In Interviews With 122 Rapists, Student Pursues Not-So-Simple Question: Why?

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

About 27 years ago I was sharing a house and a few of us were watching this movie on TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(1988_film)

It was a movie about a gang rape and rape culture in a remote Australian town.

One of the guys had just recently moved to the city from a country town. I said something about how I knew people from towns like that and he started telling me how that sort of thing went on a lot where he was from..... but it wasn't a big deal like how they made it out to be in the movie. In fact it was just a bit of fun, the girls got that and they didn't make a big deal out of it. And he said that, even if the girl did make a big deal out of it and you ended up in court, you just got every one of your mates to stand up in court and lie under oath that they had had consensual sex with her in the past week and that was enough to cast doubt on the girl's character and get you off. I think he thought I'd be impressed with his knowledge of how to rape girls and get away with it. I expressed my disgust with what he was saying but he just kind of looked at me like I was some kind of subjugated weirdo.

I've encountered several guys who claimed that women enjoy being raped and that if she went to the police it meant that you were a dud shag. Most guys don't think like that, but a small proportion do, and these were all Australian guys.

I've known one foreigner who had no concept of things like consent. He admitted that he had no idea of how to act around women because he grew up never seeing a girl's face and never once talking to a girl. But one thing he knew for sure was that if a woman went to a man's room, everyone would know that she only went there for one thing and that nobody would believe her if she said that the man forced himself on her. He literally just laughed at me when I tried to explain that he still needed her consent. He did try to rape at least one girl that I knew, who believed him when he asked her to come to his room to talk (I only found out about this a year later). He was only a small man and she was quite strong. He was constantly inviting girls to his room or trying to invite himself to theirs. He also used to walk around with his jacket draped over his arm so that he could sneakily grope girls with his hidden hand. I tried to explain the concept of consent to this guy, and how much trouble he was likely to get into, but he just had no idea. He reckoned that because he saw men touching women in the street that it was therefore okay for him to do it. That because other men fucked women they weren't married to, it was okay for him to fuck women he wasn't married to.

I'm not saying that any of these attitudes are common or universal. But I have personally encountered them. I know that there are guys out there who really do think like this, and probably a lot worse.

[Al Swearegen]

About 27 years ago I was sharing a house and a few of us were watching this movie on TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_(1988_film)

It was a movie about a gang rape and rape culture in a remote Australian town.

One of the guys had just recently moved to the city from a country town. I said something about how I knew people from towns like that and he started telling me how that sort of thing went on a lot where he was from..... but it wasn't a big deal like how they made it out to be in the movie. In fact it was just a bit of fun, the girls got that and they didn't make a big deal out of it. And he said that, even if the girl did make a big deal out of it and you ended up in court, you just got every one of your mates to stand up in court and lie under oath that they had had consensual sex with her in the past week and that was enough to cast doubt on the girl's character and get you off. I think he thought I'd be impressed with his knowledge of how to rape girls and get away with it. I expressed my disgust with what he was saying but he just kind of looked at me like I was some kind of subjugated weirdo.

I've encountered several guys who claimed that women enjoy being raped and that if she went to the police it meant that you were a dud shag. Most guys don't think like that, but a small proportion do, and these were all Australian guys.

I've known one foreigner who had no concept of things like consent. He admitted that he had no idea of how to act around women because he grew up never seeing a girl's face and never once talking to a girl. But one thing he knew for sure was that if a woman went to a man's room, everyone would know that she only went there for one thing and that nobody would believe her if she said that the man forced himself on her. He literally just laughed at me when I tried to explain that he still needed her consent. He did try to rape at least one girl that I knew, who believed him when he asked her to come to his room to talk (I only found out about this a year later). He was only a small man and she was quite strong. He was constantly inviting girls to his room or trying to invite himself to theirs. He also used to walk around with his jacket draped over his arm so that he could sneakily grope girls with his hidden hand. I tried to explain the concept of consent to this guy, and how much trouble he was likely to get into, but he just had no idea. He reckoned that because he saw men touching women in the street that it was therefore okay for him to do it. That because other men fucked women they weren't married to, it was okay for him to fuck women he wasn't married to.

I'm not saying that any of these attitudes are common or universal. But I have personally encountered them. I know that there are guys out there who really do think like this, and probably a lot worse.

My family and most of my mates from old were all from the country in Australia and this does not purport their views. How do I know this? Because I have had years (sometimes decades) long relationships with them and being young males these subjects around sex and women and such do come up.

So again, it does not seem to be particularly a male thing, nor a country thing, nor an Australian thing, nor an education thing.

