When trying to understand rape and looking for ways to change society to minimize its incidence, it might be worthwhile to look into studies of societies where rape seems to be non-existent or exceedingly rare.
A classic paper on this is '"It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference' by Christine Helliwell.
When trying to understand rape and looking for ways to change society to minimize its incidence, it might be worthwhile to look into studies of societies where rape seems to be non-existent or exceedingly rare.
A classic paper on this is '"It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference' by Christine Helliwell.
Hm, should we think the same ways of other kinds of crime, like robbery and murder?
I started reading that paper and was struck by the similarities between the Indonesian case in the beginning and the Roman/Samantha case. 13-year-old Samantha made the same conclusion: That her rapist was not going to hurt her. Obviously, Western females are entirely capable of thinking that way too. I believe that way of thinking is more or less tabooed in the West. Women are not allowed to say "I didn't want it, but I feel OK", because then they won't get accepted as real rape victims. Feeling awful has been incorporated in the definition of being raped.
> should we think the same ways of other kinds of crime, like robbery and murder?
Should we study cultures where the incidence seem very low and see what we can learn from them? Absolutely ;)
What I took away was not the part that she was not afraid to get hurt, but that she felt empowered to throw him out, solely by the reason that she did not _want_ to have sex with him. So it was not about whether the experience would be pleasant or hurtful, but about her agency to freely choose for herself.
Different cultures have different expectations of politeness, and clearly she felt free to express her displeasure, and the whole village felt free to ridicule him afterwards.
That seems very different from the Roman/Samantha case, where the reasoning is that he is not going to hurt me, therefore I should just be polite and comply.
But it is interesting that they can't even conceive of the idea that sex could be hurtful. In our culture we are so inoculated in the idea that sex is something men do to women, that a position like that is hard to relate to. In their culture they don't differentiate between the sexes in the same way we do, a vulva and a penis is from their cultural viewpoint basically the same, so how could one hurt the other?
There are other cultures that are even more different from ours when it comes to this. In the Cayapa for example, the women are seen as the more aggressive part and sex as something women do to men. Their description of sex is literally the vagina eating the penis.
So culture is hugely influential in how sex is experienced by both sexes.
Thinking about it, I don't find it very strange that people in some small-scale societies have never heard of violent rape. The only reason why I know about the kind of rape based on violence or threats if violence is mass media. Without mass media, I also wouldn't have heard of a man breaking a single hair on the head of a woman in order to obtain sex. From friends and acquaintances and acquaintances to acquaintances I have heard of numerous cases of sexual coercion. But none of those cases built on violence or explicit intimidation.
Fortunately rape by the threat of violence is so rare that it is newsworthy, and I think you are right that a small scale society may not see any incidents at all, and as such not know about violent rape.
It does seem like their society also has strong taboos against coercion. In the paper she addresses this:
> The idea of having sex with someone who does not need you to have sex with them - and so the idea of coercing someone into sex - is thus almost unthinkable to Gerai people.
This seems to align with a lot of hunter-gatherer tribes that are fiercely egalitarian. In egalitarian societies, trying to make others do something they don't want to do, is seen as a big no-no. Something that especially reflects in their approach to child-rearing (I can again recommend "Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods", by Hewlett/Lamb).
Most of all, the Indonesian woman seems to have thought her intruder was ridiculous. For me, that is a sign that violating a woman's wishes was a less serious crime there compared to in the West. I can explain:
When I was 20 years old I traveled alone to Syria to study Arabic. I stayed there for three months. During that time, I was forced to learn a lot about Arab sexual moral, or, from my perspective, about Arab men's lack of that thing. Men did things I found plain ridiculous: One moved closer and closer to me on a train, with a silly expression on his face. A male friend took off his shirt and started climbing on me, like he was doing some kind of sweet foreplay, but entirely without my consent. He stopped only when I hit him. Then he pretended to be a bit upset.
