The current wave of destigmatization around non-alcoholic drugs means that there are a lot of new avenues for using intoxicants to rape people. I feel that this is an under-discussed problem.
Also, I used to go to nightclubs a lot. It’s been a while but iirc bouncers are motivated to keep really invasive guys away from girls. In fact my experience was that bouncers were better at keeping invasive guys away from me and kicking them out than I was, because they knew that my most likely action upon having my boundaries invaded was to say nothing and leave, and as a hot girl I was a more valuable club patron than an invasive guy was.
"As a hot girl I was a more valuable club patron than an invasive guy was."
This is a good point that feels obvious in hindsight but is underdiscussed. No, I'm not going to make the claim that nightclubs are feminist utopias where women never get harassed. But even the most misogynistic club owners and employees are likely to realize that a club that develops a reputation for being a place where you can safely harass hot girls is likely to become a place where hot girls are unlikely to go. And owning/working in a club that attracts no hot girls is a really good recipe for a smoking crater where your club used to be.
Perry's apparent belief that evolutionary psychology means deterrence doesn't work for rape is very odd—shouldn't it lead us to expect deterrence ought to work quite well if we can solve the problem of identifying rapists? However, I don't think rape is unique in there being way more rape than we can ever prosecute. My understanding from reading criminologists like David Kennedy is that this is a common problem and the solution is to prioritize arresting and prosecuting the worst offenders. This deters way more crime than you can actually prosecute people for—even people who are going to keep doing some crime will want to make sure they don't wind on the police's priority list. This is challenging with rape for reasons you mention but if we magically "solved all issues related to proving beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed rape" it would be the approach I'd advocating for.
"In general, undetected-rapist studies involve asking men3 questions like “have you put your penis in a woman’s vagina without her consent by using force?” A surprising number of men respond to this question with a “yes,” but I want to highlight that undetected rapist research inherently suffers from the twin problems of:
1. People who do not admit to committing felonies on surveys.
2. People who think it is funny to claim to have committed rape when they really didn’t.
But we go to war with the data we have, so let’s see what we can find out."
On Prolific, it is easy to recruit couples. Since you say a lot of rapes happen within relationships, maybe one could use this as a convenient method to study the psychology of confirmed rapists.
One complication is that one would need to somehow guarantee the safety of the woman who reports her partner through this survey. The most obvious approach might be to just not reveal the purpose of the study to the man, but in that case that probably limits the kinds of questions one can ask.
I've read about groups of young men using rape as part of initiation for new members. I don't know if this is common, but it may mean that men are at as least as much risk of being raped as women.
This was a common if politically incorrect urban legend among a good number of students at a certain "well-known prestigious university located in a well-known high-crime neighborhood" I used to be affiliated with. I remember the occasional internet rumor of "hey, it's a local gang tradition to beat up/rape one of the Toptier University students in order to become a made member of the gang."
The most outlandish and lurid claims could easily be dismissed as edgelord/troll imaginations, but even the most politically correct among us conceded that every urban legend, however prejudiced, starts with a grain of truth.
"every urban legend, however prejudiced, starts with a grain of truth"
really? how many Men Doors Hands Hooks Car Doors were required to bring you Man Door Hand Hook Car Door? How many delicious Christian babies went into the writing of the blood libel?
stories don't need facts. they need reasons. plenty of urban legends are actively misleading as to the facts on the ground. it's easy to imagine the reasons for telling a story about the sexual menace of townies, completely independent of anything they actually do.
The "grain of truth" I was referring to wasn't some kind of offensive racist Stormfront fantasy about interracial rape epidemics, it was the realization that underserved neighborhoods with poor relationships with the police tend to have more crime, to the point that it was one of the biggest questions from prospective students/parents.
Re: "facts on the ground", I agree with you that there was never any organized epidemic of "racist fantasy gangs raping innocent nubile college students as part of sick gang initiations" (thus my pushback against the most edgelord/troll claims going around the internet), but there were a surprising number of people who knew someone who had either been catcalled, mugged, or threatened, one person I knew got sent to the hospital for a brain injury during a mugging, and even the most liberal students tried to avoid going outside of the most well-lit areas of campus after dark- things that did not happen with friends at other colleges I knew (including other urban city campuses). Hence, "grain of truth".