It seems to me a bad values kind of thing. It is certainly not saying that such people do NOT exist nor that rapists are non-existent creatures nor that injustice does not happen, but then the world and people generally are imperfect. We say how can things like the terrorist attacks around the world exist? Conmen stealing money from elderly people exist? Child grooming gangs exist? The Rosemary and Fred Wests of the world exist? People like that Josef Fritzl exist? The Boko haram girls being kidnapped? Horror DOES exist in the world and man's inhumanity to man certainly DOES exist.

But that hardly sells any large point I don't believe.

[Jack]

Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.

The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.

The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?

No. I just don't have very sophisticated paintbox skills. Just trying to suggest that it's a bell curve in both cases.

[Al Swearegen]

Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left.

The length of the bottom suggests your assessment is that neither males nor females align anywhere near the far right side of deeply intimate. Even if the bottom line were to begin with the first point of blue, and end with the last point of pink, it still concludes no males at all align to the far right of deeply intimate, and no females at all align to the far left of no intimacy. Is that the intended visual?

No. I just don't have very sophisticated paintbox skills. Just trying to suggest that it's a bell curve in both cases.

I just saw boobs

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Okay, fixed it for Jack.

And a little extra for Al as well, because I'm an inclusive kind of guy.

[Gopher Gary]

In terms of whether sexual intercourse is a deeply intimate act for men or just a physical release of some sort, I would imagine the range of emotions involved for men is a bell curve with "deeply intimate" to the right and "not intimate" to the left. If you drew the same bell curve for women then you'd probably see a similar shaped bell curve to the right.

I've attached a rough hand-drawn example of what it might look like. Remember that "deeply intimate" is to the right and "not intimate" is to the left. There is probably a lot more overlap than I've allowed for. But it kind of covers Walkie's example of men saying that they find sex about as intimate as blowing their nose, and the experiences of some of us men who find sex a deeply intimate experience.

Here. I made a venn diagram that should clear this up. 

[Walkie]

I found Silly Walk's reminiscences interesting and informative  Thanks .

I know it's onl;y anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to cultural influences , anecdotes can winklle out what's really going on a damned sight better than statistics can. There are too many different ways to interpret statistics .

Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?  But, then, Al's offering of a single, equally anecdotal counter-example  does not in any way disprove the "rape culture " theory.  You'd surely expect to find any number of individuals and families who buck any given trend.

In Laurie Lee's autobiographical work "Cider with Rosie" he describes how, as an adolescent,  he and his mates made a half-assed plan (whicjh they never actually went  through with) to waylay a mentallly challenged local girl and gang rape her.  From a modern perspective, it's shocking.  Some people also find Lee's understated treatment of the subject shocking.  There's a sort of "Boys will be boys" tone to it  that suggests that this kind of thing really was pretty normal in rural England, back in his day.

I'm thinking that kids who grow up in a rural enviromnent (like Lee and his friends) are more likely to have a sort of matter-of-fact c attitude to sex, because  they'll all-too-likely have got their sex education from watching farm animals mating.  So they won't see it as any big deal.  That matches with my own  (limited) experience of country people. I found a really startling alteration in attitudes to sex when I went to stay in a hamlet in rural Herefordshire for a little while.  I mean, for example,  it was clear that people I met there (whilst not approving of paedopholia)   did not  see  paeophilia as a serious crime that ought to be reported .  (One guy told me about  a man who drove along thev main road near the village, picking young children  up and paying tjhem to masturbate him. He's been one of those kids.  The kids  appreciated the chance to earn easy money.   When I questioned to guy about the ethics of that , he shrugged and said the guy was harmless, in view. "He didn't force us. I felt sorry for him," he said. "I think he did it becuse he was  lonely".  The difference is that  whilst the same sort of thing surely happened in the city too, it would never be talked about so openly and so casually.)

Similarly, when I when a child, sex education in English schools was presented as a purely biological thing (straight after the life cycle of the frog, usually  ) .  None of the sociological nor emotional aspects were discussed at all.  If you had any feelings on the issue (and who woudn't ? upon discovering that their parents had  - immensely hypocritically- done very rude  things, involving unmentionalble body parts? and that onself was the outcome of that act ?) then you just had to work through those feelings for yourself.   One had the impression that feelings just didn't come into it at all.  Then the "permissive society " came along and had the effect of heightening one's guilt about having any feelings about sex (which  guilt was already fighting with the more-traditional guilt about sexual desire)  especially girly-type feelings such as love and affection.

