31 thoughts on “On Rapists Who Have No Idea That Rape Is Wrong”

1. I’ve encountered people doing the “people do evil for reasons/don’t think of themselves as evil, so they/their actions/their beliefs aren’t evil” before, talking about an extreme objectivist who literally believes it’s better for poor people to die than for her to experience the “robbery” of taxes. It’s a bizarre and frustrating belief. x.x;

2. This speaks exactly to my experience with rape. In my case it was a boyfriend who, nearly a decade later, still claims it was love.

   I think some of the broken logic comes out of selfishness and an exception-to-the-rule attitude: “Well, usually it’s evil when people do this thing…. but I have a REALLY GOOD reason for doing it/ I REALLY WANT to do it/ I DESERVE to do it because LIFE IS UNFAIR because REASONS, so it’s not wrong for me to do it.”

3. Pennyposh — And that I think gets right to the heart of rapist psychology: they will find any reasons to put their wants above your basic needs.

   To me, this is obviously rape. If you drug someone / wait until someone is drugged for the explicit purposes over ignoring their stated non-consent to sex, that’s rape. There’s not a lot of gray area there.

4. I think this is a really good post, but I have a request that I think will make it better. I think it’s really important in the blogosphere that we strive to make correct attributions wherever possible to ensure that people are credited for their ideas, especially when those people are speaking from a position of oppression and are much more likely to have their words taken and co-opted. Credit and pageviews are the social (and sometimes literal) currency of blogging (especially for anyone who is trying to make a living from their blog) and failure to attribute quotes and provide link-backs is a really pernicious bad habit all over the blogosphere that has real consequences for bloggers. The more often a quote is reblogged or cited without attribution, the less likely it is that the next person will know who to attribute it to, eventually watering down the link so much that the original author is erased.

   So in that spirit, I want to point out that, “Intent! It’s fucking magic!”, is a phrase first coined (and fantastically explained) by blogger and trans activist Kinsey Hope under the name GenderBitch, in her post of the same name.

   For what happened to your friend, that very much sounds like rape to me as well, and I totally agree that the failure of our social discourse to “count” incidents like this as rape doesn’t make them any less evil or hurtful.

5. Benlehman – I totally agree. And it’s a form of rape that doesn’t get talked about very much, either: a woman assaulting a man, a friend assaulting another friend.

   I applaud Ozy for not equivocating on the matter of the woman’s guilt. It doesn’t matter how nice or good someone is, it doesn’t matter if they think they did wrong or not (I have a transcript of a conversation between myself and my abuser that highlights this rather nicely); if it looks like sex without consent, and sounds like sex without consent, then it’s rape. A person who commits rape is a rapist. End of story.

6. Jadey: Thank you for pointing that out! I’ll edit the post and try to remember to attribute memes to their originator in the future.

7. A lot of times table-turning stories can be distracting. In this case I think it’s illuminating. None of the routine gendered excuses work in this case (e.g. boys will be boys, boys have “needs,” girls can have sex “any time,” sober girls would “never say yes”) because the perpetrator is a woman. Instead it’s just clear that she intentionally “took” this guy sexually against his well-known wishes.

   And if the outlines of are clear when all the excuses are stripped away it’s a lot harder to deny in other cases where the camouflage of excuses are thrown back up again.

   Nice to see you in your own blog again, Oz.

   figleaf

8. I think that there are plenty of excuses that work in this case “Boys always want it,” “she did him a favor,” “hey, score you got laid,” “if you take X you should expect that to happen,” etc.

   Male rape survivors hear this all the time. At least, I do, before I mention that I was 4.

9. Socrates admonished us that no one knowingly does evil. Everyone has a reason for what they do, even if it’s a ridiculous, selfish reason. Our actions seem like a good idea at the time. Only in retrospect do we realize we were wrong. We all do this, so some measure of empathy is in order even for those who hurt others.

   But this doesn’t mean we should just say, “Oh, your heart was in the right place,” and let shit slide. Condemnation is a powerful social tool to change people’s behaviors. People who are shamed or otherwise punished for their actions are more likely to avoid doing the same thing in the future, especially if they can see in retrospect why their actions were wrong.

