners. In fact, enjoyment of sex has a lot to do with the culture one is raised in.
But yes, certainly I agree that there are aspects of sex which are not culturally learned. Being that physically close is dangerous. It requires trust. Not just trust that the other person isn’t trying to hurt you, but also that they’re actually interested in you, not just getting off themselves, and that they’re not being irresponsible with regard to diseases or pregnancy.
This is something that went through my mind on second consideration. And you’re right, this response does vary. As I see it, the median response sets the standard, though.
Maybe I should be thankful that that doesn’t make any sense to me. I can understand being horny and desperate, but “I’ll show this unconscious woman who’s boss” sounds like raving lunacy.
Well, are they evenly distributed? Do you know people randomly? I’m pretty sure the null hypothesis is a pretty good default assumption in absence of any evidence to the contrary. Pointing out that there are unknown unknowns sounds like a fine way to pretend that we don’t know anything and that all arguments are equal.
Basically your point is that it might not be the case that you almost certainly know a rapist, it might instead be the case that you either aren’t likely to know a rapist or that you are likely to know several, depending on how the population is distributed. Without any knowledge of how rapists are distributed in the population, what could you explain the important difference between the assumption of even distribution and the assumption of concentrated distribution? I mean other than the latter leaving people feeling shocked when someone they know is arrested?
I think this is true: you cannot comprehend thinking like this. That’s a good thing!
Remember, rapists aren’t desperate for sex. Most have sexual partners. Someone like this jerk, even if he didn’t have a specific girlfriend at the time, was a good looking Olympic-bound athlete at a premier school. There were probably at least one or two young women who flirted with him at that party. He could have had sex that night if he wanted to. But instead, he chose to follow someone who couldn’t consent and rape her.
I think the fact that it would have been known at the party that she wasn’t a student there might have been part of the reason he went after her. He probably figured that she wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting him in trouble…which is absolutely true, except for the fact 2 male graduate students stepped in to protect her.
True, and we have moved pretty far from my original point. The fact that we don’t know one way or the other shows that rapist status is not something people share with others, so it is not really appropriate to describe as a culture. Or at least not one that I have experienced, which is sort of what I said in my first post.
Well, that hasn’t been my experience. I do try to be selective about who I hang out with, it is possible that I have been more successful in avoiding such people than I realized. It is possible that this makes me a bit sheltered.
