Sorry if this is "hijacking the thread".
Zoning Goddess said:
OT: I'm all for the death penalty for rape. Date rape may be dicey, but violent, beat-the-crap out of the victim rape is not. It ruins lives, it takes every shred of self-esteem away from the victim, whether the victim is male or female.
ZG, I used to feel the exact same way. Then I had a baby boy. I felt strongly that if I did not change deeply, he would have no hope of growing up psychologically healthy. I re-entered therapy and began a long, strange journey. Sexual assault can be recovered from. To a greater degree than most people seem to realize. I have guided a few women in that journey. And I no longer see myself as defined by what "they" did to me. I am defined by what I choose to do with my life's experiences. To quote Aldous Huxley: "Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you."
Violent, beat the crap out of the victim rape is a situation where the outdated laws of Georgia get used to give someone 128 counts of this, that, and the other. I think that is a societally healthier way to handle such things. The vast majority of rapes do not fall in that category. When they do studies, what they find is that if you ask a room full of women how many of them have been "raped", half or less will raise their hand. If you ask "How many of you have had sex against your will, after saying 'no'?", something like 90% raise their hands. But I have two sons. So, the other side of the coin is never far from my mind. I know of cases where women threatened to “scream rape” if _______(fill in the blank).
Sexual ethics are incredibly tough and complex issues. I do not believe it benefits women as individuals or the "women's lib" movement or society to take an extremist position on such matters. Because of my own personal life’s journey, I simply can't advocate the death penalty for “rape”. It is antithetical to all that I have learned about how one recovers fully. But I also believe that the kind of assault you describe goes way beyond mere “rape” and can be handled based on the degree of violence involved and not specifically that it revolved around a lack of sexual consent (the cornerstone of the definition of rape).
But there is this fact too: countries that torture prisoners universally assault the genitals of the person. To quote the blind priest from the Kung Fu tv show: “The tongue that laughs also screams.” The ability to experience great pain and great pleasure are inseparable – and we all contain those two extremes within our sex, physically and psychologically.
In other words: what you describe is rarely about “sex” per se.
When I was in therapy, I often shared my thoughts and therapeutic process with a close friend. At about the time I stopped doing therapy, she filed for divorce. Her estranged husband kidnapped, choked, tortured, beat, and raped her for 4 hours for the crime of leaving him (and had bought a gun, stalked her with every intent to kill her, etc). When I returned from Germany, where I had been while in therapy and where I still was when she was assaulted, I told her that I felt bad for “not being there” for her in her hour of need. I felt that I had failed her. Her reply to me was “But you WERE there: Even while he was beating and raping me, because of the things you had shared with me during therapy, I knew that it didn’t matter if it was his penis or his fist that hurt me. It was not about sex. It was about hurting me.”
The night of the attack, she slept in her boyfriend’s bed, at his home. They very gently made love the next day, with her bruised from head to toe and looking like hell. They later married. Her sex life hardly missed a beat – in spite of the fact that she was so traumatized that she experienced Post Traumatic Shock – flashbacks, the whole nine yards. She refers to the assault as “I was murdered”. And she genuinely isn’t the same person she used to be. It did, in a very real way, utterly destroy her. But she knew it was not about “sex” and that protected her in some fundamental way.
She taught me that I am not defined by what men did to me, I am defined by what I do with my life. I am not a victim. I am a shield. And innocent men need to be shielded as well, from the bottomless rage of women who have been put through hell at the hands of some monster who just happened to be male. Decent men played a very big role in my journey of healing. Decent men do not need to live with the terror that some misunderstanding or unjust accusation might cost them their life because they were born the wrong gender to merit protection under the law. Women are not going to become safer by making this world less civilized generally.
The men who healed me took serious risks to do so, if only because I was filled with so much rage that I was genuinely a dangerous person to get close to. I can only assume that it would have been that much harder to find men to help me heal in a climate of general terror where simply having the equipment to commit rape is potentially life-threatening. If attempts are ever made to pass such a law, I might have to reverse my “I am not interested in the News or Politics” laissez-faire attitude and go to “war” against it.
Just my view.