   Furthermore, when society makes a Big Deal™ about things like the importance of consent, we’re less likely to think our own reasons make our actions okay. The more we talk about this, the more it sticks in people’s brains: “Having sex with someone without their explicit consent is never okay! No, not even then.”

10. This is a bad comparison, but I can’t help thinking of this, this, and even this.

    Basically, what it comes down to is that “rapist” is pretty much the worst thing you can call a person. If you try to imagine a “rapist”, you think of someone who has no redeeming characteristics whatsoever: the kind of person who would be a villain in a horror movie, who did something terrible to someone and left them with psychological scars that will never heal, who deserves to rot in jail and have all other kinds of horrible things happen to them. The kind of person even other villains can’t stand.

    Most people who do bad things aren’t evil reptilian kitten eaters from another planet. They’re people. Many of them are even, most of the time, very nice and friendly people. When people who seem good do bad things, it’s usually not because they were secretly evil all along. And, because they’re people, they’re not likely to think of themselves and their friends as being one of those really bad people who deserve to rot in jail and have all other kinds of horrible things happen to them. They think “What I/we/they are doing can’t really be hurting someone in the way that I’ve been told rape hurts people.” (And, sometimes, people do indeed end up mostly unaffected by what they experience.)

    It is, in fact, possible to have been a “nice guy” or “nice girl” and still rape someone; I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out that many rapes actually are committed by people that, if you knew everything about them except for the fact that they raped someone, you would have no reason to consider them any more monstrous than anyone else. If you think that everyone is either a “good person” or a “rapist”, then anything that indicates that a person belongs to the “good person” category is also evidence that they’re not a rapist – so if you hear that someone who seems like a good person raped someone, you’re more likely to think that it couldn’t have happened. You start thinking things like “Good people don’t rape; X is a good person, therefore what happened couldn’t have been rape and the so-called victim is just overreacting.”

    And the fact that “good people” who end up doing bad things can – often quite truthfully! – say that they had “good intentions” also doesn’t have to matter. In law and in ethics, the answer to “I didn’t intend to hurt somebody, therefore I shouldn’t be blamed” is “Well, you did something that you knew, or should have known, was likely to hurt somebody. You were negligent: you are blameworthy not because you had bad intentions, but that you lacked the good intentions that people ought to have – the intention to avoid hurting people by accident.” And taking stupid risks with others’ well-being is still wrong even when nobody actually gets hurt – after all, we still arrest drunk drivers who don’t actually crash their cars, consider “attempted” murder a crime, and so on. We would indeed be right to condemn the girl in this story for being a rapist, regardless of what she thought she was doing at the time.

    Please, though, don’t ask me what we should do to the girl in the story. Maybe the utility-maximizing thing to do is merely to explain to her why what she did was wrong, have her apologize, and let her go on with her life. Maybe she should be prosecuted, convicted, and put in jail to serve as an example to others and to prevent her from victimizing anyone else. Maybe there’s something else that should happen which I haven’t thought of yet. I have strong opinions about a lot of things, and some of them are even well-informed opinions, but when it comes to this one, I’m totally at a loss.

11. Doug: I think it is important to acknowledge that there are also a lot of rapists who are narcissists, manipulators, and unwilling / unable to perform the self-reflection necessary to evaluate their actions (let alone themselves) as “good” or “bad.”

    Not everyone is well-intentioned but led astray. This is a comforting thing to think — “oh all people are ultimately good” — because then we don’t have to face the question of human evil. But it’s not true. Some people are just selfish or cruel.

    The people who raped me were well aware that what they were doing was wrong. They just did it anyway because they (correctly) thought that they could get away with it, and it made them feel good. They were charismatic enough to escape the social consequences, adept at denial and victim blaming, and good at discrediting, alienating, and undermining their victims.

12. (I really hope I didn’t just say something really stupid somewhere in that last post.)

