Can we resume normal internet please.

Damnit Zanza, I read the first sentence and acted on it before reading the second sentence.

I hope you feel bad now.

 

Okay, so instead of composing another 1000-word screed about something I don't know much about, I decided to (gasp) do some research.

Turns out the thing I've been trying to describe is "paraphilic rape", which is apparently better known (?) as Biastophilia, which is where "sexual arousal is dependent on, or is responsive to, the act of assaulting an unconsenting person, especially a stranger". I feel that this maps pretty well to what I've been saying.

When I went looking for how rapists describe themselves, to see how many of them fit the above, I found this paper, Convicted Rapist's Vocabulary Of Motive, which conducted interviews with 114 imprisoned rapists (all heterosexual males, convicted of a violent rape) and grouped them into categories according to the justification and excuses that they offered.

If I'm reading it correctly, roughly a third of the rapists claimed they had no contact with the victim at all, a third claimed they had sex but it was consensual, and a third said something along the lines of "well, yes, I raped her, but..." The paper discounts the first group, since they can't really get any meaningful data from them, and classifies the other two groups as "deniers" and "admitters".

The denier's main theme is that the victim enjoyed the sex, either from the beginning, or after they had "warmed up". Some even said that sex was the victim's idea in the first place.

Of the admitters, some of them blamed alcohol or drugs, and almost all of them claimed there was a stressful event that precipitated their actions, but a common theme is "it's not like me to do that sort of thing".

So, is rape about power, or about sex? Of course, we're talking about the testimony of convicted rapists here, so I would expect that a lot of them are lying, either deliberately or as part of their own self-deception. Still, I don't think there's any kind of emerging theme of "rape is about power". The closest match would be for part of the admitters group, where they felt stressed, betrayed or otherwise helpless, and went and took it out on a woman. I think you could make a case that they enjoyed the power more than the sex in those cases, but they're a minority, and they don't explicitly say it.

On the other hand, none of the rapist's self-descriptions come across as rape paraphilia at all! Like, zero percent of them said "Yeah, you know what, raping is just my thing." I can attempt to weasel out of this by saying that, well, of course none of these imprisoned men hoping for parole would say that. They may be rapists but they're not stupid. But that would be kind of weak. So I have to admit that there isn't much evidence that rapists mainly consist of biastophiliacs. I was wrong about that.

In conclusion, rape is a complicated subject, and we were both wrong about what motivates most rapes. But not as wrong as the statement "Rape isn't about sex, it's about power."

 

Sample size is too small. They didn't even interview homosexual rapists. What about their ethnicity, their cultural background? Really need to test from multiple convicted felons from other countries. Cutting out a third of the sample because they didn't know their victim us ridiculous.

 

It's not that they didn't know the victim, it's that they denied they ever met the victim, i.e. they were still claiming to be completely innocent even after the victim pointed at them in court and said "that's the man who raped me." At least that's how I understood it.

According to the paper, half the men were white and half were black, but I don't really see how that would affect the conclusions. Presumably if there was any notable split along racial lines the authors would have mentioned it. Also, I don't see what difference the country would make - do rapists have notably different profiles around the world?

Maybe you have some alternative research you'd like to share?

 

Nah, I don't care enough to write pages of opinion to feed a debate going in circles.

 

I think you've manipulated the data there a little bit, at least with how you presented the facts I would draw different conclusions from you. I'll get onto them in a bit..

Firstly, what I said in the first post I made on this topic, was that violent rapes are about power but non-violent rapes likely aren't. What I meant by this is all pre-meditated rapes are about power (even when they're not necessarily violent, e.g. date-rape) but also a decent proportion of rapes that weren't premeditated but where the man is irritated and wants to take it out on someone are there's a very clear and obvious lack of consent (e.g. the victim isn't significantly inebriated or otherwise impaired in some way that you can pretend to yourself that what you're doing is okay) are also about power.

