Rape is About Power

Rape as Power

I'm sure you've heard this one. "Rape is about power." Not sex, not desperation, not frustration, and not impatience. If you're a man, I'm sure something about it seemed wrong from the get-go, too. Have you ever thought about raping someone? If you're a man, I'm sure you have. Part of the background noise from the voices in your balls screaming sex, sex, sex. Voices tell me to take a jump when I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, too. Blame Freud. No intention of doing either anytime soon.

I remember hearing this idea early on and thinking to myself "huh, that's strange." I was quite clear, even when young: I was aware of my ability to rape someone (if I wanted to spend my life in prison) and I was sure power, if it was involved, would play second fiddle to sex.

Origins

What's the deal with this persistent myth of rape equating power? Where did it come from? Why has it survived, improbably, against the gut feeling we have, as men? Well, I'm sure that you won't be surprised to hear it came from a woman. Susan Brownmiller, a feminist, wrote Against Out Will: Men, Women, and Rape way back in 1975. The book's credited with some good stuff (removing the need for a secondary witness to corroborate a rape accusation), some shaky stuff (removing the ability to present the accuser's sexual history) and some out-right bad stuff, such as this myth of power. She further idealized rape as a "conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Surprised yet? No? Neither am I. Whose bright idea was it to take a woman's word on why men rape?

I'll tell you why men rape, as a man. Men rape because it's their only access to sex. Because their biological imperative realizes they haven't so much as seen a vagina in years and starts freaking out.

Now, I'm sure you're experiencing a total lack of surprise once more as I tell you only four years later, criticism of Brownmiller's book appeared in the form of The Evolution of Human Sexuality, a book written by an actual anthropologist named Donald Symons. Check it out: it says some interesting things about sexuality in general (women in all societies as gatekeepers of sex) as well as blowing apart Brownmiller's argument of rape=power.

No one's read his book. At least, no one on any college campuses, if the current state of affairs is anything to go by.

Well, don't take his (or my) word for it. How could we tell if rape was really about power? I've got a good idea: let's make sex easier to find and see what happens.

Evidence for Sex-central Rape

I'm sure if you thought about it the first thing you'd think about in terms of making sex more available would be prostitution. Since we're certainly not going to change Hypergamy anytime soon (nor should we), that's the best we've got. You'd be right: There's a great paper on the 2003 Rhode Island (unintentional) decriminalization of sexual services and what happened in the 6 years it stayed that way...

aw, fuck. Check out how many times it's cited next to what Google Scholar thinks is the next applicable search result.

Well, anyway. The paper's worth a read on its own but its conclusions are particularly interesting. In that 6-year period, there was a 31% decrease in cases of rape. No worry on STDs, either: gonorrhea fell by 39% itself. In visual?

http://i.imgur.com/NALBjMf.png

Goddamn, that's a sexy graph. But wait, there's more! If we can't decriminalize sex work, let's make sexual stimuli more available through a screen. Ever heard of the Internet? It has some porn on it. You should check it out. Here's a paper discussing how a 10% increase in internet access is correlated with about 7% less rape.

Still not convinced? There's more for you to find, out there on the web. Consider the fact that many rapists don't consider what they did to be rape but rather sex that the woman incidentally didn't enjoy or consent to. Consider the fact that most rapists are low-value men. Consider the fact that most women who're raped are not high-powered business women breaking into a man's world. I certainly don't intend to say power is divorced from rape: in our Neanderthal brains, we're programmed as men to find submission and weakness sexy. But it's not the only thing going on.

Why Does the Myth Persist?

If you've been with the Manosphere for a while, I'm sure you have a pretty good idea why. In the end, it benefits women.

Let's play out a hypothetical scenario where rape is understood to have a sexual motivator. Working from that premise, we can say definitively that more sexually satisfied men = less rape. So the best thing to do is to decriminalize prostitution. But a lot of women don't want that. Let's travel back to that screenshot.

Why don't they want that? Because one of the fundamental laws of economics is that supply drives prices down. If your pussy is the alternative to an escort, not the only way to get sex, your latitude for leverage is limited. Legitimately.

Small surprise, then, the incredible derision women have for men who solicit prostitutes. It's a defense mechanism, and a biological reaction to the idea that low-value men might be able to get sex instead of being Beta Bucks.

So in the end, the myth is right: rape is about power. Women's power.

So What Should we Do?

Don't ask me, I'm just some idiot on the Internet. But if you really want to reduce cases of rape, maybe you should consider decriminalizing prostitution.

Or, you know, keep on "teaching boys not to rape." Let me know how that one works out for you.