For myself, as an adolescent girl in the seventies, I was much more embarassed about the significance my mind attached to the sex act and by own viginity (for as long as  it lasted) than I was about he act itself.  And that was entirely  due to cultural influences: what I saw on TV,  and read in books and newspapers. And being autistic didn't help, there.  It meant that I was much more exposed to - and influenced by-  exaggerated media reports  than I was to the complex, human perspectives of the people  immediately  around me (who'd mostly  already earned my contempt  for their narrow-mindedness). And inasmuch as I grasped  that most of the people around me hadn't "moved with the times " near as much as the media suggested, I just put that down to them being dinosaurs.

I can easily imagine all kinds of individual attitudes to sex arising out of that particular cauldron of social forces, depending on gender, upbringing,  enviroment, personality,  etc.  But you couldn't claim that anbody's attitudes were unnifluenced by societal norms-  or that societal norms no longer existed, just that those norms were in a state of flux, and we were  all receiving a  a bunch of confusing mixed mes
sages. There was a rendency towards casting off   ( or rather repressing )  the "sexual hang-ups" of previous generations, together with a  (less obvious) move towards " maculinising" sex .
It was a bloody hard time to be a girl.  On the one hand , you got social disapprobation for  being "frigid" , or old-fashioioned, iif you didn't  put out; and on the other hand, the double-standards that would put  a girl down as a "whore" for behaving in ways that were totally acceptable for boys (and always had  been ) were still alive and kicking.  You couldn't do right.

What I see happening nowadays , is a bit of  re-balancing of sexual mores going on.  I mean, it's now totally OK to have emotional  feelings about sex , especially if somebody groped you without your consent....and all the lecherous gropers of the past  3-4 decades are winding up in court, FFS  (or all the ones who wound up famous, at least).   Now , I loathe that kind of behavious as much as anybody, but it was so damned common in my youth (and I think it was probably always common) that I fel it's unfair to make examples of a few individuals like that.

For my own part, when I've taken exception to a guy groping me, I've told him very fi rmly to stop. And if that didn't work, I slapped him in the face.  And yeah,  I  can see that some girls (and boys) wouldn't be so assertive . Some girls (and boys)  might freeze and wind up being effectively  raped.  And  I can also see  that it's ugly behaviout that ought to be stopped a root...if possible.  But it doesn't follow that all those guys are evil . Or let's say, if they are,  then we might as well top ourselves, because there's no escaping such widespread evil any other way.

So i'm very  much with Al, in wanting to  firm up the definitions of "rape" and  "sexual assualt" to stop this thing becoming a witch-hunt. But i find this idea that societal forces don't come into this at all to be laughable.  If different cultures don't have different rate -rapes I'll be bloody amazed. But the evidence suggests that they do. And what the heck is your problem with that, Al?

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? 

There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.

A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.

But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.

Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.

[Al Swearegen]

Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? 

There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.

A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.

But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.

Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.

Not entirely right nor entirely wrong.

There is a very worrying trend to call things "other than rape", rape. US colleges are very much bastions of Progressive and Feminist thought and enthusiastically embrace the belief females at all costs.
No one wants rapists to get away with rape but taking away due process and/or believing one party over another on basis of gender is not that great either.
So NO, you do NOT out of hand become a supporter of rape culture or a victim blamer IF the victim has not been proven. Up until then you are simply a reasonable and moral human being waiting for all the facts and passing judgment accordingly.
Shock horror, some males do rape and shock horror some girls do lie about being raped.

I think it is crazy that the high incidences of rape have been compared by some as akin to the rape statistics in the Congo during time of war where rape is used as an instrument of war to dehumanise the enemy. It is insulting. It would be similarly as insulting to pretend that just because an accused rapist is in a US college, that he could not have raped someone. Rape does and has and will continue to happen in US colleges. The truth is like most things somewhere inbetween. There will be some guys who DO rape and there will be some women who will lie about it. There will also be a lot of women who do not report it. None of us for those very reasons know what the TRUE statistics ion rape there or anywhere else is BUT it is absolutely reasonable to say that rape is abhorrent and ought not occur and rapists are monsters.

[Walkie]

Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ? 

There is a major problem at US colleges with what could be described as a rape culture, or rape sub-culture.

A significant number of girls experience rape, sexual assault, and attempted rape.

But I heard a very telling statistic recently (I don't know how accurate, but it "sounds" about right), that it is 3% of the males at colleges who are responsible for such behaviour. The fact that the number of girls who are assaulted in some way is significantly higher than that harks back to a point that Al made earlier: these type of males tend not to just do it once or twice.