I agree that it is often common, and wrong, to exaggerate the menace (particularly sexual/racial menace) of marginalized people in a misguided/malicious appeal for people's need to feel safe. I also agree that some people can enjoy spreading salacious offensive rumors about rape gangs because gossip and being edgy about rape and crime is amusing to some people. That being said, due to me and my friends' lived experiences, I respectfully have to disagree with the phrase "completely independent".
I think you misunderstood me-- what I was talking about was stuff I'd heard about, say, fraternities where the new potential member was raped by the existing members as part of hazing.
Re: sending young men the message, “You would never commit rape, obviously, but those guys might commit rape. We think you can help stop them.”
I went to a large public American university 2012-2016 and at some point while I was there, they started mandatory online anti-sexual-assault training for all students and employees. This was the tactic they used. It took maybe 10-15 minutes and I had to watch some videos and then pass a short quiz. I remember one of the questions being something like, "What percent of men commit sexual assault?" with the correct answer being in the single digits. There might have been some questions about domestic violence and coercive rape in relationships.
It seemed to me (a female student) like they were trying to make SA sound like an uncool thing and to communicate that if you want to be a cool, normal person you won't rape anyone. My female friends thought it was absurd that they were framing the training that way; I think they were more concerned about people being educated about the existence of a SA epidemic on college campuses. My male friends were the sort of guys who wouldn't rape someone (as far as I could tell, and I have always been paranoid about these things) and they seemed to dismiss the training as being completely self-evident to the point of uselessness. I'm curious as to how the frat guys and sorority girls interpreted it; I didn't really interact with that crowd.
A common complaint of most people I've interacted with in places that had sexual assault trainings (college, work, etc.) is that the only people who would take the trainings to heart are the kind of people who would generally not rape people, and the kinds of people who would commit rape probably aren't going to change their behavior from a training.*
This isn't to say that some kind of presentation on the subject would have no value, if it were subtle, nuanced, and compassionate about the social pressures that people of all genders experience when interacting in co-ed spaces. (and this is coming from someone that is generally, to use a popular term, anti-woke.)
Unfortunately:
1. The people who create and host sexual assault trainings don't really have any incentive (or desire) to be subtle, nuanced, or compassionate.
2. For multiple reasons, sexual assault tends not to be something that most people have subtle, nuanced, or compassionate opinions on.
*The steelman argument here, I suppose, is that even if a would-be rapist's mental attitude towards whether rape is bad isn't changed from a training, just knowing that they're in an environment where overbearing sexual assault trainings are seen as a positive cultural value might serve as a deterrent. I don't know how to measure how much this is true, though.
For marital rape, I actually think awareness might help. You don't need a violent person to commit marital rape, just a clueless person paired with a passive one. Many things can go wrong in the valley of miscommunication and emotional insecurity, specially for inexperienced young people.
With respect to Louise Perry's suggestion to strengthen marriage norms, I wonder if she is trying to make some sort of sacrifice play. Like if ten percent of men are rapists, but society is arranged so that they only get to rape their wives and the small percentage of women deemed "whores" you could potentially limit the rate of rape victimization to maybe about one eighth of women. This could be considered an improvement if present rape victimization rates are higher than that. Now I personally would consider that to be a very bad trade off because of the substantial decrease in human liberty required to attain it, but I wonder if that's what Perry is trying to get at yet is unwilling to explicitly say.
"What would be ideal is qualitative research exploring one-offs’ narratives of their experiences, but unfortunately even men who admit to violent felonies on surveys are unlikely to admit to them face-to-face."
Surprisingly, Lisak has also been able to conduct some face-to-face research on rapists, for example in the paper "Motives and psychodynamics of self-reported, unincarcerated rapists". The detailed case studies presented in that paper are on repeat rapists, but it suggests that that it might be possible.