Maybe you think by adding this extra clarification I'm re-purposing what I said originally to provide alternate meaning retrospectively, but to me personally that original point - while I didn't provide all these bonafide distinctions - does read very much in this way; and I did clarify all these points in the post previous to this one. In fact, here's how explicitly I spelt this out in the last post:

So I've never argued "all rapes are about power" and have said that a complete blanket statement is wrong, yet somehow you more or less keep telling me that I have been.

Now if we get back to the data, as you did I would write off the "no contact" group (however arguably they're people who didn't want to incriminate themselves further, and so probably still fall into the "denier" and "admitter" groups already if they were being honest). For the denier group, I don't think they fit the profile of a violent and/or pre-meditated rapist as they seem to be completely trying to disown what happened (either saying they enjoyed it, or were consenting, or whatever) - for simplicities' sake these are those people who have poor impulse control and just fancied a shag (looking at the research you provided, it seems to suggest that these men lacked the value system to suggest what they were doing was wrong, and so it's not done on a power basis for them as they never really believed they were doing anything overly transgressional in the first place).

For the admitter group, in your own words:

I think this is absolutely about power, and even if they don't come out and plainly say it (why would anyone take such direct ownership of their flawed nature? The research even goes to far to claim admitters want to "reconceptualize themselves" as "'ex-rapists'") their provided rationale for their own actions speaks volumes already. Ultimately they had a bad time, and they wanted to make themselves feel better by taking it out on someone else and making them feel worse. What they are doing, they are doing with knowing aggression and when they also know their actions are wrong - they are validating their own emotional needs by forcibly dominating someone else.

You're also saying there that this group is a minority, when really it's half of the people who acknowledge they've done a rape. Even with with the last "no contact" third, as I mentioned presumably already being deniers and admitters themselves if they were being honest, I see no reason why it isn't a fair assumption to think they themselves wouldn't be 50-50 between deniers and admitters purely on the basis that that's what the remaining population looks like (as mentioned though, this is just an assumption).

So this then to me looks like half of all rapes are about power, and half are about poor impulse control and some combination of not thinking they did something wholly bad in the first place (and as I said, I've never mentioned that 100% or rapes were about power). At the very least if "no contact" isn't a 50-50 split, the entire population can only be at worst 33-67 as you said the admitters were already a third, in which case it is completely fair to say without any caveats: "A good proportion of rapes are about power, not about sex."

Yeah, I really didn't think this would be a widespread fetish in the first place. I would wager that people who sexually fetishise rape do take it out in a BDSM fashion rather than out in public. I think this concession vindicates my entire narrative that people who go out and commit a violent rape are getting a thrill out of it due to the violence and physical possession of another person.

In conclusion, you've lead me round the houses with a debate you created spouting even more nonsense than I have (which is a pretty impressive feat) while being I would say doubly as rude and condescending to me at every turn (compare the google definitions of "asinine" as you described my thinking to "obtuse" which is how I referenced yours) and also telling me I'm claiming things that I never have since my very first post on the topic (that I support the statement "all rapes are about power" as a universally applicable generalisation), only to cap it all by presenting research that I would say strongly indicates my own points have had a factual basis all along (or at the bare minimum, makes them much more difficult to write off as unequivocally "wrong", which you keep telling me they are).

*slow clap*

Don't ever let people tell you you're not annoying Smuel, you have a rare talent for it. You could say this last section of this post has all been a bit gratuitous and cruel, but it's representative of how frustrating you've made this every step of the way, and at least I'm not calling your thinking asinine

 

Okay, so I'm a little confused. Zanza originally said that rape was about power. I expressed doubt about this, but you leapt to the defence of the statement, and we ended up arguing about whether or not rape was primarily about sex or about power. Now you're saying, "no, Smuel, you dumbass, I never said rape was 100% about power, only that violent rapes are about power, you prick".

Well, okay, but then I have to ask, I mean I really don't want to ask, but it does seem like I have to ask, what makes a rape "violent" to you?

Part of the reason for my confusion is that you seem happy to agree that for the "denier" group in that survey, the rape was about sex rather than power. But a lot of those men raped their victims at knifepoint. I find it a bit of a stretch to classify these as "non-violent" rapes. And yet, they're about sex? At this point I honestly have no idea what you consider to be a "violent" rape, or how you make the sex/power distinction.