Rape culture is not just about the ones doing the raping. Everyone who blames the victims, who questions their motives in reporting these crimes, who passes it off as "boys being boys", is also an active part of that rape culture.

Oh  I  agree with all that, except that I'm very surprised by that 3% figure. that suggests to me that modern-day US is hugely better that Britain in the seventies and eighties!  My experience was that every girl/woman I ever talked with about it with had been groped without her consent on several occasions  by several different men.  The number of boys/men who were well-known to be to much too free free with their hands was closer to 50% than 3%. and that probably went up to 50% or more  when they were drunk.

That said, I moved in a number of radically different social circles , as it happens,  and I found  that  college kids  (who were largely middle-class, back then. That might have changed somewhat?) were , on average, a lot more civilised in their sexual behaviour than working-class men were.

Again, I suppose that goes to  reinforces the part that prevailing cultural attitudes play. You can't just dismiss culltural influences and put it all onto the individual, like Al does.

[Al Swearegen]

I found Silly Walk's reminiscences interesting and informative  Thanks .

I know it's onl;y anecdotal evidence, but when it comes to cultural influences , anecdotes can winklle out what's really going on a damned sight better than statistics can. There are too many different ways to interpret statistics .

Maybe we should call it a "rape subculture" in small-town Australia rather than a "rape culture" ?  But, then, Al's offering of a single, equally anecdotal counter-example  does not in any way disprove the "rape culture " theory.  You'd surely expect to find any number of individuals and families who buck any given trend.

In Laurie Lee's autobiographical work "Cider with Rosie" he describes how, as an adolescent,  he and his mates made a half-assed plan (whicjh they never actually went  through with) to waylay a mentallly challenged local girl and gang rape her.  From a modern perspective, it's shocking.  Some people also find Lee's understated treatment of the subject shocking.  There's a sort of "Boys will be boys" tone to it  that suggests that this kind of thing really was pretty normal in rural England, back in his day.

I'm thinking that kids who grow up in a rural enviromnent (like Lee and his friends) are more likely to have a sort of matter-of-fact c attitude to sex, because  they'll all-too-likely have got their sex education from watching farm animals mating.  So they won't see it as any big deal.  That matches with my own  (limited) experience of country people. I found a really startling alteration in attitudes to sex when I went to stay in a hamlet in rural Herefordshire for a little while.  I mean, for example,  it was clear that people I met there (whilst not approving of paedopholia)   did not  see  paeophilia as a serious crimes that ought to be reported .  (One guy told me about  a man who drove along thev main road near the village, picking young children  up and paying tjhem to masturbate him. He's been one of those kids.  The kids  appreciated the chance to earn easy money.   When I questioned to guy about the ethics of that , he shrugged and said the guy was harmless, in view. "He didn't force us. I felt sorry for him," he said. "I think he did it becuse he was  lonely".  The difference is that  whilst the same sort of thing surely happened in the city too, it would never be talked about so openly and so casually.)

Similarly, when I when a child, sex education in English schools was presented as a purely biological thing (straight after the life cycle of the frog, usually  ) .  None of the sociological nor emotional aspects were discussed at all.  If you has any feelings on the issue (and who woudn't ? upon discovering that their parents had  - immensely hypocritically- done very rude  things, involving unmentionalble body parts? and that onself was the outcome of that act ?) then you just had to work through those feelings for yourself.   One had the impression that feelings just didn't come into it at all.  Then the "permissive society " came along and had the effect of heightening one's guilt about having any feelings about sex (which  guilt was already fighting with the more-traditional guilt about sexual desire)  especially girly-type feelings such as love and affection.

For myself, as an adolescent girl in the seventies, I was much more embarassed about the significance my mind attached to the sex act and by own viginity (for as long as  it lasted) than I was about he act itself.  And that was entirely  due to cultural influences: what I saw on TV,  and read in books and newspapers. And being autistic didn't help., there.  It meant that I was much more exposed to - and influenced by-  exaggerated media reports  than I was to the complex, human perspectives of the people  immediately  around me. (who'd mostly  already earned my contempt, for their narrow-mindedness) And inasmuch as I grasped  that most of the p[eople around me hadn't "moved with the times " near as much as the media suggested, I just put that down to them being dinosaurs.


