If rape is about sex, doesn't that in some sense justify rape?
“If there is still any lingering misconception that rape is a crime of sexual passion, it’s important to drive a stake through the heart of that idea as quickly as possible…”3 Another writer calls the old model of rape “the ideological fantasies of those who justify sexual coercion,” and claims that admitting that rape is rooted in human desires “actually amounts to an incitement to rape.”Are most rapes planned and therefore not caused by sexual passion but by strategic dominance?
According to the sociologist Garbrilee Dietrisch, “Surveys show that a vast majority of rapes are planned. This goes to disprove the theory that the rapist is usually ‘provoked’ by the flimsy clothing worn by the victim, and is overcome by an overpowering physical urge. In fact, the rapist is asserting his power and urge to dominate.”Are there other cultures that don't rape, and therefore rape was invented by men to dominate women?
feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel claims “[w]e have evidence of the absence of rape” in “several cultures... Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously argued in Coming of Age in Samoa that rape was virtually absent in the Samoan Islands”and,
anthropologist Peggy Sanday states that in some societies, “the sexual act is not concerned with sexual gratification but with deploying the penis as a concrete symbol masculine social power.”9 To support her claim that rape is a cultural phenomenon, she provided her own study of the world’s anthropological literature.Is it true that other animals don't rape, and therefore rape was invented by men to dominate women?
In Against Our Will, Brownmiller makes her own naïve foray into the worlds of anthropology and zoology, and attempts to uncouple sexual desire and rape by theorizing that it is a human social phenomenon not found elsewhere in nature: “No zoologist, as far as I am aware, has ever observed animals to rape in their natural habitat, the wild.”Is the fact that more vulnerable women are raped more often evidence that rape is about oppression, not sex?
rape correlates highly with poverty, homelessness, and gender inequality. War is a major catalyst for rape. All of these variables make women more vulnerable to male desires...Okay, so...
If these quotations sound like fair depictions of what intellectually strong, "rape is about oppression," people say, then good. That means the author didn't build a straw man when he criticized these arguments in the article.
