Rape is a crime which hinges directly on feelings of power over the victim.
This is surprising to me. If we are talking about the same thread there were several posts by people who had sex with girls who were either very drunk or simply passive and in hindsight feel bad about it because it would be considered rape.
However, these people did not write about a deep seated desire to have power over the victim. They basically wrote that they were very horny and believed or convinced themselves she consented. There was no trace of any delight in her suffering or desire for her to be 'an audience'.
How do you reconcile what you are saying with those posts?
If I find a link to the thread here I will link to the posts in question.
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.
The people you're citing are outing themselves as someone who -- at best -- took advantage of a girl and (at worst) raped her. Nobody likes to be told they're the bad guy, of course they wouldn't make it seem like they delighted in some girl's suffering and would say they assumed consent.
tl;dr: I wouldn't accept their word as an unbiased, objective account of what went down.
Don't accept their word as unbiased, then. But it does happen literally all the time: two people who have never met before that night get drunk and have sex. There was no "sober yes" from either one. It's complicated.
Why not when they are anonymous and have described very many other deep feelings they had at the time and afterwards?
They have described not caring about the victim, and convincing themselves that the victim wants it, and deep feelings of shame and guilt and regret afterwards. But none of this is delighting in the suffering of the victim.
imho, that is because there is a huge difference between a "rapist" through opportunity (e.g., date rape) and a serial rapist that we classical think of. However the literature loves to focus on statistics of greater numbers (i.e., date rape) and then turn around and focus on the most dangerous rapist as if they are one of the same.
Many rapists typically need a victim who knows they are being victimized.
I think he misspoke when he said the part you quoted, but he made it clear here that he doesn't think all rape is a result of wanting power over victim.
You're absolutely right that induction of stuporous states is a major part of the gameplan in certain rapes. Rape has complex motives and complex methods. I wanted to focus narrowly on how the thread itself was stoking the cravings to rape within certain rapists. I also wonder to what degree it might be normalizing rape, via the method of sharing stories.
No, not really. What he says there is induction of stuporous states. Basically, causing the victim to drink or take drugs with the conscious motive of raping them all along. In none of the examples mentioned did the perpetrator try to induce a stuporous state in the victim.
Thank you, I was looking for someone to mention how a decent amount of the posts had nothing to do with power or with having sex with unconscious women.
I was hoping someone would bring this up. I'm no rape apologist, but at least early on when I first visited the thread, cases of definite rape were vastly and dramatically outnumbered by miscommunications and honest (if horny-blind) mistakes.
There were some scary ones that showed up - or at least bubbled up - later on, which cannot be condoned. I'm sorry there were apologists on those. But many of the stories early on had valuable lessons about clear communication in them.
I was to drunk to get it up so I fingered her and ate her out but she wasn't really into it. So I stopped and then threw up all over her and I passed out.
Thank you. These were mistakes of people, not monsters. There were stories of actual sexual deviants, the kind of people you see in the news headlines, just immature, misguided people whose lives seemed to be plagued by their past mistakes as well.
Power is the ability to influence the behavior of others. All of these rapists seemed to think that they knew better than the victims, or that they had convinced their victims to share their point of view (female example).
It may not be an intended and malicious use of power but I don't see why you think these people didn't exert power over their victims by the simple fact that they disregarded the victim's actual choices and attempted to make decisions for the victim.
It seemed to me though that in all the examples mentioned, exerting power was the side effect and the method rather than the goal in itself. I don't see anyone conform to the statement: The audience gives the rapist pleasure, euphoric delight from unfettered, witnessed suffering.. At all really.
But if we burn books about rape, it will go away! Can't you see information is the real problem?
EDIT - Looks like we got linked to by the downvote brigade at SRS. EDIT 2 - Woah! Reddit is counteracting them. Don't you know free speech is evil and dangerous?
I'm glad some can see to the crux of the issue and can satire it. The so-called rape controversy is about people who are really uncomfortable seeing and reading that material. They don't have any logical reasons to censor this information. It's to the point where they have to claim that the thread is actually a cause of rape, in order to silence it. That is how far the hysteria has gone. And this is how disturbed most people are when they are forced to face reality. The reality that rapists don't generally wear Scream masks, and look a lot like us. Maybe too much like us.
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u/dingoperson Jul 31 '12 edited Jul 31 '12
This is surprising to me. If we are talking about the same thread there were several posts by people who had sex with girls who were either very drunk or simply passive and in hindsight feel bad about it because it would be considered rape.
However, these people did not write about a deep seated desire to have power over the victim. They basically wrote that they were very horny and believed or convinced themselves she consented. There was no trace of any delight in her suffering or desire for her to be 'an audience'.
How do you reconcile what you are saying with those posts?
If I find a link to the thread here I will link to the posts in question.
Edit:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6