Can we resume normal internet please.

Hey, thanks for bringing me back into this with the "pithy" citation.

After rereading your arguments, I was struck by this imagery of a game. The goal of the game is to dominate, and the rules by which we dominate is to rape.
Wait, that's not quite right. Life is a game. The goal of this game is to succeed. Success is that dopamine drop of achieving a goal, which is why we do what we do.

• Some people set professional goals, achieve their level of status, and feel good about themselves. The mechanics of professional and social structures describe how they dominate in their field.
• Some people engage in competitive sports and dominate other people by running faster, shooting more accurately, or punching harder. The mechanics of the rules of the game describe how they dominate other individuals.
• Some people aren't professionally motivated or coordinated enough to compete in sports, but they still need to succeed. Maybe their preferred variety of success is domination. The mechanics of sex describe how this person dominates, as opposed to any professional, social, or sports rules. Sex is the mechanics by which this person achieves his domination.

What makes a boxer different from a rapist? Each boxer is engaging in the contest of boxing, knowing that there is a possibility that he will lose. Aren't we all implicitly engaging in the contest of I-will-not-be-raped? Shouldn't we reasonably assume that some of us will lose? Thems just the breaks.

The other thing that struck me from Smuel's research was how the admitters mention some stress that preceded the rape. This reminded me of control, which I can resolve to success or domination.
I wouldn't be surprised if many stressful events are outside of the individual's control. In the case of the rapist "motivated" by these stressful events, he probably seeks to regain control by acting out in a mania of hyper-control wherein he takes control of somebody else, dominating her, and ultimately raping her.


Anyway, back to my complaint about the pithy things people say about ugly topics, it isn't so much that I think people must think about and talk about these things. It's more the case that I don't like the things that these types of people do to discourage other people from talking about them.
Bill Burr has a great bit where he rails against the mantra that there is never a reason to hit a woman.

Spoiler

There are plenty of reasons to hit a woman, you just don't do it.

I believe this statement to be true, that this joke is funny, and that domestic violence is bad, all at the same time and I don't have to shut anybody down to enjoy any of this.
In the same vein, I hate the bullshit that rape jokes are never funny. I'm really glad Jojobobo shared that Schumer sketch because that is on point, hilarious, and it's topic is rape. How is this possible?

By the way, I dominated a bunch of dudes last Friday. The mechanics by which I did so was Smash Bros. and it felt good.

 

I think legality is in some ways the differentiator over why rape, and possibly beating the hell out of someone on the street, is different to trying to dominate people in other ways (or at least if not different, more severe). As mentioned, at least when it comes to sexual domination, people can find someone to engage in an BDSM fantasy or at least pay a hooker to. To take it to that next level and break the law implies a worse level of need to me.

But yeah, I agree besting someone does provide a related dopamine kick, and most normal people get this kick through legal and civil means.

Control is probably a better way to describe the situation, yes. Their means of taking control of their lives amounts to thoroughly dominating someone in one of the most aggressive ways possible.

I get your point, however I'm not so sure people saying, "Rape isn't really about sex, it's about power," does do that much to shut people down discussing it. At least when it comes to this place, which I get isn't entirely representative of normal society, it's promoted discussion on it. I think that's likely because there is some truth in it, it's just not the most accurate or all encompassing way to describe the issue.

You mention the idea, "You should never hit a woman," as a pithy statement however - and I'm very much inclined to agree it's designed to shut down conversation on the topic, as to fight against the statement you need to try and argue the stance, "Sometimes you should hit a woman," which is never going to be well received by anyone.

It's also a weirdly illogical thing to say, as with the drive towards social justice and gender equality it doesn't make much sense. Surely, if I was going to hit a man in a situation and I consider the genders entirely equal, hitting a woman in that same situation is the thing you should do?

I guess people shouldn't hit anyone, male or female, so the advice that women should somehow receive special treatment in this regard is moronic.

At least with Amy Schumer's sketch, it's a socially acceptable rape sketch because it critiques rape culture and it consistently makes it clear that rape is wrong.

However I've always supported all uncomfortable topics being something that's okay to make a joke on, whether they're an on the nose critique or not. I think jokes by their very nature are about parody, which is making light of a topic to make people feel better. I guess, "You shouldn't joke about that," is another one of those pithy statements - as I'd the people who joke about a certain topic are getting as much relief in doing so as the people trying to ignore the topic in the first place.

