I will try to keep this post from not branching off in a thousand directions. I wasn't sure of the title so chose one to keep me focused on the main subject. Some branching is necessary, however. Indulge an old man his branches.
Sex is the most psychologically fraught human drive and second in intensity only to hunger. Rape has pretty much settled into a black-and-white issue for Americans and British today; for, as far as I know, Europeans, and really, almost worldwide, at least in terms of statutes on the books:
Rape=Sex-Consent. Prosecutors must affirmatively prove beyond a reasonable doubt the element of non-consent.
Even in America however the equation was once somewhat different:
Rape=Sex+Violence (or the threat).
Some well-regarded scholars though have long argued that rape is not a crime of sex but a crime of violence. This view has taken some serious hits. It always rang a little tinny in some folks' ears, I mean it is sticking a penis in a vagina, how is that not sex? If it is "just" a crime of violence why use a penis and not a knife or gun? Legally, if rape is only a crime of violence then is it the equivalent of a punch to the arm, a battery, a misdemeanor? (In Florida rape is called "sexual battery."); or is it an aggravated battery, a felony (if blood is drawn or stitches required or a bone is broken). How can an adult penis break a bone or draw blood or inflict injury requiring stitches on an adult vagina? It has always seemed to me that "rape is a crime of violence not a sex crime" is minimizing to the victim.
Then there is the recent categorization of rapes, plural. Look it up in Wikipedia, there are a number of them. One of them is "lust rape." The state of the scholarship today, as the undersigned understands it, is that men rape overwhelmingly because they want sex, not to inflict violence per se.
The parsing of rape into "specialties" came about (my understanding) largely through the reporting of Oregon governor Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC was named the Rape Capital of the World by a United Nations agency. Some prominent women in Congo took umbrage. Congolese have complex attitudes toward rape:
1) It's a marital act. Which...It used to be in the U.S. that you could erase the crime of rape, especially "statutory" rape of an underaged female, by marriage.
2) In the DRC wives have no right to refuse sex to their husbands and a husband rebuffed may beat the parsimonious wife. Which is not much different at all from how it used to be in the U.S. A man would not be prosecuted for raping his wife (as long as he didn't go "overboard"), seeing as how wives owed sex as a duty to their husbands.
3) Women in the DRC were given a "choice", consent to sex or refuse and get a beating plus sex. Putin: “Like it or not — put up with it, my beauty.”
4) Rape was expected by some DRC women (implicit consent? No.). Oh hell, here come those dang rebels again. One foreign soldier told, I think it was Kristof and WuDunn but maybe others in follow-up reporting, that sex in Congo is a "game, everybody does it with everybody else."
5) The DRC's raping rebels had "permission." No, not from the women, what do they matter?, from their superiors. Russian soldier Roman Bykovskaya got permission from his "superior", his Russian wife Olga, to rape Ukrainian women. It ain't cheatin' if you have permission! (It is still rape.)
Violence. Seems to be black-and-white, no? Prosecutors do not even have to prove the element of non-consent in almost any violent crime (But, it's still a good idea to ask the victim on the stand).
Almost any. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me." Sadomasochism, bondage, new ones for me, “rapeplay” and the "hate fuck." (look it up) Can you consent to non-consent? "AHH! what happened to you!" to woman with visible facial bruising. "Oh it was glorious!" Different pov: "It was glorious to beat people to death," one of Chinese president Liu Shaoqi's daughters.
It was in my
Chinese Cultural Revolution studies that I first saw a tricolor in the yin-yang duochrome and it about broke my brain. Permission from higher up, check. Consent? In brief, as I have
written of the incident many times: Older man leaves his house, locks
door behind him, walks up to stadium where he is to be
"struggled", like he had an appointment, tells the demanding Red Guards
"Well, you can't have a struggle session without me, can you?"
And then I encountered it again in the American Civil War (the CR sometimes analogized to a Chinese civil war). The Gettysburg Reunions. Those were 50-75 years after the fact! YES, tempers had cooled by then. But...I'm reading just now Bruce Catton's superb trilogy (a birthday gift from my daughter). Like a (very) few of the struggle sessions, the issue of consent to violence came up. Was secession violence? Must secession be consented to by both seceder and remainer? There were no rules. Catton:
"It was a little confusing...because protocol for such a situation had never been devised... A revolution was in progress...but with the best of intentions... [Lol in sidebar by me]
"[State] militia officers who seized the Federal installations solemnly gave receipts to the dispossessed..."-The Coming Fury (187)
Wait. So if there's no law against it, it's okay? There's no moral law? If murder wasn't on the books we'd all be doing it all the time? No. But there is a lessening of inhibition in humans when they have permission from a higher authority to kill, and since that is true, why not to beat (struggle)?, why not to rape?
-"Harvesting the steppe". The Turks used to raid the plains of Greater Russia and carry off on horseback the most fetching young girls into sexual captivity to the Harem at Constantinople for the Sultan.
The practice had legs. In Kazakhstan, I believe, suitors would ceremoniously kidnap their brides (a form of “rapeplay”). The brides would be ridden on horseback to the "rendezvous" point and the suitor would take possession of her on his horse. Some Kazakh women came to expect this courtship. What, I'm not worth kidnapping? Which..."arranged marriages" in Europe between an old, propertied man, and a beautiful young virgin.
"Say it bitch." "I do."
It can get complicated, peoples have complicated it in every society throughout history, or at least we can twist our brains to complicate it. For me the first and last word in human relations is still the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
Okay, so that wasn't too bad, was it, that is I didn't branch too much?