"If 80% of men were rapists, they wouldn’t have criminalized marital rape"
Unless, of course, they had strong reasons to expect that crime to be acknowledged and punished only selectively, when it is convenient against some low-status man who may or may not actually have raped anyone.
A serious question: why can't we, as a society, use the tiny guillotine solution and castrate ten percent of most violent/strong/otherwise-at-risk-of-becoming-rapist males (including proven rapists)? Ability to have sex and/or children is arguably a privilege (the latter might also be resolved by storing sperm), not a basic right. Also, one man's sperm can impregnate several women, so it is not even necessary that birth rates would fail significantly (except between religious fundamentalists, who would only benefit themselves and society by producing a lesser share of children). Also also, castration and the corresponding testosterone drop has an obvious positive effect on society: less aggression and status competition (for the sake of status itself rather than the goods it provides). Also also also, it would solve prison rape: inmates for violent crimes are obviously first candidates for being in the ten percent. I would frankly volunteer to join said ten percent even though I share no risk factors beyond being cis-by-default male — the benefits seem obvious and large, the downsides pretty non-existent (in particular, that would probably be cheaper than incarceration!).
Otherwise, I really enjoyed this peace and largely agree.
Men who've been castrated during or after puberty can still have sex, including rape. Wayne DuMond is one example. And if the penis was removed as well, they could commit other forms of sexual assault.
Also: As unpleasant as it is to think about, it probably isn't out of the realm of possibility that a man forcibly castrated by such a policy would have a level of resentment, bitterness, and bloodthirst that would make even Elliot Rodger and Seung-Hui Cho blush. Yes, he's not checking the “have you put your penis in a woman’s vagina without her consent by using force" box, but it wouldn't take a genius to figure out all the ways a bitter, resentful man can inflict a large amount of tragedy on society without a functioning pair of genitalia.
Sure, you can (and should) argue that the people on the guillotine list should also be put on the "not allowed to buy any weapon more dangerous than a can opener" list. Whether such a policy would be effective is an exercise left to the reader.
That's something of a society customs question. In Byzantium or pre-Communist China, where eunuchs were relatively commonplace and not really shunned, they largely didn't demonstrate such bitterness, it was sometimes even a deliberate career choice ("I can get closer to the Emperor if I guard his harem, balls are an acceptable payment"). If a castration policy is commonplace and its targets are not too stigmatized, one could expect similar attitude prevailing.
It's a little hard to not stigmatize castration when everyone knows it's done to men who are expected to be rapists. If we're going to use the Byzantine solution of making these men Secret Service agents or something, I don't think the President would like the idea of giving the most violent, rape-prone men direct access to him and his family!
It's done to men who would be better without. With right marketing, this wouldn't necessarily translate to "expected rapists" rather than "people who don't want bodily distractions".
And on the last point, given that it's currently done by, er, military dudes, I'd estimate that no, violent types are preferred. (Perhaps not specifically for bodyguard job? But Secret Services nowadays have many other jobs...)
>With right marketing, this wouldn't necessarily translate to "expected rapists" rather than "people who don't want bodily distractions".
It would be hard to do that without only castrating people who voluntarily sign up for it. And I don't know how much overlap there is between "people who want to be castrated" and "rapists." If the government castrated people against their expressed wishes while telling them it was for their own good, I think that would upset and enrage people even more than if the government was honest about the fact that it's to prevent rape.
Military dudes aren't supposed to be wantonly violent - they're supposed to be law-abiding citizens who only kill in the line of duty. Of course many soldiers are wantonly violent, but that's an undesirable quality for a Secret Service agent, and deliberately filtering for people who are expected to commit violent crimes seems like a very bad idea. Anyway, you need to go through an intensive screening process to join the Secret Service. If we made it essentially a consolation prize for castrated men, we'd get a lot of highly unqualified agents.
A couple of thoughts:
The current wave of destigmatization around non-alcoholic drugs means that there are a lot of new avenues for using intoxicants to rape people. I feel that this is an under-discussed problem.