Maybe truly pithy statements are just ones where they can be written as an imperative, e.g. you should/shouldn't do that, as they encourage an argument through their bluntness that can put people off trying to talk about something because they don't want the hassle of a confrontation.

 

Well that's your first mistake - you aren't supposed to actually read the arguments, just pick out a couple of sentences that you don't like and then respond to those.

For the record, I'm not against pithy statements per se, I'm only against ones that do more harm than good. e.g. they are misleading, have unfortunate implications, or are just flat out wrong.

"You should never hit a woman" is a good example of one of these. I guess the intention behind the phrase was good, about say 100 years ago, when violence was generally more acceptable. But these days it raises too many questions: Is it okay to hit a man? Are men allowed to hit each other, but women aren't? What if the woman is hitting you?

I don't know if anyone is still saying it today, but if they are then I agree with Jojobobo (!) in that a much better thing to say would be something like: You should never hit anyone, except in self-defence, and even then you should consider your options carefully, bearing in mind both the legal and the ethical consequences of your actions, and the potential danger of escalating the situation further than you intended.

Pithy.

 

Thanks for reigning me back in on my tangent where I steered the topic to the aspects of rape I wanted to discuss.

My interpretation of the original topic is that in the case of violent rapes, sex is the means and not the ends. The purpose of this type of rape is similar to most other endeavors, whether it be to feel in control, overcome an obstacle, dominate an opponent, or feel a sense of achievement.
In the case of nonviolent rapes, sex is the ends and drugs are often the means.

Then again, the motivations can be as varied as the people who commit the act, so until we can get ahold of an honest rapist who isn't in denial, we may never know.

 

This was more or less my interpretation too, but I guess the research Smuel pointed to did make it all a lot more complicated. There were some who had something bad happen to them and as you said previously wanted to exert hyper-control over some aspect of their lives and so raped someone to make themselves to feel better, which sounds a lot like straight forward domination.

However, possibly a lot of these kind of rapes aren't exactly going to be violent. Some of them might just be an overly insistent man, and a woman who doesn't really say no but clearly doesn't want to, and the man knows she's not the type to say no - so in a way he is still controlling her and raping her but it's not exactly violent. Further there's countless times where women just freeze up when they're being raped, and these also might not fit the bill so much of a violent rape.

As Smuel mentioned, there is a good proportion of men who claimed either the rape was entirely consensual, or that it started non-consensual and turned consensual when the woman enjoyed it, even when the guy was raping the woman at knifepoint. These rapes are also violent, but it's a lot harder to say whether they fit into that tidy box of a desire to control or dominate someone. Arguably someone who is that sociopathic or sadistic doesn't really have social interactions that aren't in someway about control and domination, however maybe that is just something people like that do when they're horny.

I guess if you're raping someone at knifepoint and then claiming then claiming (maybe even believing) the woman enjoyed it then, you're hardly a reliable source of information and your motivations may not even be clear to you personally.

All in all, it's a thoroughly messy situation. There's some truth in the statement rape is about power, but it's an over simplification and not generally applicable to all rapes.

 

I was ready to walk away from this thread, but you couldn't let it lie could you. You just couldn't let it lie. And now everyone has to suffer through another of my posts about rape. I HOPE YOU'RE BOTH HAPPY.

So, let's imagine that 1000 men and 1000 women are stranded on a desert island. Most of them would probably pair up, and things would proceed nice and sweatily. Now imagine that 1000 men and one woman are stranded on a desert island. If that one woman were still only inclined to pair up with one man, it means that 999 of the men would be faced with a choice - they can either go without sex, or they can rape the woman. I can imagine that most men would be like the fine upstanding citizens of this forum and honourably forgo sex for the duration of their stay on the island. But a few would find that the appeal of sex outweighed other concerns, and would plough ahead, as it were. For these men, if they're in a situation where consensual sex is available, they're happy with that, but if it isn't available, well...

Now, clearly it's possible to construct a hypothetical scenario to prove any point you want, but it struck me that this sounded similar to the reports given by rapists in both the surveys. That is, they suddenly found themselves alone with an attractive woman, who wasn't consenting to sex with them, and their thought process was something like "I could either leave this woman alone, or I could force her to have sex with me, in which case I get some sex, and she will probably end up enjoying it because what woman wouldn't enjoy having sex with me, so on balance the sex option seems pretty good."

This seems quite straightforward to me. Why wouldn't we believe these people's accounts of their actions? Dismissing them as unreliable or in denial about their own motivations seems unnecessarily patronising. "I wanted to have sex with her" sounds like an eminently plausible justification to me. No need to try to make out that it's more complicated than that.