By the way, I never described your thinking as asinine, I said that the statement "rape isn't about sex, it's about power" is asinine. Since you are now taking pains to distance yourself from that statement, and in fact agree that "a complete blanket statement is wrong", it seems we at least partially agree about that. Except that you still seem to be defending the statement, albeit modified to "a good proportion of rapes are about power".

So, what proportion? As mentioned above, you agree that for the denier group, sex is not about power, and I guess in return you want to claim that for everyone in the admitter group it IS about power, and therefore there's about a 50/50 split, and that this split extends to all rapes, including the ones where the rapist denied there was any kind of sex at all, and all the ones who weren't convicted of their rape, which is usually reported as being around 95% of rapes.

I'm sure you'd agree that it's easier to convict whatever you define as a "violent" rapist than a "non-violent" rapist, since a defense of "it wasn't rape" is more convincing if the victim has no injuries. So I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the men interviewed in that survey represent the more extreme end of the spectrum. And therefore, using your own definitions, the rapists for whom it's "about power" would be over-represented in the survey.

Still, even if we ignore that, and I grant you every claim you want to make about the data (i.e. all admitters are in it for the power and this extends to all non-surveyed rapists too), you can still only reach an absolute upper limit of 50% of rapes being about power.

I'm not aware of any convention where "X is at most 50% of Y" is commonly understood to imply "Y is about X". At this point I think it would take a special level of mental gymnastics to keep defending the "rape is about power" statement...

... but I fully expect you to keep on doing it, while also maintaining that it's not what you're doing at all.

I mean, honestly, if you think that the statement "rape is not about sex, it's about power" is not defensible, then stop defending it. It will probably turn out that we completely agree on the subject matter and are just arguing about some small aspect of the wording. That used to happen when I argued with Grossenschwamm, and I always assumed it was his fault, but if it's happening with you too then maybe it's my fault. Maybe I've been the Grossenschwamm all along.

 

I thought you might make this distinction, which is why I said:

I do appreciate that people lacking a value system in general that tells them rape is wrong can quite easily be violent, I just didn't want to over engineer the point and I think psychoanalysing a group made up in part by people with strong anti-social tendencies starts to become a bit of a minefield (because how directly comparable are they to regular Joe rapists, etc.). However if anything, it strengthens the point as now all of the admitter group and at least some of the denier group are doing it about because of the rush of power.

I think most of this is covered in the above point. One would assume that admitters/deniers wouldn't naturally have different rates of conviction without further information to suggest otherwise, and so you would think un-convicted rapists would naturally have the same proportion of mindsets.

I think that's a wonky assumption. I was simply extrapolating, you have a whole mess of assumptions here. Since you were the one who bought the article up, I'm approaching it from the viewpoint it is representative and fair rather than trying to manipulate the facts it represents.

You're being massively selective about your quoting of me here, and it's really annoying, because anyone with eyes can see you're pulling things out of context. Here's what you're saying I said:

Here's what I actually said (here is the link, the second time I've linked to the post making this point, joy of joys, and I'll also direct your attention to, "Last edited: Jun 30, 2017", in case you were going to claim I've retroactively edited it - at this stage I'm really not sure what craziness you're going to try and claim next), the very first thing I said in this thread about rape in response to you, with the important bits in bold and underlined, and with some numbers (e.g. [1]) before the separate instances where I made clear my stance:

There, I added in some red even, for extra clarity. Contracting the quotes to remove redundant filler, we get:

As every subsequent thing I said was informed contextually by that original point, and as I expected you to have originally read what I said at the bare minimum and not to have the memory of a gnat, I feel like I've been pretty crystal clear from the off. But of course, keep claiming that my opinion is shifting in the wind, it doesn't smack a little of grasping at straws for a counterpoint at all.

I think it's defensible in the context I gave it in. You keep telling me I never mentioned a context even though I very blatantly have, however I'm sure you'll fail to move your eyes up the page a little to those red letters and keep at this whole mindless nonsense angle you're working so well.

