Gender and Violence and Blame
POSTED BY: Magonsdaughter
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 20:14
VIEWED: 35151
PAGE 9 of 31
Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:Quote:What? No way- they tend to get a brisk slap on the wrists! A year in the pokey, sometimes a fine... unless the victim has a lot of cash.
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Also, are we caring about this? Don't rapists tend to get the death penalty in this country anyway?
>_>
I'm sorry chris, but that turning a rape into murder thing... That comment kinda got to me.
You believe in self-defense, right, and when it's life or death, then do you think you can kill in self-defense?
What is more life threatening than rape? I do not understand your reasoning as equating fighting off a rapist with murder, especially when the rape victim so often succumbs to their wounds.
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CHRIS... what do you mean? That an insert could kill a man, or that the man would just get enraged and kill the woman?
If you mean the first... well, I hardly have sympathy for the rapist. If the latter... well, then it wouldn't be very effective and shouldn't be considered.
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Quote:TONY- women get to deal with all of the sanitary aspects of having menstrual cycles, so shoving stuff up our vaginas isn't such an unusual prospect for us.
Re: Inserts - I am not interested in shoving anything up inside my body to prevent rape. I suspect most people feel this way, and not just men. It seems to me that if I shove something up inside myself to fend off a rapist, then the rapist has succeeded in getting something shoved up inside of me. Which was part of the thing I was trying to avoid.
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Quote:My dear, you misunderstood me due to my brevity, I don't give a rat's ass about a rapist's life, but what might be a survivable rape might turn to death if a person so already sick as to commit rape feels pain in that area and decides retaliate by killing the victim.
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I'm sorry chris, but that turning a rape into murder thing... That comment kinda got to me.
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Just to get back to violence in general -
I think it's pretty clear that people have the capacity for violence as well as for sociality. Yanno - look at history.
I tend to try to frame this in an evolutionary sense. Some additional reading I've done recently indicates that some common chimpanzee troops hunt quite a bit. Females don't hunt. Males form hunting groups, dominated by not necessarily the best hunter, but often the larger, younger and/or more aggressive male. The dominant male decides who will be included in the hunting party. The dominant male also decides who gets what of the kill, if there is one. Females engage in extreme submissive behavior to beg for meat. Despite that, on the whole females only get about 1% of the meat. These troops also have been seen to engage in warfare of a sorts against neighboring chimpanzee troops - they use their organization and hunting skills against isolated chimpanzees where territories meet, killing them.
To me it seems like this 'hunting' creates an easily dominated resource, leading to the same types of steep male-dominated hierarchies seen when fruit gets piled into one pile. And group hunting behavior gets translated into territorial behavior.
This isn't necessarily a sustainable model. One might think it would allow for troops led by warlike dominant males to take over territory of more pacifist groups, allowing that behavior to thrive. OTOH the true generators of long-term survival - females and surviving young - benefit very little from this behavior. But evolution makes its first cut in the immediate time frame. So this behavior PRIMARILY benefits the creation and maintenance of a male hierarchy. If taken to an extreme, that behavior would lead to the decline of the overall population. Over time a balance is struck between aggressive dominant male behavior and group survival.
Anyway, the point is that evolution doesn't select for the optimum behaviors, it selects for the ones that control the most resources, and against the ones that lead to unsustainable mortality in females and offspring.
Bonobos also hunt. However, females hunt equally with males. And while there are hierarchies among both males and females, they don't revolve around food or mating. The friction of living in a hierarchical group is resolved through sex (lower ranking individuals offering sex to higher ranking individuals). This arrangement would seem to lead a thriving populations and long-term survival. I haven't read how territorial disputes between groups get resolved.
Anyway, I think people evolved in an egalitarian setting - where the means of survival was available to anyone's hand, literally. However, as people moved off the beach and out of the estuary, they encountered an environment where food was a lot scarcer. Hunting became a necessity. Since females rarely hunt in 'primitive' societies, I think this created an easily dominated 'rare resource' that COULD lead to the formation of hierarchies. Agriculture is another innovation that could accomplish the same thing, since the means of survival was limited to discrete areas of land not relocatable. Capitalism does the same thing, where a few have control over the means of survival for many.