I can easily imagine all kinds of individual attitudes to sex arising out of that particular caudron of social forces, depending on gender, upbringing,  enviroment, personality,  etc.  But you couldn't claim that anbody's attitudes were unifluenced by societal norms-  or that societal norms no longer existed, just that those norms were ion a state of flux, and we all receiving a  a bunch of mixed messages. There was a rendency towards casting off   ( or rather repressing )  the "sexual hang-ups" of previous generations, together with a  (less obvious) move towards " maculinising" sex .
It was a bloody hard time to be a girl. On the one hand , you got socoal disapprobation for  being "frigid" , or old-fashioionediif you didn't  put out; and on the other hand, the double-standards that would put  a girl down as a "whore" for behaving in ways that were totally acceptable for boys (and always had  been ) were still alive and kicking.  You couldn't do right.

What I see happening nowadays , is a bit of  re-balancing of sexual mores going on.  I mean, it's now totally OK to have emotional  feelings about sex , especially if somebody groped you without your consent..and all the lecherous gropers of the past  3-4 decades are winding up in court, FFS  (or all the ones who wound up famous, at least)   Now , I loathe that kind of behavious as much as anybody, but it was so damned common in my youth (and I think it was probably always common) that i fel it;'s unfair to make examples of a few individuals like that.

For my own part, when I've taken exceprion to a guy grropinfg me, I;'be told him very formly to stop. And if that didn't work, I slapped him in the face.  And yeah, i can see that some girls (and boys) wouldn't be so assertive . Some girls (and boys)  mmight freeze and wind up being effectively  raped.  And  I can also see  that it's ugly behaviout that ought to be stopped a root...if possible.  But it doesn't follow that all those guys are evil . Or let's say, if they are,  then we might as well top ourselves, because there's no escaping such widespread evil any other way.

So i'm very  much with Al, in wanting to  firm up the definitions of "rape" and  "sexual assualt" to stop this thing becoming a witch-hunt. But i find this idea that societal forces don't come into this at all to be laughable.  If different cultutes don't have different rate -rapes I'll be bloody amazed. But the evidence suggests that they do. And what the heck is your problem with that, Al?

It s interesting that you latch onto the rape culture narrative on the basis of an anecdote but when offered a counter say that my experience of people who I grew up and around is simply a case of exception to the rule. Could it not be said the other way around? That the people in the counter anecdote to mine were the exceptions? Not if you are mentally invested in the narrative being true.

As to your assertions being rural as having a more matter of fact attitude towards sex (which may or may not be true....it really is a guess isn't it?) somehow translates into more likely to be at risk of being rapists??? Again, I do not see your connection.

I have a feeling and I may be completely off-base, but I think you have chosen a narrative and now have conclusions and are looking for premises to fit these conclusions. Poor way to go about things.
Now can rapists find each other to commit horrible crimes? Absolutely. I do not know how they do but then I do not travel in such circles nor know their psychology but Fred and Rosemary West found each other and so did Myra Hinckley and Ian Brady. I do not think that this indicates that there is a murder and child abduction culture that evil people may find each other and perpetuate evil acts together and I believe the same about so-called rape culture.

Society is NOT a rape culture. It has laws against. It has social cost against rapists. It is not celebrated or encouraged. It is just about the opposite to what rape culture is supposed to be. But horrible people will do horrible things to others and always will. You will always have people in society who murder, torture, abuse children, rape, steal, and every other crime. It is sad and regretable. But that does not mean there is a rape culture and I am sorry but the idea that there is, is laughable to me.   

[Walkie]

Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote. Not reasonably.  Presumably, that film was inspired by various anecdotal evidence (that kind of thing usually is) ;it drew more anecdotal evidence out of Silly Walks ; which in , turn, inspired me to present some anecdotal evidence of my own.

I also  pointed out that I know for a fact (purely by introspection)  that my own sexual attitudes were very much influenced by the prevailing social mores (confused and contractory though they were)   so why should n't the same be equally true of other people, especially men?

In answer to all that you cite your family , as not participating in the  supposed rape culture. And you expect us to just drop the theory  that a rape culture exists on that basis? That's just not gonna satisfy anyone but you Al, because nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.

[El]

Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote.

[...]

nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.

thaaaaaank you.  Both points are what I was trying to get at a page ago but I apparently didn't put it very well.

[Walkie]

Well here's a thing about anecdotal evidence, Al: you can't just overturn a growing weight of anecdotal evidence by presenting a counter-anecdote.

[...]

nobody's actually trying to suggest that everybody is the same.

thaaaaaank you.  Both points are what I was trying to get at a page ago but I apparently didn't put it very well.

Oh, you put it clearly enough . But Al is ome  bloody hard nut to crack.   I  surely wouldn't presuppose that my own attempt will be sucessful. Water off the proverbial 's back, most likely.