If a Western man had done anything similar, I wouldn't have hit him. I would have been terrified. In the West, ignoring a woman's interests is tabooed, so only men who are prepared to break social rules do such things. For that reason, I'm afraid of them. My Arab friend, however, wasn't an aggressive rule-breaker. So I found him only annoying and ridiculous.
In general, the Arab men cared very little about consent. But they seemed to adhere to strong taboos against violence. Which made me much more assertive against them compared to Western men who disregard the consent principle. My guess is that there might have been something similar in that Indonesian society: Consent wasn't a biggie, but killing women was.
So maybe reducing it to something stupid and ridiculous also lowers the barriers to reacting against it. Making this kind of clumsy flirting a taboo, does seem to radically heighten the stakes when it then actually does happen.
It seems to have worked for the people in the paper (of course just being one thing in a larger cultural context). They didn't even have a word for rape, and had a hard time conceiving that such a thing was even possible.
>>So maybe reducing it to something stupid and ridiculous also lowers the barriers to reacting against it. Making this kind of clumsy flirting a taboo, does seem to radically heighten the stakes when it then actually does happen.
Basically, yes. For Arab men, trying to have sex with a woman who protested verbally and otherwise showed clear signs of lack of consent wasn't taboo. It was seen as a thing men did (all men didn't, but many enough for it to be normal). So when I pushed away the n:th man of the day, I didn't accuse him of anything worse than being a man. No hard feelings.
If I push away a Western man doing the same thing, I'm not only accusing him of being a man. I'm accusing him of being a molester, a potential rapist. At the very least, I'm accusing him of having made a wrong move. In best case, such accusations make people regretful, insecure or annoyed. In worst case, they make people angry and aggressive.
That being said, I'm not the least jealous of the Arabs. I'm sure there are at least as many anti-social, dangerous molesters among them. Those dangerous men are just being diluted by scores of annoying and ridiculous men. The Western taboo against sexual aggression has allowed me to spend my life focusing on others things than avoiding sexual aggression. I'm immensely grateful for that opportunity.
Rather than easing taboos against sexual aggression, I think there should be more inoffensive excuses for not wanting to have sex with someone. More versions of "it's not that I don't like you but...".
When trying to understand rape and looking for ways to change society to minimize its incidence, it might be worthwhile to look into studies of societies where rape seems to be non-existent or exceedingly rare.
A classic paper on this is '"It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference' by Christine Helliwell.
https://dunedinfreeuniversity.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/3175417.pdf
Hm, should we think the same ways of other kinds of crime, like robbery and murder?
I started reading that paper and was struck by the similarities between the Indonesian case in the beginning and the Roman/Samantha case. 13-year-old Samantha made the same conclusion: That her rapist was not going to hurt her. Obviously, Western females are entirely capable of thinking that way too. I believe that way of thinking is more or less tabooed in the West. Women are not allowed to say "I didn't want it, but I feel OK", because then they won't get accepted as real rape victims. Feeling awful has been incorporated in the definition of being raped.
> should we think the same ways of other kinds of crime, like robbery and murder?
Should we study cultures where the incidence seem very low and see what we can learn from them? Absolutely ;)
What I took away was not the part that she was not afraid to get hurt, but that she felt empowered to throw him out, solely by the reason that she did not _want_ to have sex with him. So it was not about whether the experience would be pleasant or hurtful, but about her agency to freely choose for herself.
Different cultures have different expectations of politeness, and clearly she felt free to express her displeasure, and the whole village felt free to ridicule him afterwards.
That seems very different from the Roman/Samantha case, where the reasoning is that he is not going to hurt me, therefore I should just be polite and comply.
But it is interesting that they can't even conceive of the idea that sex could be hurtful. In our culture we are so inoculated in the idea that sex is something men do to women, that a position like that is hard to relate to. In their culture they don't differentiate between the sexes in the same way we do, a vulva and a penis is from their cultural viewpoint basically the same, so how could one hurt the other?
There are other cultures that are even more different from ours when it comes to this. In the Cayapa for example, the women are seen as the more aggressive part and sex as something women do to men. Their description of sex is literally the vagina eating the penis.