I think partly what's going on here is that society is a victim of its own success. We've all been so fully indoctrinated with the idea that we shouldn't use violence to solve problems, that when someone DOES use violence to solve a problem, we think there must be something wrong with them. But no, from a long term perspective, we are the ones who are behaving strangely. When two monkeys want the same banana, one of the monkeys ends up with the banana, and the other ends up with bruises. Humans used to operate on the same principle, but after thousands of generations of refinements, we have managed to create a system where we peacefully negotiate the cost of bananas and respect each other's personal space. From a monkey-brain perspective, this is utterly insane. If you are the stronger party, just take the banana! It's a testament to our impulse control mechanisms that most of us refrain from doing it. And the simplest explanation for when someone takes the banana by force is that their monkey-brain temporarily won out, rather than there being some complex reasoning enacted by their human-brain that coincidentally ends up with the same result. This also fits the observation that a lot of rapes occur while the perpetrator is intoxicated. Alcohol is famous for lowering inhibitions and dampening higher brain functions. The monkey-brain gets its reins loosened, and for those of us who are already closer to that edge, the result can be disastrous.

The thing is though, for the rest of us, the conditioning and higher-level reasoning works so well that we can't easily put ourselves in the shoes of someone who would use such short-term and unempathetic thinking, even while drunk. That's my theory for why, when faced with the kinda obvious motivation for rape being that a guy wanted sex, and moreover that a whole bunch of rapists say that it's the reason, many people feel compelled to discount that completely and go off searching for the "real" motivation and construct elaborate theories based on power or self-delusion.

But no, I don't buy it. Sometimes a drunk horny guy is just a drunk horny guy. Seems much simpler to me.

 

Smuel, you just can't get enough of* rape.

I think you're delineating too much still. You're saying, the monkey brain wants sex, so the monkey brain has sex.

However there's also the bit where the monkey brain wanted sex, the monkey man was refused sex, and so the monkey brain feels sexually frustrated. The monkey man has been having a tough time at monkey work at the banana factory, there's a set of looming monkey redundancies and he's not sure if he's going to make the monkey cut, plus his monkey dad has monkey cancer. His monkey brain reward centre hasn't paid out in what seems like a monkey lifetime - to add this further frustration is too much for his monkey brain to handle.

So the monkey has forceful monkey sex, and the monkey brain squirts a big load of monkey dopamine, rather like his monkey penis just... well.. you get the picture. But the monkey man would never have normally done a monkey rape, normally he's a sensible monkey and it's life that's been making him into a sad monkey, and so when you put those things together it's just too much and he wanted to take back some goddamned monkey control. The reward centres of his monkey brain are also telling him that he did a good job, in that moment he solved a monkey problem, even though the likely monkey repercussions are going to be a whole lot monkey more monkey than he ever thought he could monkey monkey. Monkey.

The point here is that 99% of the time people don't rape unless they aren't in someway sexually frustrated, but they will very often be otherwise frustrated too, and that by acting on that frustration your brain is rewarding you for sex but also rewarding you for mitigating a source of your general endemic frustration, and which is providing the greater part of that dopamine reward is hard to say. You mentioned that adding more to all this makes it overly elaborate, but both of these things are extremely simplistic monkey brain behaviours and are operating on a similar impulsive level - it's not like when people are trying to otherwise violently take control of a situation to trigger their reward centres they've spent a while thinking about it in an armchair smoking a pipe. "Power" and "control" are just ways to articulate rape is serving more general frustrations a lot of the time than only sexual frustrations, and with a rape the monkey brain can satisfy all of these needs in one action.

And sure, I guess there's some people out there who have such bad impulse control that pure sexual frustration is enough for them to want to rape someone (particularly if they are drunk or on drugs), maybe that's a reason behind the admitter-denier split, I don't know. Maybe they're also the kind of people who would take out other mild frustrations on people early and violently too rather than trying to manage them - they're already hardwired into reward behaviour based off taking impulsive action (particularly if they have a drink or drug problem).

As a side note, I'm beginning to think everything's about jizzing to you.

Sounds like a good excuse for an enormous man on man orgy if you ask me. It'd be like the Human Centipede, but they wouldn't be joined surgically

*talking about the motivating factors behind

 

I still think rape is complicated. Or at least it can be. But a lot of the times it isn't - according to research maybe more than 50% of the time it isn't. And I don't get why people don't want to face up to that. What's so terrible about the idea that sex is the main motivation for rape?