13. Yeah. I think there’s a difference between “Hey man! It was totally not meant that way so that makes it okay!” and “Hey man! It was totally not meant that way but holy crap look at what you did this is horrible and does not excuse your actions but let’s find out how the hell something like that could have happened when you really thought what you were doing was actually not what you were doing at all! In other words, let’s explore the cultural background and your own background that can lead to (relatively) good people to do very, very bad things indeed.”
    There is a huge taboo on rape, because it’s such an unbelievably sensitive subject, which is very understandable. But honestly.. even when I was a child I could understand that people who are in almost all respects good people could do bad deeds like theft, harming someone or even murder. I can still understand that. Even with rape.
    I think it’s incredibly unhealthy for a debating environment to have a certain subject in which you plug your ears and go “I don’t care what happened, if they did this they’re evil for all eternity and deserve to be branded this for ever”. It doesn’t work that way. People don’t work that way. People are human. And if you think that every person in the history of ever who does a bad thing was an evil person and others are the good ones, you aren’t only quite naive, but also creating a very dangerous environment in which you ignore the fact that there are bad things hidden in any of us, and everyone should be informed of the fact that evil actions aren’t only done by mythological horrible people, but by anyone. For any reason. It’s a scary thought, and it’s always easier to spererate and push away evildoers as something other than yourself, but you are simply ignoring the problem. And you are killing a healthy and very necessary attempt at understanding.

14. @Doug, I think we also need to start differentiating more between “charming” and “good” in our culture. Someone can be nice and friendly and tell good jokes, and be a rapist. Hell, someone can write the sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and be a slaveholder who allows his foreman to beat small children for inexact work in his nail factories. I don’t really care very much about distinguishing whether the girl in Ozy’s story, or Thomas Jefferson, are “good people” or not. I do think they should both be held to account.

15. Hats off to Josh, above. He nails the intention/actuality dynamic: comic-book villain wannabes notwithstanding, people who do evil rarely imagine themselves doing evil.

    figleaf

16. I agree, and I appreciate the female rapist.

    The myth that rapists and paedophiles are monsters in every way makes it harder for people to believe that their friend is a rapist or paedophile. This allows rapists to get away with rape.

    It’s like she can’t be a rapist, she’s my friend. Really she is a rapist and your friend.

17. @f.:

    Indeed, which is why I described the person as “no worse than anyone else”. Consider the following “crimes” that most people in the U.S. can be said to be guilty of:

    Eating factory farmed meat.
    Spending money on luxuries while people in other countries die of poverty-related causes.

    I could go on, but I’ll just link to this and leave it at that.

18. Not-So-Good Men Project & Enabling Rapists « Caught in the Cogs

19. I just realized that I should probably have a warning on that “factory farmed meat” link. It’s not pretty.

20. I’m very uncomfortable with those posts about victims who aren’t much affected by their rape, because they always go beyond “sometimes it doesn’t traumatize people”. There always are undertones of “It doesn’t have to be traumatizing, so if it is, it’s your fault for letting it. You must be weak or indoctrinated by feminists/the penis-obsessed patriarchy.”

    Ey, I think you’re overreaching. People are all human and when they do evil things they have reasons, but not any evil thing can be done by anyone by any reason.Most people would be Nazis if they had been born in Germany in the 1920s, but there are no possible circumstances that can turn most modern non-Nazis into Nazis.

    People do commit rape due to complex cultural factors, some of which affect everyone and some of which were particularly bad for them. People don’t commit rape because cultural factors jump out of the bushes, temporarily erase their moral compass, then vanish with no trace. About half of rapists rape repeatedly.

21. Leo: Crap, does my post give that impression? I mean, first, it’s absolutely evil to police how people respond to a traumatizing event and, second, my friend was, in fact, affected by his rape. (Fuck yeah depression. :/)

22. Ozy: No, I didn’t mean your post. I was referring to the posts Doug S linked, especially Live Through This.

23. Leo — Yes.

    Doug — No. You’re over-reaching. See Leo.

    There is a difference between crimes of omission and commission.