Also, I used to go to nightclubs a lot. It’s been a while but iirc bouncers are motivated to keep really invasive guys away from girls. In fact my experience was that bouncers were better at keeping invasive guys away from me and kicking them out than I was, because they knew that my most likely action upon having my boundaries invaded was to say nothing and leave, and as a hot girl I was a more valuable club patron than an invasive guy was.
"As a hot girl I was a more valuable club patron than an invasive guy was."
This is a good point that feels obvious in hindsight but is underdiscussed. No, I'm not going to make the claim that nightclubs are feminist utopias where women never get harassed. But even the most misogynistic club owners and employees are likely to realize that a club that develops a reputation for being a place where you can safely harass hot girls is likely to become a place where hot girls are unlikely to go. And owning/working in a club that attracts no hot girls is a really good recipe for a smoking crater where your club used to be.
Perry's apparent belief that evolutionary psychology means deterrence doesn't work for rape is very odd—shouldn't it lead us to expect deterrence ought to work quite well if we can solve the problem of identifying rapists? However, I don't think rape is unique in there being way more rape than we can ever prosecute. My understanding from reading criminologists like David Kennedy is that this is a common problem and the solution is to prioritize arresting and prosecuting the worst offenders. This deters way more crime than you can actually prosecute people for—even people who are going to keep doing some crime will want to make sure they don't wind on the police's priority list. This is challenging with rape for reasons you mention but if we magically "solved all issues related to proving beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed rape" it would be the approach I'd advocating for.
"In general, undetected-rapist studies involve asking men3 questions like “have you put your penis in a woman’s vagina without her consent by using force?” A surprising number of men respond to this question with a “yes,” but I want to highlight that undetected rapist research inherently suffers from the twin problems of:
1. People who do not admit to committing felonies on surveys.
2. People who think it is funny to claim to have committed rape when they really didn’t.
But we go to war with the data we have, so let’s see what we can find out."
On Prolific, it is easy to recruit couples. Since you say a lot of rapes happen within relationships, maybe one could use this as a convenient method to study the psychology of confirmed rapists.
One complication is that one would need to somehow guarantee the safety of the woman who reports her partner through this survey. The most obvious approach might be to just not reveal the purpose of the study to the man, but in that case that probably limits the kinds of questions one can ask.
I've read about groups of young men using rape as part of initiation for new members. I don't know if this is common, but it may mean that men are at as least as much risk of being raped as women.
Depends on popularity of said groups, innit?
This was a common if politically incorrect urban legend among a good number of students at a certain "well-known prestigious university located in a well-known high-crime neighborhood" I used to be affiliated with. I remember the occasional internet rumor of "hey, it's a local gang tradition to beat up/rape one of the Toptier University students in order to become a made member of the gang."
The most outlandish and lurid claims could easily be dismissed as edgelord/troll imaginations, but even the most politically correct among us conceded that every urban legend, however prejudiced, starts with a grain of truth.
"every urban legend, however prejudiced, starts with a grain of truth"
really? how many Men Doors Hands Hooks Car Doors were required to bring you Man Door Hand Hook Car Door? How many delicious Christian babies went into the writing of the blood libel?
stories don't need facts. they need reasons. plenty of urban legends are actively misleading as to the facts on the ground. it's easy to imagine the reasons for telling a story about the sexual menace of townies, completely independent of anything they actually do.
(Edited for typos because I suck at writing.)
The "grain of truth" I was referring to wasn't some kind of offensive racist Stormfront fantasy about interracial rape epidemics, it was the realization that underserved neighborhoods with poor relationships with the police tend to have more crime, to the point that it was one of the biggest questions from prospective students/parents.
Re: "facts on the ground", I agree with you that there was never any organized epidemic of "racist fantasy gangs raping innocent nubile college students as part of sick gang initiations" (thus my pushback against the most edgelord/troll claims going around the internet), but there were a surprising number of people who knew someone who had either been catcalled, mugged, or threatened, one person I knew got sent to the hospital for a brain injury during a mugging, and even the most liberal students tried to avoid going outside of the most well-lit areas of campus after dark- things that did not happen with friends at other colleges I knew (including other urban city campuses). Hence, "grain of truth".
