Scifi with aggressive sexuality
- Thread starter JirinPanthosa
- Start date
And often, just as with Brock Turner, when you have a real-life perpetrator who's sufficiently privileged, "dehumanization" of the perpetrator is the opposite of what happens. All sorts of excuses were made for Brock Turner not just by his defense team and his friends and family, but by the court that sentenced him. Or there's Jian Ghomeshi in Canada, who basically got away with putting his accusers on trial when he came up on sexual assault charges; one of them managed to elicit a vague "apology" from him, because she could see the court system wasn't going to do anything else, and then had to go to the media herself to make it explicit what the apology was for. The excesses of dehumanization in rape culture are of the victims, NOT the perpetrators.
Damn this topic moves fast. It's so hard to keep up.
Anyway, that's where I stand on this. The sailor didn't rape the woman because he was offering something that the woman could easily do without (although he was probably breaking some other laws).
Example 1:
"Hey, you're about to die from dehydration in the desert. I'll give you some water if you have sex with me". That's rape because it's not something the woman can easily refuse.
Example 2:
"Hey, you want to play the new Uncharted game? I'll buy you a PS4 if you have sex with me". This would be a little creepy, but certainly not rape or any other crime. The woman doesn't need a PS4. The boat situation falls here.
EDITED TO ADD:
I should point out that my view here is strongly coloured by the ridiculousness of this hypothetical scenario. I'm supposed to believe that this boat is the only way that this woman can see her finance? Okay, then how about calling the police and saying "Hey, this creep tried to force me to have sex with him to cross the river. Arrest him and take away his boating license." There's just so many other ways that the woman could have easily handled this situation without agreeing to have the sex with the man.
Now I completely agree that the extortion of sex can be rape outside of life or death situations, but in this specific, incredibly weird and hypothetical scenario, I'm not calling it rape.
Last edited:
Really?
After reading this?
It was an impossible choice. She was faced with losing the only chance to be united with her lover. That is an abuse of power and faced with that non-choice you can't claim there was actual consent.
Comparing that abuse of power with "I'll give ya a PS4 if you fuck me" is trivializing it like crazy.
@Zaku
Here are a few things to think about when determining what constitutes rape:
1. Do you agree that rape is about power? If so, why does it make a difference if the power a man has over a woman is physical, emotional, financial, etc? Why is one rape and the others not?
2. People often ask of women who were raped, "Why didn't she fight back?" When you wrote "She could have refused" honestly, that's what popped into my head.
3. Do you think, from the perspective of the victim, that being forced to have sex through methods of coercion other than physical coercion feels any less like rape? Would it feel any less like robbery if someone told you you could never see your wife again unless you gave them all your money than if they beat you and physically took it from you?
4. Now, really put yourself in the victim's shoes: how would you feel if a whole society was asking..."Why didn't she fight back?" "Why didn't she just say no?" or saying, "It wasn't rape, because he didn't use physical force," "It wasn't real rape, because..."
Here are a few things to think about when determining what constitutes rape:
1. Do you agree that rape is about power? If so, why does it make a difference if the power a man has over a woman is physical, emotional, financial, etc? Why is one rape and the others not?
2. People often ask of women who were raped, "Why didn't she fight back?" When you wrote "She could have refused" honestly, that's what popped into my head.
3. Do you think, from the perspective of the victim, that being forced to have sex through methods of coercion other than physical coercion feels any less like rape? Would it feel any less like robbery if someone told you you could never see your wife again unless you gave them all your money than if they beat you and physically took it from you?
4. Now, really put yourself in the victim's shoes: how would you feel if a whole society was asking..."Why didn't she fight back?" "Why didn't she just say no?" or saying, "It wasn't rape, because he didn't use physical force," "It wasn't real rape, because..."
Taking this out of a hypothetical for a moment, do people think this stuff counts as rape?
In order to advance at work, the [female victims] were told they must perform sexual favors. Other women say they were subject to constant harassment, crude remarks and denigration of their genderby male staff at all levels.
Managers attempted to coerce junior employees into going on dates with men higher up in the company. One woman said that in 2009 she walked into an office she thought was empty only to find amale senior manager receiving oral sex from a young female staffer.
...
In 2007, Wilson dangled the possibility of a promotion in front of Bakhtiar and when she said she’d be excited to take the job, he reportedly told her, “I’d like to see the inside of your hotel room.” He said that he wanted them to have a “friends with benefits” relationship.
Bakhtiar declined and says that immediately her career at the company went into free-fall. Her appearances were canceled and when she attempted to address the issue with other executives, they told her to go to Human Resources. Within weeks she was fired. Ailes told her that it was for performance-related reasons.