According to my own analysis of this forum, people can be split into two groups according to their attitudes to this. The first group takes it as read that rape is not about sex. They roll their eyes at the naiveté of anyone who might suggest that it is about sex, even when that person produces reams of research supporting their point. I call this group the "deniers".

The second group, who I call "admitters" will concede that sex can be a motivation for rape, but most of them immediately qualify it with conditions. They say that occasionally rape is motivated by sex, or that sex can be one of the motivating factors, but there must be some kind of stress or additional factor that accompanies it, otherwise why rape? They also lament that it's just so gosh-darned difficult to get a straight answer out of a rapist.

I understand that it's much more interesting to look at the rape cases where there was more going on than just a desire for sex, but that doesn't explain all the resistance to the idea. Nobody is saying "Yeah, Smuel, obviously most rapes are motivated by sex, everyone knows that, but let's look at the ones that aren't". They're either denying it completely, or admitting it to some degree and then wringing their hands over what could possibly be going on.

None of this makes any sense to me any more. The naïve view is that rape is about sex. The evidence is that rape is mostly about sex. So where did the idea that rape isn't about sex even come from? Who started this whole "power" idea? How did it come to be accepted wisdom in society?

What the hell is going on?

 

I think it's complicated because the people you talk about who are doing it arguably purely for sex are complicated, and likely fall under the antisocial personality disorder bracket. They clearly live by a moral code that is so far removed from most people's (or maybe simply lack a moral code) so how they operate day to day is inscrutable and not a stance people can identify with (I think that's what the original paper you posted said the deniers were all about - the lack of a moral code). It also presents a lot of questions about how they operate - if they are running around satisfying impulses willy-nilly, sexual or not, then all of that isn't normal behaviour (the satisfying of any impulse with complete disregard for someone else) so it becomes difficult to map their desires and mindset to our conventional norms of having sex with someone.

However I guess for these amoral people, as there isn't any real delineator between consensual sex or rape for what they get out of it in the first place, it probably is all about sex. They understand consent as an intellectual concept, but like a dog having sex with another dog it really doesn't mean anything to them. Likely the only reason they prefer consensual sex (if they do at all) is because they won't be arrested for it.

As these people are always present in society and are more or less incapable of change (you can find this readily by googling ASPD, also this meta-analysis article says 47% of male prisoners have APSD to give an idea), and people can't really rationalise what they are doing beyond it's just about sex (which still seems irrational, because no one of a sound mind and non-impaired judgement would commit a crime to fulfil such a sexual urge), they're likely ignored because there's nothing people can do about them.

What people can do something about is those people who do do it to take control of some part of their lives because they've fallen on hard times and choose to rape, and possibly whose image of their victim becomes so warped by whatever culture they've found themselves in that they can think even momentarily that's something that's okay to do. As that is something that as a society we maybe have a chance of correcting, rather than sociopaths who will always run around raping, killing and stealing anyway, that's probably why society's focus is on the portion of people where "rape is about power" is somewhat applicable - because that's where a difference could be made.

To summarise:

(a) Sociopathic people don't really operate as humans, and so when they rape people don't see it as something they can do anything about.
(b) 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 - because people can see what caused it. It also does still account for a good number of rapes.
(c) As people can potentially solve (b) but they can't do anything about (a), societal wisdom becomes rape is about (b), because handling rapes as subject to (b) actually leads to useful outcomes, and possibly people don't like to dwell on (a) because they can't do a single thing about it.

I guess this is still all a bit too tidy for you most likely as it's putting people in boxes, there's likely a lot of people in that (b) category in the who are on the anti-social spectrum, but all in all I think that's fine reasoning for why the conventional wisdom is what it is. If the "rape isn't about sex, it's about power" statement could still be considered pithy, it's pithy because it's useful and actually achieves good outcomes, not for the sake of maintaining some conventional yet flawed wisdom.

Now, have we finally burnt this issue out? I'm getting a little weary of hearing, "There's loads of violent rapists out there, and all they want to do is CCUUUMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!"

 

No matter who is right, this will continue for as long as anyone engages smuel.

 

I have no idea who started the power theory behind rape or why it has caught on. To tease out why this theory is comforting to so many people is probably as complicated as teasing out why each individual rapist rapes.
I even buy into this rape-is-not-about-sex theory to some degree as I said that violent rapes are about something other than sex, but sex is the means. However, I avoided exploring why sex is the means, dismissing it as coincidence. Much was sacrificed in my attempt to be pithy.

