Rape — sex or power?

Boy, oh boy! My comments follow after the post...

from Thought Leader, Jennifer Thorpe

Rape happens every day in South Africa. It is estimated that each year about half a million rapes occur, but only 1 in 9 of these is reported. With roughly 24 million women in South Africa this presents women with a scary picture. It means that if you are a woman and you live to the age of 50, you have a damn high chance of being raped in South Africa. You can debate with these statistics, but that’s not the place of this blog. Even if only 1 occurs, there is something going on. And I’m interested in what that something is. Is rape about sex, or is it about power?

For a long time many women’s groups have advocated for the idea that rape is about power. They have argued that it is about the relationships between men and women, and the “expected” relationships between men and women in a patriarchal political system. To explain, the “expected” relationships say that men should have more power than women, and historically this has largely come from their physical size and economic power. Men have been the breadwinners, businessmen and success stories whilst women have played a background role. This has been intimately tied with masculinity, and in fact being dominant has been one of the central historical traits that have been labelled as “masculine”. Similarly, being sexually powerful, having a good libido and the ability to be sexy to women is part of the script of masculinity that appears cross-culturally throughout history. In summary, men are supposed to be strong, rich and virile.

However, the times they are a-changing and increasing numbers of women are gaining their economic independence. In South Africa especially, they have been given constitutionally entrenched equal legal status. Women have also been granted sexual freedom. They are legally empowered to have sex with whom and when they want to. Women are no longer legally required to have sex with their husbands, boyfriends or partners. They are sexually liberated (in theory). So women too are legally enabled to be rich, and sexually free post 1994. For all intents and purposes, they are equal to men for the first time in the history of the country.

How is rape related? The explanation goes that these changes can make men feel emasculated and powerless. This can result in feelings of anger, and sometimes these feelings can be directed at women. Women represent the unwanted changes in their power status and are thus the perfect object of their anger. Men who do not find some other way to renegotiate their masculinity will take their anger out in a physical way, and the most invasive way to teach women their place is to rape them. The level of invasiveness is unlike any other because during a rape, a man is physically inside of a woman. It takes away women’s sexual freedom, and it is an insult to her dignity.

I have been a firm believer in this explanation for a very long time. In my understanding the way that masculinity and femininity are constructed, renegotiated and formed are essentially political and are not without their links to power. The fact that rape is so invasive, whether it is of a man or a woman, with a penis or an object is linked to this power relationship — it is a demarcation of that most intimate space as someone else’s property. It is a taking-away of the survivor’s power. A re-assertion of the rapist’s power.

Sexual relations are necessarily based around power and as rape is the most unfortunate and damaging of sexual relations, rape is about power. It is about putting women back in their places. It is about taking sexual freedom and showing women that it is not theirs to have.

But there is a second stream of thought that says that this is not the point of rape. If it were about power, men could just beat up a woman (and some do). They could simply kick a woman out, or kick her to show how powerful they are. So what is it, that makes a man choose to use his sexual organs? Could rape be about sex?

If we think that rape is about sex, then we explain that rape is about men’s (socially constructed or physical) needs to have sex with women when they want to. Rape involves the sexual organs because it is the part of the body that is associated with their sexuality, their sexual pleasure and their reproductive power. This explanation also links to biological drives like reproduction and the reproduction of the species.

I have an extremely close friend who has been part of the women’s rights struggle for the 37 years of her life, and she suggested that in her experience of dealing with survivors she has begun to change her mind about what the “cause” or “explanation” for rape is. Through hearing the narratives of rape survivors and alleged rapists, she has come to believe that rape is very much about sex. It is about men wanting sex and women being forced into sex. It is about the inability of women to negotiate the sex that they have, and thus being forced into situations where sex happens to them without their consent. Rape then, for many women and for some men, is about sex.

These distinctions are not about light matters. They define the solution. If rape is about power we must renegotiate power relations, masculinity and femininity, and ensure that equality is something that does not become a situation of equal disempowerment. In order to stop a rapist you have to understand why he is raping, and not understanding this will leave many organisations with the simple task of picking up the pieces. If rape is about sex, new strategies and solutions will need to be devised and enacted to create a better way of living for men and women.

The most disheartening thing about both explanations is that neither provides us with an explanation of why one man chooses to rape and another does not.