I agree that it is often common, and wrong, to exaggerate the menace (particularly sexual/racial menace) of marginalized people in a misguided/malicious appeal for people's need to feel safe. I also agree that some people can enjoy spreading salacious offensive rumors about rape gangs because gossip and being edgy about rape and crime is amusing to some people. That being said, due to me and my friends' lived experiences, I respectfully have to disagree with the phrase "completely independent".
I think you misunderstood me-- what I was talking about was stuff I'd heard about, say, fraternities where the new potential member was raped by the existing members as part of hazing.
Thanks for the clarification- I apologize for my heteronormative reading of the situation.
No apology needed-- I think I was pushing the frontiers of understanding.
Re: sending young men the message, “You would never commit rape, obviously, but those guys might commit rape. We think you can help stop them.”
I went to a large public American university 2012-2016 and at some point while I was there, they started mandatory online anti-sexual-assault training for all students and employees. This was the tactic they used. It took maybe 10-15 minutes and I had to watch some videos and then pass a short quiz. I remember one of the questions being something like, "What percent of men commit sexual assault?" with the correct answer being in the single digits. There might have been some questions about domestic violence and coercive rape in relationships.
It seemed to me (a female student) like they were trying to make SA sound like an uncool thing and to communicate that if you want to be a cool, normal person you won't rape anyone. My female friends thought it was absurd that they were framing the training that way; I think they were more concerned about people being educated about the existence of a SA epidemic on college campuses. My male friends were the sort of guys who wouldn't rape someone (as far as I could tell, and I have always been paranoid about these things) and they seemed to dismiss the training as being completely self-evident to the point of uselessness. I'm curious as to how the frat guys and sorority girls interpreted it; I didn't really interact with that crowd.
A common complaint of most people I've interacted with in places that had sexual assault trainings (college, work, etc.) is that the only people who would take the trainings to heart are the kind of people who would generally not rape people, and the kinds of people who would commit rape probably aren't going to change their behavior from a training.*
This isn't to say that some kind of presentation on the subject would have no value, if it were subtle, nuanced, and compassionate about the social pressures that people of all genders experience when interacting in co-ed spaces. (and this is coming from someone that is generally, to use a popular term, anti-woke.)
Unfortunately:
1. The people who create and host sexual assault trainings don't really have any incentive (or desire) to be subtle, nuanced, or compassionate.
2. For multiple reasons, sexual assault tends not to be something that most people have subtle, nuanced, or compassionate opinions on.
*The steelman argument here, I suppose, is that even if a would-be rapist's mental attitude towards whether rape is bad isn't changed from a training, just knowing that they're in an environment where overbearing sexual assault trainings are seen as a positive cultural value might serve as a deterrent. I don't know how to measure how much this is true, though.
For marital rape, I actually think awareness might help. You don't need a violent person to commit marital rape, just a clueless person paired with a passive one. Many things can go wrong in the valley of miscommunication and emotional insecurity, specially for inexperienced young people.
With respect to Louise Perry's suggestion to strengthen marriage norms, I wonder if she is trying to make some sort of sacrifice play. Like if ten percent of men are rapists, but society is arranged so that they only get to rape their wives and the small percentage of women deemed "whores" you could potentially limit the rate of rape victimization to maybe about one eighth of women. This could be considered an improvement if present rape victimization rates are higher than that. Now I personally would consider that to be a very bad trade off because of the substantial decrease in human liberty required to attain it, but I wonder if that's what Perry is trying to get at yet is unwilling to explicitly say.
It seems to me at least some young women are unaware that rape can happen to them. This seems like a necessary first step.
Sex clubs definitely aren't automatically safe: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/nyregion/hacienda-sex-club-consent.html?te=1&nl=from-the-times&emc=edit_ufn_20240326
"What would be ideal is qualitative research exploring one-offs’ narratives of their experiences, but unfortunately even men who admit to violent felonies on surveys are unlikely to admit to them face-to-face."