Perhaps rape is just the Wuzzle of extreme pastimes. The people who live to dominate other people but also really enjoy sex no longer have to split time between the two thanks to rape. It's kind of like how I don't have to decide between playing video games or watching porn thanks to the advent of Bayonetta.

 

A like for the last witticism, four stars.

This is a lot of what I've been saying, but I do also think for some people it is just about sex, but as mentioned people who rape for sex aren't exactly normal people in the first place - so I'm not really sure what is to be gained by insisting, "Rape is sex for psychos, and often about power for other people." I'm not really sure what the point of any of this is about anymore.

I'm pretty sure Smuel will be along soon though to say, "If there's sex involved, it's about wanting to CCUUUMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!"

 

Ehh, this is a nasty thread but the elephant in the room is evolutionary biology.

Weasels, for example, will sneak into a litter of newborn weasels and rape all the females, therefore it evolves as a creep.

By the same token, rapists impregnate women, therefore more rapey genes proliferate. By the cold, blind logic of molecules, rape is therefore effective.

You can speculate as to the gratification the evolved neurotransmitters bestow upon the rapist, but that is way too far down the rabbit hole for me.

Suffice it to say that higher primates have evolved to beat the living shit out of any chimp caught raping, so can we please leave it at that.

 

I'm not sure if that's true. Rapes haven't been cool in civilisation for a good long time, so while when there's a lack of civilisation I'm sure rapists do great, when you have civilisation rape is punished, thereby it doesn't offer an evolutionary advantage and so I doubt rape genes would propagate significantly through the generations - and likely haven't done for a few thousand years.

If you don't think evolution can happen at all on that time scale, a semi-interesting article I saw last year claimed that caesarean births have now allowed more narrow hipped women to pass on their narrow hip genes in a single generation (article here). A selection pressure against rape has been going on for much longer than that.

 

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, my step sisters' daughter is rapespawn, so y'know, the system works.

If you crunch the numbers I'm sure there's a formula for how a rapey gene might propagate.

It's like sociopaths in general, yknow... One percent of people have no conscience, and they succeed largely because 99/100 do. The phenotype is viable within a population of normal, empathising people, even though it's probably not viable if everyone did it.

So, like, taking gorillas as an example, most silverbacks spend a whole bunch of energy protecting their family group, women and children, and that helps the whole species thrive. But now and again a young male will sneak in and - yknow - propagate his genes, whether or not he manages to escape with his life afterwards. he wouldn't need to spend the energy being a good silverback, just being a sneaky fucker.

From a strictly molecular perspective, there's no reason why that stratagem should not remain mathematically viable.

But, I'm sure we can all agree, that it is morally abhorrent.

 

It's probably a pretty unlikely occurrence though, as most times people have sex unprotected it's not going to end up in a pregnancy. Additionally, a fair number of people who do fall pregnant from rape will abort. It's not like in modern times people can go around systematically raping other people like Genghis Khan, which would result in a lot of rape-babies (I put the hyphen to avoid you dastardly people quoting out of context), so I don't think a lot of rapists are going to be all that successful in passing on the rape genes.

 

Well, to my point, Ghengis Khan is the descendant of 95% of Mongolia or something, so -- the system works, infrequently but enough to keep the hypothetical gene alive.

p.s.,

You have a peculiar perspective on matters of moral repugnance, Jobo, old bean, and I think I'm beginning to figure it out...

You worry from the point of view of harm ocd that some of us may be bad seeds, and rotten to the core.

Although I maintain that evolutionary biology is explanation enough for the phenomenon of rape, I don't consider it a biological imperative nor do I think that a compulsive rapist is a likely phenotype, let alone genotype.

It's not common for such characters to appear in the courts, people who are clinically diagnosed as unable to stop themselves, but it does happen. Sadly.

Of course, it's more complicated than that.

As to your good self, I'll say again what I've said before, that the feedback loop in your brain which obsesses over the potential harm you might cause affects you because you have a hyperactive conscience, not because you're without one.

 

No need for the reassurance, but thanks none the less. I think harm OCD does come about by having a particular rigidity of thinking and also of morals that any irrational thoughts contrary to that can send you spiralling, and naturally you obsess over them. Fortunately if you just carry on living life and expose yourself to your obsession, in my case literally being around people, it's the kind of OCD that more or less entirely stops having an effect on your life. I think most people could master their anxiety issues if they bothered to try, but it takes effort so many don't. For me I guess I didn't really have much of an option, other than to be a mental shut in all my life.

