"Forced sex" versus "rape"

[alexandraerin]

So, I was using Google to try to find a particular survey that showed how men responded differently when asked if they would "force someone to have sex" if they could do so without consequences versus men who were asked if they would "rape someone" in the same circumstances. I didn't find what I was looking for (I think I may have first seen it in the pages of Cracked), but I did find there is a depressing wealth of information about the frequency of the belief that "forcing someone to have sex" exists as something distinct from and morally superior to "rape".

Here's one where six in ten men responded that forcing an acquaintance to have sex isn't rape, but nine in ten thought that forcing a stranger is. (Spoiler alert: the numbers for women aren't astronomically better.)

Let's back up a second here and try to imagine a functional society where it is believed that all robbers... burglars, muggers, thieves... look basically like this:



In this society, theft is not viewed as "theft-theft" when it happens between acquaintances, when the victim of the theft has been known to give people money in the past, etc., and we have such a hard time seeing anyone who isn't wearing a domino mask and a striped jumpsuit as a thief that we're sure there must be some kind of misunderstanding or something when a non-mask-and-jumpsuit-clad individual is accused of stealing.

Imagine that this is the only culturally accepted image of a murder:



Can you imagine a functioning society that tacitly excused all crimes... serious crimes, violent crimes... when they happened between acquaintances? Where the act of merely knowing someone... to say nothing of having some fondness for or familial relationship with them... was considered to be enough to "blur the lines" and turn murder or larceny into "kind of a gray area"?

Now, of course, a lot of horrific things that aren't rape have been swept under the rug or excused or even officially condoned as "family matters", but I feel confident in asserting that few people would say that spouses have an absolute right to murder each other or that it's not really stealing if you know the guy you're taking stuff from.

And here's where I move this post from mere observation of fucked-uped-ness to advocacy: call this shit out. It's important. All the guys out there who have forced... coerced, pressured, tricked, whatever... women into having sex? They have committed acts of rape, and they did it while telling themselves that they weren't doing so. Correction: they did it while being told, from a hundred different directions, that they weren't raping. Would some of them have done this regardless?

Probably. But the cultural narrative helped. And when I say "it" helped, I mean "we helped", I mean "you and I" helped... in little ways and big ways, in ways active or passive, we are the conversation that happens about rape and rapists. I'm not trying to point a finger and I'm certainly not suggesting that no one reading this blog has ever done anything positive. I'm saying this is a society-wide problem, and society includes everyone.

We need to change the narrative that says that rape is something that happens in dark alleys, something that's done by a special identifiable category of people called Rapists to people who are (or who look and act in a manner that might get them mistaken for) Rape Victims, and not something that can be done by a friend or a lover or a co-worker or a nice young man, a good-looking guy, someone with a future, someone who can get women willingly so why would he bother?... not something that can happen to anyone who's minding their own business, out trying to have a good time, going to work, trying to get an education, or simply existing in the same spot as someone who doesn't see anything wrong with forcing another human being to have sex.

The distinction between "forced sex" and "rape" is semantic only, but it has very real effects. Not only does it make it possible for someone who fully believes that rape is wrong or who fears the consequences of rape to commit a rape while believing it's just sex... it can lead the people who should be in charge of prosecuting those actions and protecting the rights of the victim to do the same thing. It lets us pretend that what is black and white is big and murky and gray.