Surprisingly, Lisak has also been able to conduct some face-to-face research on rapists, for example in the paper "Motives and psychodynamics of self-reported, unincarcerated rapists". The detailed case studies presented in that paper are on repeat rapists, but it suggests that that it might be possible.
"If 80% of men were rapists, they wouldn’t have criminalized marital rape"
Unless, of course, they had strong reasons to expect that crime to be acknowledged and punished only selectively, when it is convenient against some low-status man who may or may not actually have raped anyone.
A serious question: why can't we, as a society, use the tiny guillotine solution and castrate ten percent of most violent/strong/otherwise-at-risk-of-becoming-rapist males (including proven rapists)? Ability to have sex and/or children is arguably a privilege (the latter might also be resolved by storing sperm), not a basic right. Also, one man's sperm can impregnate several women, so it is not even necessary that birth rates would fail significantly (except between religious fundamentalists, who would only benefit themselves and society by producing a lesser share of children). Also also, castration and the corresponding testosterone drop has an obvious positive effect on society: less aggression and status competition (for the sake of status itself rather than the goods it provides). Also also also, it would solve prison rape: inmates for violent crimes are obviously first candidates for being in the ten percent. I would frankly volunteer to join said ten percent even though I share no risk factors beyond being cis-by-default male — the benefits seem obvious and large, the downsides pretty non-existent (in particular, that would probably be cheaper than incarceration!).
Otherwise, I really enjoyed this peace and largely agree.
Men who've been castrated during or after puberty can still have sex, including rape. Wayne DuMond is one example. And if the penis was removed as well, they could commit other forms of sexual assault.
Also: As unpleasant as it is to think about, it probably isn't out of the realm of possibility that a man forcibly castrated by such a policy would have a level of resentment, bitterness, and bloodthirst that would make even Elliot Rodger and Seung-Hui Cho blush. Yes, he's not checking the “have you put your penis in a woman’s vagina without her consent by using force" box, but it wouldn't take a genius to figure out all the ways a bitter, resentful man can inflict a large amount of tragedy on society without a functioning pair of genitalia.
Sure, you can (and should) argue that the people on the guillotine list should also be put on the "not allowed to buy any weapon more dangerous than a can opener" list. Whether such a policy would be effective is an exercise left to the reader.
That's something of a society customs question. In Byzantium or pre-Communist China, where eunuchs were relatively commonplace and not really shunned, they largely didn't demonstrate such bitterness, it was sometimes even a deliberate career choice ("I can get closer to the Emperor if I guard his harem, balls are an acceptable payment"). If a castration policy is commonplace and its targets are not too stigmatized, one could expect similar attitude prevailing.
It's a little hard to not stigmatize castration when everyone knows it's done to men who are expected to be rapists. If we're going to use the Byzantine solution of making these men Secret Service agents or something, I don't think the President would like the idea of giving the most violent, rape-prone men direct access to him and his family!
It's done to men who would be better without. With right marketing, this wouldn't necessarily translate to "expected rapists" rather than "people who don't want bodily distractions".
And on the last point, given that it's currently done by, er, military dudes, I'd estimate that no, violent types are preferred. (Perhaps not specifically for bodyguard job? But Secret Services nowadays have many other jobs...)
>With right marketing, this wouldn't necessarily translate to "expected rapists" rather than "people who don't want bodily distractions".
It would be hard to do that without only castrating people who voluntarily sign up for it. And I don't know how much overlap there is between "people who want to be castrated" and "rapists." If the government castrated people against their expressed wishes while telling them it was for their own good, I think that would upset and enrage people even more than if the government was honest about the fact that it's to prevent rape.
Military dudes aren't supposed to be wantonly violent - they're supposed to be law-abiding citizens who only kill in the line of duty. Of course many soldiers are wantonly violent, but that's an undesirable quality for a Secret Service agent, and deliberately filtering for people who are expected to commit violent crimes seems like a very bad idea. Anyway, you need to go through an intensive screening process to join the Secret Service. If we made it essentially a consolation prize for castrated men, we'd get a lot of highly unqualified agents.
Yesn't. They technically can but the drive is much reduced. A solution doesn't need to be 100% effective to be, well, effective.