You know, it really raises the bar for a discussion when you have to quote yourself in red lettering rather than assume basic literacy. If you're wondering why I'm so irritated, it's because I've been providing a context for ages, and you've ignored it in probably every post you've made. It is the definition of tediousness, and at this stage I'm starting to think you're just trolling me because I can't grasp why you would be so staunchly maintaining your ignorance.

No I don't think that will happen. What seemingly has happened here is that you revealed your own argument to have no factual basis, and now to save face you're saying, "Well we were both wrong in the end."

I think as a broad brush stroke "right" and "wrong" are fundamentally stupid things to say in a debate anyway as they mean too many different things (e.g. morally wrong, based on flawed logic and so intellectually wrong, factually wrong as there is empirical evidence that what is being said is false. If you're going to say someone is wrong you need to clarify which of these "wrongs" it is), so I would never claim I'm "right". However, I would say the point I have presented you cannot beyond reasonable doubt refute based on the evidence you presented.

There is no grounds to say what I'm saying is wrong, just that you doubt it is true for reasons you've not done well to articulate ("it sounds pithy", etc.). However, for your whole fetish argument, you were factually wrong, there is no evidence to back what you are saying.

To summarise: you were factually wrong, my arguments stand up to some scrutiny and you can't say beyond a reasonable doubt they are factually, logically or morally wrong (morally, in that they impede social handling of rapes and potential rapists).

So no Smuel, I don't think we're going to come to any agreement here, and I certainly don't think we were "both wrong" as you say.

Hey, you said it, not me.

 

Oh, I see. You're not defending "rape is about power" as a blanket statement, you're defending it as a statement in the context of "the specific sub-set of rapes that are about power". Yeah, right, yeah, that's not tautological or anything, and is also totally obvious when Zanza says "rape is about power" and I say "I think that's not only over-simplistic but also probably wrong" and then you write a series of lengthy posts to tell me that, no, I'm the one who is wrong, because rape is about power.

Indeed, I can't fault your reasoning when I bring up some research that shows that 50% of actual rapists explicitly say that it was about sex for them, but you conclude that "at least some of them are doing it because of the rush of power", and the other 50% don't explicitly mention power, but you conclude that "this is absolutely about power even if they don't come out and plainly say it", and then you extrapolate from there and say that you're being fair and not manipulating the evidence and it all supports your viewpoint that rapes are about power.

So obviously I'm the one distorting what people say by quoting some occasions where you have defended the statement "rape is about power" by writing "rape is about power", without also quoting the context that you were only referring to the specific sub-set of rapes that are about power. Even though you've never really defined what that sub-set is besides "the violent ones", which isn't very helpful since at least some of the men who commit violent rapes say something to the contrary.

But naturally I'm still wrong to say that the simplistic statement "rape is about power" is asinine.

I do apologise.

 

Yes exactly, I just gave my interpretation on the phrase, and then you argued against me over Zanza's seeming interpretation of the phrase, and not my own. It would have been tautological if Zanza had said, "I think rapes are about power," and then he also said, "Actually I think violent rapes are about power," but as we're two different people I think that's a dumb accusation.

If you're going to claim that me saying stating, "A good proportion of rapes are about power," and, "Violent and/or premeditated rapes are about power," is completely tautological, I would not say it is as I provided a rationale - it based on the evidence a good proportion of rapes are violent rapes, and therefore a good proportion of rapes are about power. My understanding of tautology is saying the same thing twice without any logical reason to do so, here there is the logical reasoning to do so.

And the point of, "Rape isn't about sex in the same vein as consensual sex, it's really about power," was really because I was tired of you going, "There's a dick involved, ergo it's 100% about sex!" So strike off, "Rape isn't about sex in the same vein as consensual sex, it's really about power," even though as I mentioned it was in the view of violent rape as it followed my original point as, as clearly that was tautological. I was hoping that rephrasing might resonate slightly more with you, which is why I rephrased, but I guess not.

