If It Isn't Sexual, Why Call It Sexual Assault?

[akirlu]

Welcome to another episode of Unpopular Opinions R Us:

Look, I truly do get why it's important to pry the sexysexy titillation off of rape and sexual assault. People's brains get all cloudy and distracted when you introduce the sexysexy into a subject, and I'm sure that doesn't help focus the conversation about how society should better deal with sexual assault. But the received, platitudinous talking point that rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are only a product of the will to power and control and not a product of sexual desire at all is just nonsensical. If that were true, you wouldn't see drops in the reported rape rate where prostitution is legalized. You would, statistically speaking, get the same percentage of rapists among asexuals as among the general population. But that's not the case. (My own suspicion? There's probably a spectrum, akin to the Kinsey Scale, along which the ratio of power motive to sex motive (and who knows what other motives - human beings being complicated) increases as you move along it.)

The claim that there's no sexual component to sexual assault is a bit ridiculous on the face of it. Check the name. And the fact that we make it a separate crime from assault. Making ridiculous claims undermines the rest of a message. Lying about your cause degrades the credibility of your other statements about it, and your credibility as an advocate. It didn't work for the Refer Madness folks and it seems to me unlikely to work here either, except when preaching to the choir.

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

But the received, platitudinous talking point that rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are only a product of the will to power and control and not a product of sexual desire at all is just nonsensical

So far as I can tell, we have that formulation because one day back in the high tide of second wave feminism, somebody had a theory (trying, perhaps, to account for the fact that there were a lot of rapes out there that didn't appear to be the result of sheer overpowering lust), and that theory became accepted as truth over time, and now here we are.

Which doesn't change the fact that as far as actual hard data goes, we're in about the same place that knowledge of the female orgasm was before Masters and Johnson came along.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

There is also the thing that everyone seems to be very intent on not looking at, unless they are fetishists: sexual response appears to run on very similar pathways to violence and power. It seems that these things cannot be neatly teased apart, that they stimulate some of the same physical responses. When they say "it's not about sex, it's about power" they are creating a false dichotomy. It's like the argument that sex shouldn't be about how people look. I'm fat and fifty and still getting laid, so I now have good personal experience to tell me that sex is not entirely caused by someone responding visually to me. But at the same time, it's not immaterial. I get less interest than I did when I was half this age and 60 pounds lighter. Oh, and there are the people who are interested in me now who wouldn't have been interested in someone younger and smaller. The sex drive is solidly wound down against the core of our perceptions, it serves multiple purposes, and interacts complexly with our psychological and physical selves. The attempt to completely divorce the psychological from the physical is as stupid as the attempt to divorce power differentials from sexual response. They aren't the same thing, but they are part of the same system.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Let's say that sexual assault exists and has a serious problem for a long time. Sexual harassment too. And let's say you want to do something about it, maybe because it happened to you or someone close to you, or because you're a woman and therefore at greater risk, or just because it's bad and it shouldn't happen to anybody. How do you stop it, or at least make a dent in it? One approach is to desexualize it. Assault and harassment are unacceptable whether or not they are sexual. Maybe by desexualizing it you can gain more allies among non-feminists who are otherwise decent people. Another approach would be to sexualize everything. Maybe if we treat all creepy and borderline behavior as assault we can banish potential assaulters (and their enablers and supporters) before they have a chance to commit really serious harm. I don't like either approach, but they are not completely without logic. It isn't like muddling through has really worked that great either.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Though I can't agree with the 'check the name' comment since names may or may not reflect reality, I do agree with your point. The first time I heard someone say, "It's not about sex, it's about power," I said, "Whaaa?" The concept that power entered into it is a great and useful revelation. But when introduced, the idea was so new and shiny that people were seeing it as the new, great unified theory, which of course it's not. The reasons for rape, like most things, is all entangled. Power/powerlessness may be an important factor, but not the only one, and maybe not even the biggest one. Truthfully, I don't know what's going through the mind of the average rapist. But I'm pretty sure that the frat boy/high school athlete doesn't have the same motivations as the middle aged child predator.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry but I just don't think that telling lies and saying stupid shit gains more allies among people who would not have been allies anyway, and I can tell you for absolute certain that it puts the backs up of people who might otherwise listen if you didn't do that shit. Saying that rape has nothing to do with sex is telling lies and saying stupid shit, and it shuts down the rest of your message for people like me, because chances are, I've stopped reading. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. It's a bad, bad approach to messaging, in my experience and it's too typical of the people who use it, taking out Articles of Feminist Theory and parading them as proven fact.

So what would I do instead? Well I think that the A Needed Response video, and others I've seen along the same lines that promote the value of respect for women and for consent are a much better approach. Tying insistence on consent to an updated model of masculinity goes a long way to making a needed cultural shift for the kind of young men who don't even think of it as rape because it was, you know, sex.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I absolutely agree that it's useful to have the concept that rape can be about power. (Or about demoralizing the enemy in war, or about breaking down the veneer of civilization in your soldiers by making them complicit in atrocities, or any of a number of other things that aren't exactly power either). But as you say, reasons are entangled, and most of us know that on a gut level that rebels against being lied to.

And yeah, I think it's absolutely right that different types of rapists have very different motives and no particular good is served by lumping them all together.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, precisely. In fact I would bet that from some rape victims perspective the failure to acknowledge entanglement just adds another layer of insult to the whole horrible affair. Which is to say I've read accounts of victims of repeated molestation who feel guilt and shame over any physical pleasure they felt because that somehow makes them responsible, or equally blameworthy, or cancels out the rape somehow, which is all, of course, nonsense, but if you're being fed a line about how rape and sex are completely separate and dichotomous it's an easy thought pattern to fall into. Part of the inevitable logic of saying that rape isn't about sex at all is the conclusion that if there was an element of sexual pleasure, it can't have been rape. And that's the worst kind of wrong.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, I do in part blame the infection of feminist theory with a bad case of Post Modernism, which in general seems to operate on the principle that sufficient repetition creates factiness, and if that doesn't work, obscure your point with vacuous or internally contradictory jargon. Fight the patriarchy and its oppressive "logic".

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My response to the "rape isn't about sex, it's about power" meme has been, "OK, if you say so." It didn't make sense to me, but then a lot of better-attested human behavior makes no sense to me. I'm not a rapist, and I don't know how they think.

So I feel I have learned something from this post.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"If that were true, you wouldn't see drops in the reported rape rate where prostitution is legalized."

Except generally speaking, you don't. The reported decrease in Rhode Island was based on cherry-picked data. http://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/commentary/20140727-margaret-brooks-and-donna-m.-hughes-flawed-analysis-of-prostitution-in-r.i..ece (Note: I don't agree with Brooks' and Hughes' opinions about prostitution in general, but their numerical analysis makes perfect sense.) Full report here: http://www.academia.edu/7692383/The_Flawed_Analysis_of_Decriminalized_Prostitution_in_Rhode_Island_by_Cunningham_and_Shah