I think we need to find a way to resolve our evolutionary egalitarian past and our restricted environment. I suspect that it's that conundrum that creates the conditions for a lot of unfortunate behavior.
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Quote:
Originally posted by chrisisall:Quote:My dear, you misunderstood me due to my brevity, I don't give a rat's ass about a rapist's life, but what might be a survivable rape might turn to death if a person so already sick as to commit rape feels pain in that area and decides retaliate by killing the victim.
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I'm sorry chris, but that turning a rape into murder thing... That comment kinda got to me.
Better than them getting away with it, since many of them already do that anyway.
Said I was full of spite, and I meant it. If that's the one last act of a rape victim, it would also be the one last cold comfort provided to them.
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Quote:The latter.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
CHRIS... what do you mean? That an insert could kill a man, or that the man would just get enraged and kill the woman?
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Well, if there was such a thing and it was known there was such a thing, males would change their behavior to account for it - using objects rather than body parts, using the threat of death - weapons/ superior numbers - to make the females remove such a thing. I wish it didn't seem to me that that's what would happen, but it seems obvious to me that that would be the result.
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So back to...
A Place Where Women Rule
Quote:.
UMOJA, Kenya -- Seated cross-legged on tan sisal mats in the shade, Rebecca Lolosoli, matriarch of a village for women only, took the hand of a frightened 13-year-old girl. The child was expected to wed a man nearly three times her age, and Lolosoli told her she didn't have to.
The man was Lolosoli's brother, but that didn't matter. This is a patch of Africa where women rule.
"You are a small girl. He is an old man," said Lolosoli, who gives haven to young girls running from forced marriages. "Women don't have to put up with this nonsense anymore."
Ten years ago, a group of women established the village of Umoja, which means unity in Swahili, on an unwanted field of dry grasslands. The women said they had been raped and, as a result, abandoned by their husbands, who claimed they had shamed their community.
Stung by the treatment, Lolosoli, a charismatic and self-assured woman with a crown of puffy dark hair, decided no men would be allowed to live in their circular village of mud-and-dung huts.
....
What started as a group of homeless women looking for a place of their own became a successful and happy village. About three dozen women live here and run a cultural center and camping site for tourists visiting the adjacent Samburu National Reserve. Umoja has flourished, eventually attracting so many women seeking help that they even hired men to haul firewood, traditionally women's work.
....
But the women felt empowered with the revenue from the camping site and their cultural center, where they sell crafts. They were able to send their children to school for the first time, eat well and reject male demands for their daughters' circumcision and marriage.
They became so respected that troubled women, some beaten, some trying to get divorced, started showing up in this little village in northern Kenya. Lolosoli was even invited by the United Nations to attend a recent world conference on gender empowerment in New York.
"That's when the very ugly jealous behaviors started," Lolosoli said, adding that her life was threatened by local men right before her trip to New York. "They just said, frankly, that they wanted to kill me," Lolosoli said, laughing because she thought the idea sounded overly dramatic
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/08/AR2005
070801775_2.html
Maybe there should be separation of the genders, for those who would like to live that way.
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Quote:
using objects rather than body parts, using the threat of death - weapons/ superior numbers - to make the females remove such a thing. I wish it didn't seem to me that that's what would happen, but it seems obvious to me that that would be the result.
Would they? Or would the act itself just lose its appeal?
Organic rapes are crimes of passion, but using an object, to me that seems to be about shaming a person. It's two different things. You can't cut down on the object rape, but you probably would cut down on organic rape.
If only because, imagine a guy holding a woman at knife or gun point, ordering her to remove her protection. Says she says no, because maybe she's like me and thinks the rape that would come after that would be worse than death.
Three possibilities remain for the man: kill the woman and then be forced to give up because the woman would not remove the contraption, remove the contraption himself while she's dead, or give up. And the most likely option there is: he gives up, because what's the fun for him raping a dead chick? He doesn't get the power rush of watching her be afraid, or the power rush of forcing her to submit to him.
Once the girl has protection like that, all a would be rapist has left is a bluff.
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Dissection time:
Quote:Better the rapist turns even MORE violent & kills the victim?
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Better than them getting away with it, since many of them already do that anyway.
Quote:I'm so not getting what you mean in this sentence, Byte.
If that's the one last act of a rape victim, it would also be the one last cold comfort provided to them.
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