Okay, well offer what these rapes were about then that demonstrates they unequivocally weren't about power? I say for the admitters that is the only reasonable narrative, as they are hurting other people to spread around their own emotional grief, which people wouldn't unless they thought a person was at least in the moment in someway their lesser, which means at least in the moment they are more powerful than them. They are overlooking the rights of the other individual and giving their own desires precedent, treating them as lesser.

And I know you're going to say for the deniers, "It was about a desire for sex." Does that mean that their desire for sex can't be mutually linked to their desire for power, or they like rape sex because it makes them feel powerful? People with aggressive anti-social tendencies will treat all kinds of people as their lesser all the time, they live a power dynamic day to day, and so if a good proportion of those people are deniers as you claim, I think there's a case to be made some of them are doing it for power too, or that their motivations are much less binary than other people's.

As I said unless you can strongly refute both of these hypotheses by making good alternate hypotheses or pointing to some logical flaw in interpretation, I don't think you can say what I'm claiming is "wrong", and at the very least if the deniers are a bit of a stretch (which I don't think it is, as all I'm claiming is some of them would also do it for power, whereas the only stance that refutes this is none of these people do, which is a tough claim to make), I think the interpretation of the admitters' actions is fair - as I think I've reasonably demonstrated that their actions could be about power and there isn't an alternative hypothesis.

As mentioned also, my assumptions on the rest of the "no contact" group was simple extrapolation.

Bottomline, unless you have an alternate hypothesis, I don't really get why you can state I'm wrong.

Err, yeah. Thanks for owning up to it buddy. It's like if I reviewed a film and said, "It's amazing how bad this film is," and you quoted me regarding the film saying:

Do you not think that's a problem? You should feel grateful anyone would carry on with this after such a display. I mean, really never ever misquote people again, how is that possibly a stance to make any argument from - logical or not? It's really never a thing I thought people would do around here, as it's an extreme fallacy. But I guess let's talk more upon the merits of taking quotes out of context, because they are obvious and apparent? Whaaaaattttt?!?!?

As mentioned, a possible explanation is anti-social people are habitually violent and live and breathe by a power dynamic. In that way, it's tough to say pretty much all their social interaction isn't dictated by a need for power, and so they wouldn't say, "Well it was about power," because arguably everything is for them on some level about power.

And even if none of those rapes are about power, that doesn't make the main point I was arguing - that the admitters do seem to do it for power and they are a significant portion of the population - any less valid, and it was that point that lead to, "A good proportion of rapes are about power."

Currently all you're doing is saying, "I think your points are rubbish, but I can't offer much of an alternative." As I mentioned unless you can put forward a strong alternate case that the points I'm making are incorrect, I don't see how you can claim they are wrong.

I never said that you were, all I said was that to entirely refute it in all cases of rape is more or less the same kind of oversimplification you seemed so keen to tell everyone else they were making.

 

Boys you don't have to fight over me. There is plenty of me to go around.

 

It still seems to me that you're dancing around the facts to avoid having to admit that "rape is about power" is not a defensible statement.

My position is only that it's not a defensible statement. If you agree with me, then we can end this right now. However, you've had at least one opportunity to do that, and elected to keep on going instead, so on that basis I'm going to assume that you think that "rape is about power" is a reasonable statement to make.

Your defense of it seems to oscillate between two distinct arguments:

1. Rape IS about power, because the evidence shows it.
2. SOME rapes are about power, and anyone who hears the statement "rape is about power" is clearly going to understand that it doesn't mean ALL rapes, but only those ones that are about power.

I think that the second argument is weak. Especially given that Wayne's explanation of the phrase was that it's "to correct an easy misunderstanding". So we've already established that people don't necessarily understand the motivations behind rape. Claiming that they're obviously going to be able to apply a filter to a simplistic phrase and walk away with a better understanding is rather optimistic. If the purpose of the phrase is to educate people, then its value hinges on whether the majority of rapes are about power or not. If they are not, then it's a bad phrase. Bad!