So culture is hugely influential in how sex is experienced by both sexes.
Thinking about it, I don't find it very strange that people in some small-scale societies have never heard of violent rape. The only reason why I know about the kind of rape based on violence or threats if violence is mass media. Without mass media, I also wouldn't have heard of a man breaking a single hair on the head of a woman in order to obtain sex. From friends and acquaintances and acquaintances to acquaintances I have heard of numerous cases of sexual coercion. But none of those cases built on violence or explicit intimidation.
Fortunately rape by the threat of violence is so rare that it is newsworthy, and I think you are right that a small scale society may not see any incidents at all, and as such not know about violent rape.
It does seem like their society also has strong taboos against coercion. In the paper she addresses this:
> The idea of having sex with someone who does not need you to have sex with them - and so the idea of coercing someone into sex - is thus almost unthinkable to Gerai people.
This seems to align with a lot of hunter-gatherer tribes that are fiercely egalitarian. In egalitarian societies, trying to make others do something they don't want to do, is seen as a big no-no. Something that especially reflects in their approach to child-rearing (I can again recommend "Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods", by Hewlett/Lamb).
Most of all, the Indonesian woman seems to have thought her intruder was ridiculous. For me, that is a sign that violating a woman's wishes was a less serious crime there compared to in the West. I can explain:
When I was 20 years old I traveled alone to Syria to study Arabic. I stayed there for three months. During that time, I was forced to learn a lot about Arab sexual moral, or, from my perspective, about Arab men's lack of that thing. Men did things I found plain ridiculous: One moved closer and closer to me on a train, with a silly expression on his face. A male friend took off his shirt and started climbing on me, like he was doing some kind of sweet foreplay, but entirely without my consent. He stopped only when I hit him. Then he pretended to be a bit upset.
If a Western man had done anything similar, I wouldn't have hit him. I would have been terrified. In the West, ignoring a woman's interests is tabooed, so only men who are prepared to break social rules do such things. For that reason, I'm afraid of them. My Arab friend, however, wasn't an aggressive rule-breaker. So I found him only annoying and ridiculous.
In general, the Arab men cared very little about consent. But they seemed to adhere to strong taboos against violence. Which made me much more assertive against them compared to Western men who disregard the consent principle. My guess is that there might have been something similar in that Indonesian society: Consent wasn't a biggie, but killing women was.
So maybe reducing it to something stupid and ridiculous also lowers the barriers to reacting against it. Making this kind of clumsy flirting a taboo, does seem to radically heighten the stakes when it then actually does happen.
It seems to have worked for the people in the paper (of course just being one thing in a larger cultural context). They didn't even have a word for rape, and had a hard time conceiving that such a thing was even possible.
>>So maybe reducing it to something stupid and ridiculous also lowers the barriers to reacting against it. Making this kind of clumsy flirting a taboo, does seem to radically heighten the stakes when it then actually does happen.
Basically, yes. For Arab men, trying to have sex with a woman who protested verbally and otherwise showed clear signs of lack of consent wasn't taboo. It was seen as a thing men did (all men didn't, but many enough for it to be normal). So when I pushed away the n:th man of the day, I didn't accuse him of anything worse than being a man. No hard feelings.
If I push away a Western man doing the same thing, I'm not only accusing him of being a man. I'm accusing him of being a molester, a potential rapist. At the very least, I'm accusing him of having made a wrong move. In best case, such accusations make people regretful, insecure or annoyed. In worst case, they make people angry and aggressive.
That being said, I'm not the least jealous of the Arabs. I'm sure there are at least as many anti-social, dangerous molesters among them. Those dangerous men are just being diluted by scores of annoying and ridiculous men. The Western taboo against sexual aggression has allowed me to spend my life focusing on others things than avoiding sexual aggression. I'm immensely grateful for that opportunity.
Rather than easing taboos against sexual aggression, I think there should be more inoffensive excuses for not wanting to have sex with someone. More versions of "it's not that I don't like you but...".