My comment on the origional post follows:

A large part of a rape survivor's recovery will come from the realization that she was the victim of her rapists' feelings of powerlessness, which was transferred to her through sex. In that respect I think feminists are right.

However, I don't think your conclusions about rape in the present day political context have much merit, to the extent that you have generalized in your post. Rape and violence have always been a part of Western culture, going back to the Dark Ages and beyond to historical times when Western society was much more patriarchal. I don't believe we have more rapes occurring today than we did back then, even though we are much more likely to talk about it openly. Another contradiction in your thought process is the fact that other societies that have been liberated much more, in terms of sexual equality, have much lower incidents of rape than South Africa. Be careful not to down play South Africa's horrific rape statistics in your post.

Still, I commend your efforts to raise the issue and create public awareness. I take a keen interest in this topic in a personal capacity, having been raped at the young age of three years.

Oscars: No woman ever won Best Director

From experience I know how KAK it is when you have been given something simply because you were a woman. But soon the Oscar for Best Director will probably be given to a woman since the following has come to light:

By Guy White, 6 March 2010

Just heard that no woman has ever won Oscars for Best Director. We are half a century into women’s liberation and still women can’t do it. Women achieve success in politics, but that is very subjective. (And that's all the Oscars are now days - politics.)

But it seems that in places were one has to be the best (as opposed to most popular), men dominate.

This is not caused by women being diverted to different fields. Women right (sic), poetry much more than men, they cook more, design clothes more. Yet, at the very top, men dominate. Top chefs, top designers, top poets are overwhelmingly male. A few women will pop up, but 90% of the best are make, regardless of the field.

There are two reasons for this. One is the greater IQ range for men than women. This also explains why most degenerates are male. The homeless, the drunks, the criminals are 90% male too.

Another reason is that women multitask, while men concentrate on a given task. Women had to do it to raise many children, as well as while gathering food.

Men had to concentrate on one task not just when hunting thousands of years ago, but as recently as … the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

If you are sitting in a foxhole and not concentrating on just one task, you will get killed within minutes.

This is why autism is predominantly a male disease. It is sometimes thought of as a hyper-male condition because it is (probably) triggered by excess testosterone at a particular point during pregnancy. Autism is concentration taken to extreme. People concentrate on one thing and find it impossible to anything else, leafing to everything from school problems to social inadequacy.

In normal males, however, focusing on one issue at a time means that men are more successful in their careers, more likely get promoted and most definitely more like to become great at what they do.

Women want to spread themselves among many interests from job to kids to clothes to culture. This is not bad in general and I would not advise against it, but it is also not the way to win a Nobel Prize, become a CEO, develop cure for cancer or become the best clothes designer.

To outcompete (sic) every other designer, chef, poet, artist, one needs ro (sic) obsessively dedicate oneself to success, among (sic) other things. (he had problems concentrating on doing one thing only i.e. writing properly! LOL).

Women don’t do it, which is fine. Not every person should be a CEO and it may be best for everyone if more people tried to be good parents rather than climbing the corporate scale.

But the problem comes when feminists incite women to complain that they weren’t moved up the corporate scale when they were not on the scale at all, when instead of working over-time, they worked part-time or not at all while raising kids.

You have a choice in life. If you choose to play with your kids and to read Cosmo instead of corporate finance documents, please shut up about the glass ceiling. It’s not the glass ceiling that’s responsible, it’s the fact that you are still reading Cosmo at 50 years if age. (Ouch! He he)

Lesbians: Fantasy and Reality

Women used to be scarce in my line of work, in the environmental sciences, although more recently females certainly benefited from affirmative action. The majority of the positions in government that are not black appointees are white women. My awkward discovery over these past few years was that many of these white women were lesbian; and the type that were mad that they didn't have any chest hair. Their behaviour confuses men, but it seems that Guy White has a simple perspective on the issue.

Mike wrote: “Those lesbians are mad that they have breasts instead of chest hair. They want to be men, and they’re mad that they get “stereotyped” in with the other 99% of women who actually want to be women.”

I agree that some lesbians want to be men, but some are just lesbian because they can’t get a man due to being so unattractive.

Men claim they like lesbians, but they don’t. They just like polygamy. You want multiple straight girls.

As a result, there’s confusion in what one may expect in a lesbian bar.

This is a lesbian fantasy:

And this is a lesbian reality, the kind of women you get to see at the National Organization for Women.

Scary.