This brings us back to the first argument - that rape is about power. If the evidence shows that more than 50% of rapes ARE about power, then I think that "rape is about power" would be a reasonable summary. However, the evidence is far from conclusive on this:

This is not a good basis to start from. You're a scientist, so you should be able to appreciate that "let's assume that all rapes are about power unless the rapist explicitly tells us otherwise" is going to lead to a biased result. It would be far better to start with a rule of "we don't know what any given rape was about until the rapist tells us what it was about."

So what are rapists saying? According to the survey we've been discussing, about 50% of convicted violent rapists are saying that the woman enjoyed it, and the other 50% of them are saying things along the lines of "I dunno man, I was feeling stressed that day, I don't know why I did it, that's not like me."

I don't think the first group's statements equate to "it was about power" at all, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to equate ALL of the latter group's statements to "it was about power", but you seem to want to. Okay. So let's say I give way on that - for 50% of convicted violent rapists it's about power. However, you previously wrote:

According to you "lazy" rapes are not about power, it's only the "man in the bushes" (or violent) ones that are. The thing is, almost all of the convicted rapists in the survey were what you would classify as "man in the bushes". So now, in order to get anywhere close to 50% of rapes being "about power", you've either got to say that lazy rapes don't count (I hope you don't say this), or that "man in the bushes" rapes massively outnumber them (not what statistics generally show), or that your original split between "lazy" and "violent" rapes was wrong.

When I previously brought up this point you said I had a "whole mess of assumptions", which is kind of funny because they are YOUR assumptions. Personally I wouldn't try to make a simplistic division between "lazy" and "violent" rapes and ascribe a clear cut separation of motivations between them, because this is a complicated topic with lots of additional factors at play. In any case, it seems to me that the results of that survey don't support the statement "rape is about power" even when I use your assumptions and definitions.

Still, since you're not convinced by that, let's try a different approach. I typed "rape motivations" into Google, and these articles came up on the first page. So I haven't gone digging for the ones that support my case. Well, I mean, obviously I have a bit, but only in those on the first page:

Wikipedia - Causes of sexual violence

There's a bunch of stuff on this page, including that some rapists are motivated by power, and others by anger or sadism. I don't think you can conclude from this that rape is therefore "about power" without trying to define anger and sadism as being different types of power. But then - if that were the case, they wouldn't be listed separately. The page also includes this:

In 1994, Richard Felson coauthored the controversial book "Aggression and Coercive Actions: A Social-Interactionist Perspective" with James Tedeschi, a book which argues that sexual fulfillment is the motive of rapists, rather than the aggressive desire to dominate the victim. Felson believes that rape is an aggressive form of sexual coercion and the goal of rape is sexual satisfaction rather than power. Most rapists do not have a preference for rape over consensual sex.

Obviously I can't say that this is definitive in any way, but I think at the very least it shows that "rape is about power" isn't an automatic conclusion.

Why do rapists rape? For power or sex? Let's ask a rapist!

This is an article about a different survey of rapists from the one I previously linked to, but it follows the same principle, and concludes with this: But from what I have read, it seems sex is a very widespread motivation for rape, according to rapists themselves. Power seems to be the motivation much less often.

Jezebel - Rapists Explain Themselves on Reddit, and We Should Listen

Yes, sorry, it's a Jezebel article. Still, it quotes another article thus: As activist and writer Wendy McElroy points out, "there can be as many motives for rape as there are for murder and other violent crimes ... Rape is every bit as complex." Insisting that no rape is ever "about" sex but is rather about an individual man acting on a patriarchal mandate to sow terror by exercising "power" does a disservice to us all.

In the light of all this, I do think that "rape is about power" is not supported either by the evidence - two separate surveys each show at least 50% of rapists report that it's about sex, or by the people who do research on the subject - they list motivations as being anger, power, sadism, sex, plus a bunch of other things.

At this point, I don't really want to continue arguing with you about this. I've now read about rape so much that I've stopped flinching at the word, which I don't regard as an achievement. You're clearly determined to believe that rape is about power, even though the evidence suggests it's far more complicated than that, and also when pressed you retreat to "I only mean some of them!" while still maintaining that I'm wrong. Plus now you're starting to claim that I'm saying that rape is 100% about sex, which I don't think is something I've ever written. Like, not even close. I admit I did get sidetracked by paraphilic rape for a couple of posts, but then shortly afterwards I said I was wrong about that, and haven't mentioned it since.

