Posted on 10/24/2003 8:29:20 AM PDT by Scenic Sounds
It all comes from a very magical place, Ellis. ;-)
All great artists are inspired. Who knows exactly where it comes from?
It's just magic! ;-)
I notice that no one has answered your question. Perhaps that because no one on this thread understands it. The feminist mantra has sunk pretty deep.
I didn't say that rape wasn't for power, to relieve frustration, or anger. I said that rape was an act of power and sex. My complaint isn't about defining rape as a violent crime but about defining at a non-sexual crime. It is like saying "President Bush is a man." and being told, "No. He is the President." Well, yes. He's the President and he is a man. The two are not mutually exclusive. Being motivated by violence and by sexual gratification are not mutually exclusive.
There is often no ejaculation, and no evidence of such at the Sexual Assault Forensic Exam. (I've done those exams and talked with women who were raped.) There's lots of information available on the internet.
OK. I looked. I found lots of nearly useless quotes that said thinks like "some men" do not ejaculate during rape (how many is "some"?). One site mention "a study" (singular), without giving details, to support that "many men" do not ejaculate during rape. A few explained the lack of semen in rape victims in several ways. For example:
The researchers are also ignorant about what happens during rape. Some men do not ejaculate and so do not deposit their semen inside the woman's body. Non-ejaculation is often the result of a man not having an erection, suggesting that whatever is driving him to rape, it is not sexual arousal. Others, if they ejaculate, deliberately do so outside of the woman's body, ensuring no trace of semen is left to connect them to the rape through DNA testing.
From the article There's a sting in this evolutionary tale - Lisa Vetten
Another article for victim service providers says, "In addition, if the suspect wore a condom during the assault, was aspermatic due to a vasectomy, or did not ejaculate after the assault, additional DNA profiles may not be obtained from the evidence," giving other possible reasons for a lack of semen in rape victims. It isn't difficult to imagine that rapists grasp the implications of genetic testing and are motivated to not ejaculate where the evidence can be collected. As for the points in the paragraph above, "often" doesn't tell us much and the author claims that non-erection "suggests" that sexual arousal is not driving the man to rape. Sure. But sexual frustration or sexual anger over not being able to have normal sex may be a driving force. That's not "sex", per se, but it is "sexual" and just because they can't actually perform does not mean that they were not trying to. Indeed, I would be interested to see if the woman attacked by men who did not ejaculate are more physically brutalized than those attacked by men who do.
From a page called The Rhetoric of Rape, I found the following vague information ("anecdotal" "significant proportion", "over ten percent of those...", "suggests"):
The reality is that both anecdotal and scientific evidence suggests that a significant proportion of rapists have difficulty getting an erection, maintaining it, achieving penetration or experiencing ejaculation. Research undertaken in the US in the 1980s showed that over ten per cent of those serving prison sentences for rape were permanently impotent. Current South African research suggests that the majority of rapists do not ejaculate.9
As for "South Africa", their amazingly high rape rate and the motives for rape there would make it difficult, at best, to apply any information from South Africa to the US. Yes, the motive in South Africa often isn't sexual. It is driven, in part, by AIDS hysteria and misinformation.
Another page cites the book, Rape: The Misunderstood Crime over and over again in the footnotes. I'm wary of any single-sourced citations like that without seeing the original book.
In short, for something that everyone seems so certain of, there seems to be an astonishing lack of hard evidence or numbers that anyone is willing to cite on the web. The details are hidden behind interpretation, vague generalizations, and qualifications of the sort commonly found in propaganda. While I'm willing to believe that there is a slam-dunk body of multiple studies that show what you are claiming, I could not find them. Feel free to provide me with links if you want.
The most tantalizing result I got was from a "for pay" web page titled Blackwell Synergy - Psychol of Women Q, Vol 27, Issue 3, pp. 273 The partial quote that Google spit out was:
... She points out that often rapists do not get erections, or cannot penetrate the vagina, or do not ejaculate in 30-40% of rapes, and that if rape is a good ...
This still doesn't cite a study but at least it gives a number. A number significantly below 50%. Of course I've seen this morph, without citation, into claims that men do not ejaculate in a "majority" of rapes on other sites.
Rapists do not act out of arousal or lust for sexual gratification with the same regularity that theives steal for valuable property. They're more like vandals who break in and destroy property.
I have no doubt that rapists have much in common with vandals. Again, I fully acknowledge that rape is a crime of violence and is designed to dominate and harm the victim. But I think that what you are trying to do is akin to claim that vandalism isn't a "property crime" and that vandals are always motivating by trying to hurt the property owner and never motivated by simply getting their kicks out of breaking things. Even in those cases where a vandal clearly does seek to hurt the property owner, that does not exclude that they might be getting their kicks from breaking things.
A paper titled STEMMING THE TIDE: COUNTERING PUBLIC NARRATIVES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE prevented a strong motive for painting rape as a crime of violence and not sex:
This follows from the above argument. It is vital that we denormalise the act of rape, which is often portrayed as a kind of sexual kleptomania an impulse poorly controlled or inappropriately directed. The feminist arguments of the 1970s (that rape was an act of rage or power, not lust) did not go far enough in dispelling the notion that rape still fell within the bounds of normal masculine behaviour.
While I find this motive admirable, I'm wary of facts driven by agendas.
Finally, you might find this article and this article interesting. The first one, in particular, involves a case where the victim claimed that the rapist did not ejaculate.
Again, I'm not trying to nomalize rape. I'm not trying to excuse it. I'm not trying to claim that women drive men to rape them. And I'm certainly not trying to claim it isn't an act of violence. My claim is simply that I believe it is possible for rape to be a crime of violence and sex at the same time. If some men were not sexually aroused by women being raped and tortured, there would be no market for stomach-turning pornography depicting such acts. But that market is there.
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