^Okay, but what if we take as our premise the idea that rape is motivated by a desire to dominate. That is, it's not about stealing sex, it's about using sex to re-enforce a hierarchy. The rapist asserts superiority by denying the victim their basic right to bodily autonymy.
I offer a couple of points in support of this interpretation
- Prison rape is well-recorded as a hierarchy of dominance rather than [homo]sexual desire.
- Certain groups who are already marginalised in some other way tend to have higher instances of rape - percentages of rape are higher for women than men, for people with disabilities than for the able-bodied, among black women and latinas than white women, among transwomen than ciswomen, etc
- Male rapists of men often use the threat of emasculation to keep their vitims shamed and quiet. That is, they'll convince them that the rape makes them more like a woman or a gay man, which the rapist codes as an insult, as making the victim 'lesser'.
- Rape is used as one tactic among an arsenal of others by abusive partners to break their partner's spirit.
- Rape is a common weapon of war.
- Rape is used by gangs as a rite of initiation, elevating a recruit into a more elite membership.
- Johns who rape prostitutes often have partners and thus access to 'free sex' if that's what they were seeking. They aren't skipping out on the bill, they're committing hate crimes against prostituted women.
- Psychologists reckon convicted male rapists tend to have more rigid ideas of 'manliness' and gender roles than non-rapists. They are aggressively protective of the privileges that keep them higher on the power ladder than their victims.
If rape is about dominance, not lust, the tactics for avoiding it have to change because the 'valuable property' model doesn't make sense any more. Instead of "don't flash your sexy assets lest you tempt a rapist" it becomes "don't show any visible signs that you're part of a group a rapist wants to dominate."
And that's impossible - you can't change your gender, or your race, or your class, or your physical or mental disabilities, or your nationality, or your family, every time you think you might be in the presence of a rapist. Especially since said rapist will not be wearing an ID badge, nor will he be hanging around the helpfully monikered "Rapist Avenue". He's more likely to attack you in your home or a friend's home than in a dark alley.
It's still theoretically possible to perform risk-management. But first one must have a better understanding of who rapists are, how they think, what kind of bystanders' attitudes enable them etc. And in order to do this, we need to lose the myth of the stranger who targets women in skirts, walking alone. Not because women in skirts walking alone are never raped by strangers - it certainly happens - but because focusing on the skirt and the location misses the crux of the issue. The same woman could be raped by the same man for exactly the same reasons while wearing sweat pants in the laundry room if that had been the occasion that presented itself.