Though having said that, I do think that the "sadism" category on the Wikipedia page maps fairly well to a rape paraphilia. However I don't want to argue about that, I'm bringing it up only to further support the point that rape is a complicated subject.

To summarise my entire thinking on this topic: rape is a complicated subject, and therefore the statement "rape is not about sex, it's about power" is overly simplistic and also probably wrong.

 

So I've read your points, and they're all good, though some of them I feel like I addressed already (I over simplified the point about the deniers later, and of course my opening salvo was simplified in such a way between lazy rapes and violent rapes to not over engineer a point in a similar way - start the debate off simple and provide more explanation if the opponent asks for it). Sadism/power/anger I would say all fall into the realms of wanting personal power, but let's not shall we? We're not really adding anything now by going at it more. I can and will go into the points (1) and (2) oscillation if you'd like me to, but it's really only to save face for myself, which I don't really care about - but if you want me to I can justify myself.

I think what has bothered me about all this is that you're claiming that the "rapes are about power" statement is entirely wrong. As I said, I would also agree that this blanket statement is wrong. However, people like to make blanket statements, and I think telling people they are, "Wrong, and the situation is much more nuanced than they could possibly understand," and they are just idiots wandering around letting their lives be swayed by pithy soundbites heard on the TV is much more damaging to debate than the original statement was (you didn't say it like this of course, but I think the massive condescension of other people and their intellect is immediately clear when you start to describe what other people say is "pithy". And while it was TDC that first used pithy and you only used it later, you did initially say..)

I think that "people don't like analysing things in detail", and people often "make sure that they don't confuse themselves", and, "they've come up with a neat little phrase that associates rape with something other than sex, and now they can trot it out and everyone sagely nods their heads and thinks that they've solved a problem", comes across as probably a little bit worse than people saying things which are "pithy".

My points were essentially highlighting that in at least some (arguably most) of rape cases power is a contributing factor - and so the fundamental hypothesis isn't an entirely stupid thing to say and people shouldn't be criticised for saying that thing, and moreover if you do criticise people for saying that it actively could be you discouraging less conversation on a serious topic through a need to prove your own intellectual rigour by claiming a dramatically heightened level of complexity. Naturally I realise it's a complex and nuanced situation, and you've proved adequately that it's not all that simple, but I would say I've made it clear that at least some of the time it could be considered also that simple.

I guess really really, I don't like people looking around at everyone else and thinking they're retards without any worthy opinions, or at least the suggestion of that tends to rub me the wrong way. I really wasn't trying to shamelessly bolster arguments that were from your perspective weak when I stated in part I was the Devil's Advocate, probably in a larger part than you realised.

 

So we're friends again? Isn't that nice.

My main hope is that this argument about sexual violence between two obsessive weirdos will encourage some of our female ex-members to return to the forums.

 

I guess so, it's been taken to it's logical conclusion, which was always likely to be a stalemate - but I think we both made our reasoning pretty clear and none of it was exactly stupid. Apologies for getting a little heated, I think somewhere around the middle I was feeling pretty acrimonious because you were annoying me for the reasons I stated, however I'm sure I was being equally annoying at points.

If nothing else and at least for a short time, normal internet was resumed.

I have heard that women do love to hear about the specifics of the mindset of rape being discussed by two men on a retro gaming forum.

I think now is as good a time as any to repost this:

 

I'm not going back to read any of that.

I felt it was important that I let you guys know that.

 

That's okay - we don't read your posts either.

 

Most of it was just hate filled rants about you Philes, so it's probably best you don't.

 

Well if TA has taught me anything it's this:

1) If Jobo says it's too depraved, then it's too depraved.
2) If Dark Elf posts a link, then it's the tub girl.
3) If Zanza says it, then it's wrong.

Also, I didn't read any of that either, nor click on that damned tubgirl link. This time. You bastard.