    That you are not donating all your time and money to RAINN does mean that certain rapes that could be prevented occur, and that certain victims that seek help won’t get it. It doesn’t make you morally equivalent to a rapist, though. Because you’re not committing an offense, you’re just not doing everything you can to stop it.

    I believe that sins of omission are still sins, and we need to fight them. But you’re doing that argument no favors when you thoughtlessly equate the two.

24. “I don’t really care very much about distinguishing whether the girl in Ozy’s story, or Thomas Jefferson, are “good people” or not.” -f.
    ^ this. This is the thing I’ve seen muddling everything up online the past couple of weeks. Everyone seems to agree that someone does both X and Y in varying quantities, and then everything falls apart when they start quibbling about whether that person should be called an Xer or a Yer or something else entirely. The question of whether someone can be called a “good person” or not is about as relevant as asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What’s important is looking at their actions, and what those actions mean for everyone involved.

    Also, The Gift of Fear (Gavin de Becker) has a lot of useful things to say on the difference between “charming” and “nice” and the importance of not conflating the two.

25. The store you are talking about at the end of the piece, ozy, in my view is the inability/unwillingness of many people to distinguish the following three concepts.
    1) Cause
    2) Reason
    3) Excuse
    and it’s the same store that victim-blaming comes from. Also, they like to sell the accusation that acknowledging that there is anything that can be done to prevent a crime is equivalent to victim-blaming.

    It’s conflation of these three terms that caused me to fail to understand my teachers as a child. To this day, I feel the need, if I do something wrong, to explain myself even when I agree that the explanation does not reduce my culpability, but people always take this as “making excuses” because they can’t see that I might be trying to give reasons for my action (or even causes of it) rather than trying to excuse that same action.

    We can condemn actions (and even people) while still searching for causes for those actions, but this is also something that the culture (especially the judicial system) needs to learn, in part because in the not-too-distant future we will be discovering causes and reasons for many crimes, but we will still need to hold people accountable for their actions.

26. I just wonder if, say, in Ozy’s story it had been one of the guy’s male friends who decided he needed sex, whether there would be all this confusion over intent or whatnot. That’s sort of my very heterocentric shortcut when it comes to thinking about sex and consent. “Oh, so you thought you could stick your dick in a sleeping woman who had flirted with you earlier that evening? Would it be ok if a guy you’d been joking around with stuck his dick in your butt while you were sleeping?” Obviously this sort of trick doesn’t apply to bisexuals, but it still seems to have some limited utility.

27. @Doug, “no worse than anyone else” is, on the other hand, a ridiculous thing to say. She is a person who’s done a specific bad thing to someone whose trust and friendship she betrayed – a really bad thing. “Well, but your clothes are made in sweatshops and you eat factory meat!” is a weak, weak tu quoque fallacy.

    Again, I think we should do less adjudication of whether or not someone is A Bad Person, but hold everyone to account.

28. I’ve been wondering for days if I should comment here. Your post made me realize something odd. Despite being a technical virgin and having been in situations like your friend, somehow I keep finding myself looking for excuses for her. I’m apparently so afraid of being in her situation, or being accused of rape, that I keep identifying with the perpetrator’s position even though I have been and am more likely to be in the position of your friend (so far all women have respected my ‘no’, in similar circumstances, though). So I’m wondering why I’m so focused on that fear when I have no real reason to identify with her and if there may not be a more important point about contemporary discussions of masculinity and rape culture wrapped up in that fear.

29. @Mike: And it makes it impossible to even conceive of good pedophiles out there who actually have no intention of doing anything to real children and never do. Or people involved in fully consensual rape play because they have a fetish for violent sex. Because there can’t possibly be a single person out there with a rapey fetish that has no desire to actually harm someone. Being a “-phile” just means you have a fetish; it says nothing about your actions.

30. » The Good Men Project: How Not to Have a Conversation about What It Means to Be a Good Man – Part 1 Richard Jeffrey Newman

31. Hitler wasn’t evil. he was just misunderstood