Managers attempted to coerce junior employees into going on dates with men higher up in the company. One woman said that in 2009 she walked into an office she thought was empty only to find amale senior manager receiving oral sex from a young female staffer.
...
In 2007, Wilson dangled the possibility of a promotion in front of Bakhtiar and when she said she’d be excited to take the job, he reportedly told her, “I’d like to see the inside of your hotel room.” He said that he wanted them to have a “friends with benefits” relationship.
Bakhtiar declined and says that immediately her career at the company went into free-fall. Her appearances were canceled and when she attempted to address the issue with other executives, they told her to go to Human Resources. Within weeks she was fired. Ailes told her that it was for performance-related reasons.
FBI Q/AFBI said:
It's a tough question, since in these cases the women are "consenting" (under duress or coercion) but are not being "forced". I certainly think a case could be made for anyone using his position as a supervisor taking advantage of his subordinates - (the " 'friends' with benefits" allegation) especially since these high level people would have access to "escorts" if they really wanted to get laid; it certainly looks like the power trip scenario. A good defense lawyer could probably argue that it was "consensual" (even though not giving consent could cause her to lose her job).
Sexual Harassment? Check. Abuse of power/authority? Check. Rape? Hard to say.
The Brock Turner case is an awful example of "affluenza." He basically got a slap on the wrist because he was 'a good student' and a good athlete. This is a perfect example of how the US Justice System can fail, and there is no excuse. Perhaps that excuse could work for something very minor (not that i can think of any acceptable situation) but rape should not be minor, should not be treated as 'minor' and any judge who does should be removed from overseeing such cases.
Last edited:
Coerced consent is not consent. That's pretty much already a legal maxim, it applies to everything from legal documents to criminal confessions. Why would it NOT apply to sex?
Or your boss is threatening to fire you unless you fudge the budget numbers to cover his embezzling. Less threatening, but still coercion.
Emphasis mine, and I'm genuinely curious what you mean with this.
I'm going to be all benefit-of-a-doubt-y here, because I can think of two ways I could read that last bit. Are we talking about how we view perpetrators as in how we treat them, or as in how we treat their origins?
If it's the latter, there's actually a valid point to be made here: it's fundamentally unhelpful to consider awful people as somehow outside human society, like inhuman freak accident people that just came into existence somehow because the world is a cruel and gritty place. It excuses people from critically considering the factors that made them awful, so, yeah. I've observed this many times as regards Nazism: with all their awfulness, it's not really helpful to consider the Nazis inhuman monsters, as it dodges the important questions of how, and why, and how to avoid future descents of sophisticated societies into authoritarianism. They weren't inhuman - we, as humanity, built that/them. Just like we, as a society - and yes, that includes rape culture (a term you definitely aren't using correctly in your post) - don't get to wash our hands of the responsibility of producing rapists.
If it's the former, though ... holy shit, dude.
If you can demonstrate that the allegations mentioned in the article fit the legal definition of rape, as defined by the FBI, more power to you! I don't think it can, but I'd like to be wrong.
If someone is holding your job over your head and demanding that you falsify accounting statements, did you consent to committing fraud?
From that story, there arise two question. Did she end up on the wrong side of the waters because he ferried her there? Then the answer is clear cut. It is rape. End of story. He knowingly put her in a situation where he knew she would be at his mercy.
Or was this their first encounter? In which case the question would be if it is generally always wrong to set sex as a price for a service or goods.
I take it you've never seen High Plains Drifter.
This isn't a simple free trade. Not just "travel" for "sex".
He knows she can't refuse unless she accepts to never see her fiance again. That isn't free choice, it's power abuse.
Rapists are scum, that nonetheless need to be treated as humans whose background must be looked at to find out what makes them act in the way they do.
That's why we're talking about rape culture.
You know... the background that reinforces rapist beliefs.Not saying rape culture is the only reason rapists exist obviously. But it's one important element.
The problem is that hypothetical ethics story is absolutes. The world is not made of absolutes, its made of people with differing degrees of opinions, ethics, morality etc.
EVEN SO; if the cost of seeing her lover/fiance is to endure unwanted sex with the boatman, she could still have refused and accepted the cost - after all, her fiance dumps her for being unfaithful. It's a terrible place to put a person, but she accepted and agreed to the unwanted sex to be with her fiance. Therefore I don't think it could be classified as rape.
When you don't have a real choice I wouldn't call it "accept", much less "consent". And when somebody abuses his power to take away any reasonable free choice from you, and thus eliminates consent... that is rape.
There could be numerous reasons that drive a person to commit rape. Perhaps one of the more common, especially for college students, would be an assumption of consent where there is none. Violent rape is likely comparable to other violent crimes - assault, battery, murder. There is probably an additional aspect of psychological power over the victim. None of that excuses or justifies the inexcusable and unjustifiable.
Similar threads
