Can we resume normal internet please.

In all fairness to myself and weaselling out of arguments all the time, in my latest defence I did mention, "People who have fallen on hard times, or who've been taught a harmful worldview of the people they would rape, or have very impaired judgement due to intoxication, or any combination of the above, are something society has a hope of intervening in".

And in fairness to you, this hasn't been my argument throughout, but I thought the whole point of this enlightening process was that opinions could change and grow. You're right though, if the psychos rape for pleasure, and intoxicated wankers rape for pleasure, then the rape to wilfully victimise someone and take charge proportion does seem smaller.

I've quoted this out of order, because I think what I said above more or less follows into this, sort of.

I guess my trouble is I can't see anyone wanting to rape for sexual pleasure being rational, however I can see someone wanting to rape for control being rational - albeit coming from a place of being miserably depressed. What I mean by rational is more or less a logical desire, so for the latter they do it in that moment because they think it will make them feel better, but for the former they do it because they really want sex that badly and they can't stand that they're not having it.

My definitions of rational/irrational are based on personal experience, and I guess if you can't really grasp the concept then that's a great thing - it means you haven't ever had thoughts that defy all logic and demand your attention, which is a good thing because no one wants to think truly irrationally ever.

My biggest problem here is that I can't believe so many people would be that irrational. People can of course be momentarily irrational, but it's certainly on the rarer side, so to be persistently irrational and it not to amount to anything (counselling, a previous crime, etc.) seems off.

Maybe I'm just being naive, and more people are pretty damn crazily irrational a lot of the time than I thought.

Honestly I'm not that exasperated (unless you start quoting me out of context again), it's probably more that this thread has been a much greater commitment than I thought it would be, because once I've started something like this I'd be being a douchebag if I floated out controversial opinions and then backed away because I couldn't be bothered. In terms of me being ad hoc, well of course I am - unless it's something I'm particularly invested in I'm not going to do intellectually rigorous legwork and will instead argue what I think is true based on what I believe to be true. You're acting like my weird mental arguments are something new to you Smuel.

I mean it's good research, and it certainly makes your points even more compelling. I guess what I would say is that rape for power isn't something readily quantifiable, as people wouldn't own up to it, however certainly this makes it more spurious than what you're putting forward.

It's hard to track honestly, it's not like people do impact studies on random conventional wisdom phrases to see their effect on policy making. Again, I guess it's a spurious point at best - it's very hard to validate.

As a side point, I guess possibly another part of my inability to grasp why people would rape for sex is because I've been in a long term relationship since I was 15 and so never really had to live at any point the desperate chronic masturbator dream, and can't really conceptualise a situation where my own sex drive could ever get to such an uncontrollable level. As such I guess I'm a heavily biased person to be having this conversation with, you lucky man.

 

I feel like the only way this is going to end is if I rape you all. I guarantee it won't be about the sex either.

 

While I don't approve of your methods, at least it wasn't incest.

What was said about gorillas got me thinking that rape is about power. It's not that individuals rape to feel powerful, it's more that rape is a privilege of the powerful. Once an individual has reached a certain level of status, the group will tolerate more shenanigans out of that person... including acts as widely repugnant as rape.

Oh, and by the way guys...

 

That point was made by one of the articles. Power is what enables a man to have sex with an unwilling woman, but it doesn't mean that the rape is about the power. Just as a gun enables a mugger to take your wallet, but the mugging isn't about the gun.

Anyway, I think I'm pretty much done with this topic now. What I've learned is:

- Rape has always been mainly about sex, and prior to 1975 most people would have been like "well, duh" about that concept.
- In 1975, a feminist author wrote "Rape is about power, not about sex" in support of a more general argument about patriarchy. The statement was not based on any research, it just suited her wider thesis.
- The statement struck a chord with a lot of people, such as Jojobobo, who personally couldn't conceive of any reason to rape anyone, either because they were too nice, too law abiding, had consensual sex readily available to them, or were satisfied with pornography or prostitution as a means of getting the sex they wanted.
- Most of these people were in the higher social classes of trend setters and influencers, such as Jojobobo, who are responsible for creating society's narrative, so the statement became widely repeated and adopted as conventional wisdom.
- It's still not true, but that doesn't matter as long as it feels true to people, and it allows them to separate sex and rape in their minds, so men don't have to worry that just because they like sex they might secretly be a rapist, and everyone is reassured that actual rapists are "not normal people".

Whether or not the phrase is useful is debatable. I've read some points saying that it makes it easier to create laws against rape because legislators are reluctant to deal with matters of sex. On the other hand, it may make it more difficult to educate men not to rape, since men who are just after sex think they are therefore in the clear.

In conclusion, it's not true, but nobody really cares.

Here endeth the lesson.

(Unless someone continues to engage with me. Come at me, bro!)

 

I always knew deep down I was a trend setter, I'm just a cool guy like that.

 

Good points, Smuel, well made.

If you step back half a billion years, though, we can see that the hermaphroditic slug which bit off its partners penis during sex became the first male, and the one who lost became the first female. So the stronger more aggressive hermaphrodite was able to go on and impregnate others without spending chemical energy on eggs, while the less /powerful/ one was not.

It's a basic axiom of genetics that males have evolved to compete and be selected against. It's a little different in haplodiploid species like bees and ants, but basically the whole point of males is to fight it out for females.

So, while your argument is solid for the context of sociological theories over the last century, in terms of molecules over the eons, gender evolved from a power imbalance during intercourse.

Of course, there's the parthenogenesis of the lesbian lizards of south australia who also mount each other, but I think it's usually consensual.

 

Thanks for providing the wider context. I agree that millions of years of evolution are unlikely to be undone by a century of social conditioning. I think I made that point in an earlier post, that humanity is precariously close to the edge of barbarism, and society has to expend constant effort to keep us away from it. The way that it went spectacularly wrong several times in the 20th century is probably one of the best illustrations of this.

Anyway, I now declare this topic officially closed. Join me next week, when I'll be asking - why do people say that shaving makes hair grow back thicker? It's obviously not true you morons.

 

I have nothing of value to add to this valueless thread, but this made me giggle.

 

At bit late to the party, but a study based on a thread on Reddit provides some interesting points: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201702/why-does-rape-happen

Although it's a second had source (don't have access to the original journal),the reasoning as to why some men raped was, to me, a bit surprising. Keep in mind that Redditors seems to be a fairly homogeneous group and the study could most likely not be extended to, say, dirty Muslim peados, just to give an example.

 

Well I guess rape isn't always about sexual desire, sometimes it's about punishing someone for vomiting on your bed. Makes total sense.

 

When I was at university, a female student friend of mine once sent me an email confessing that she had vomited on some guy's bed.

Now I wonder if it was actually a cry for help.

 

I get the feeling that searching for rational behaviour, as established earlier, is a waste of time when dealing with these individuals or, for that matter, when dealing your general rapist.

 

That's true, but still when there's such an abject lack of rationality it is a little jarring. It's like saying, "I felt like going for a drive in the country yesterday, so I ate a fish sandwich."