I think all of this makes me overly morally judgemental, which is why I take an interest in issues such as rape. I guess my black and white thinking has softened a little with age though, and I don't think I'm as arseholey when talking about these things than I used to be, but maybe that's not for me to judge.

 

Yeah, I'm doing a little exposure therapy too, although I don't have ocd of any kind, I did get the idea from a documentary on harm ocd, where a young woman put on a tape of herself saying "I've just killed someone, I've just strangled someone" on a loop and took a walk around the block.

Classic.

In my case, I'm just a highly strung misanthrope. I suppose it's general post traumatic stress disorder. My upbringing was a bit rather survivalist, yknow, for want of better term. I'm often surprised at how little wilderness, weaponry and electricity kids have nowadays. Good times. So I'm generally on a hair trigger to defend against zombies. Classic.

Anyway, I've immigrated from the wilderness to the metropolis and I walk around crowds of people without going to war. It's nice.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah. Rape is bad. Without putting too fine a point on it, I am quite used to thinking the very worst of people, and I'm usually pleasantly surprised by the general level of humanity.

 

You know what? Rape IS bad. Let's discuss rape some more.

You're kind of illustrating my point right here. Where does this come from? I don't see much evidence for this being the case - it looks more like a theory you came up with on the spot to try to justify the stance that rape is about power. To revisit one of your own previous characterizations, a lazy rape, where the man has had a few drinks and the woman doesn't put up much resistance, is about sex. Are you now saying that all these men have anti-social personality disorder and so are not normal?

Now, I know what you're going to reply to this. You'll say you're not talking about those kind of rapes. But those are most rapes. Furthermore, your latest theory, that the "rape is about power" statement only refers to those cases that society can do something about, will miss these completely, even though I would have expected that these totally fall into the category of being potentially fixable through better education or conditioning of men.

This is going to come off as a little obnoxious, and I apologise in advance, but my interpretation of what's happening here is that I'm questioning the conventional wisdom, and doing research and trying to find out why the wisdom ended up that way, while you're defending the conventional wisdom by coming up with ad-hoc explanations for why it might be true, and then getting exasperated when I'm not satisfied by those explanations.

So, instead of asking you to explain your position again for the Nth time, I've done some more research.

According to several different articles, the origin of the phrase is a feminist book from 1975. From the article To Rape Is To Want Sex, Not Power:

In the 1975 bestselling book: Against Our Will, the feminist writer, Susan Brownmiller, asserted that “rape is about power, not sex.” Ever since, the conventional wisdom has been that rapists are misogynistic men seeking domination and power over women, not violent men seeking sex. However, there is a fundamental problem with Brownmiller’s bold assertion. In the ensuing 45 years, there has been no significant empirical research to support her claim. Yet, almost everyone repeats it.

Another interesting tidbit, from The Myth that Rape is About Power:

... researchers Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah found a simple and direct correlation between legalized prostitution and rape in Rhode Island. The state unintentionally legalized prostitution in 2003 an then recriminalized it in 2009. After prostitution was legalized, the sex market increased in size and rape (overall, across the entire state) declined by 31%. When prostitution was criminalized again in 2009, the incidence of rape went back up.

I’m well aware of the difference between causation and correlation, but taken together the research of Symons, Cunningham & Shah, and Kendall paint a stark picture in which men—driven by a more powerful sex drive—see rape as one among a series of competing sources of sexual gratification, the others being consensual sex, pornography, and prostitution.

I also found a lot of articles about WHY rape is about power, where they just take it as read that rape IS about power and then discuss the reasons why it might be. So on the one hand it seems that people who try to actually research the subject using statistics and evidence conclude that rape is mainly about sex, while on the other hand people write long articles about how terrible men are, because, you know, rape is about power.

This is an important point. What good outcomes, besides inspiring this thread, has the phrase achieved? One valid defence of the statement would be that even if it's not literally true, if it somehow leads to rape being less likely then it is a useful lie and people like me should shut the hell up.

But I haven't seen any evidence presented that supports this, and I don't really see how it could be the case. If anything I think it would be the other way around. "As long as you're doing this because you're horny, rather than because you have some weird desire to dominate, then it's not rape and therefore okay."

Seriously, the more I investigate this, the less defensible the statement seems.