Is there a “rape proclivity bubble on a multi-axis quadrant?”

Greg Laden, as you may already know, recently postulated a hypothesis regarding the possibility of a “rape switch” — a set of circumstances in which soldiers are significantly more likely to rape members of the local population — that rang true with him. The idea originally came from one of his students’ term paper written in 1993. Discussion of the topic has been heated, to say the least, and I’ve been throwing more than my fair share of wild punches in the fray. This is just an attempt to put together a number of them into something more cohesive (and coherent) now that a lot of the rage has subsided. I will attempt to avoid or ameliorate those sticking points that drew so much of everyone’s off-topic ire, and I’ll even try to make up for a number of misconceptions I myself had in coming into the argument to begin with.

Now, fair warning, I’m a computer geek, and I have a tendency to think in computer terms rather than organic squishy ones. Also, I am the furthest thing from a psychologist imaginable, so I am neither qualified nor trained to try to tie everything together. There’s a lot of preamble to get out of the way before I can get to my actual postulate, so here goes.

To start off, the major point of contention throughout the argument was Greg’s assertion that anyone for whom this potential “switch” is turned on is automatically a rapist, whether they’ve raped or not. Everyone who argued against this usage seem to be coming at it from the angle that the word itself already has a defined meaning – being, someone who has, or has attempted to rape. I’m still trying to fight off a linguistic prescriptivist image, but words mean what they mean because we all agree that’s what they mean, and if the majority of your audience disagrees with your use of a word, then it’s up to you to prove that the definition needs stretching, or use a different term. This may be ceding too much ground to people who want to derail the conversation off the useful ideas presented in the original hypothesis, but my goal here is to avoid such derailment. As such, I will only refer to such people for whom the act is capable, as “potential rapists”. I say this knowing full well that every single human being on the planet is a potential everything, so when referring to a person as being a “potential rapist” I mean that most or all of the barriers present normally in any member of a “normal” society have been removed and thus the abhorrent act in question is much more possible for this person. The word “potential”, because of that shared capacity for evil omnipresent in humankind, is useless without first qualifying the argument as such.

Another problem with the argument as originally presented is that there is necessarily only one switch, that it affects only the ability to rape someone, and that it only has two positions, off or on. This kind of binary thinking is something we humans are good at, but it abstracts the argument to the point of absurdity. The human mind is much more squishy than that — as with my belief that no one single gene is responsible for the genetic components of, say, autism, or homosexuality, I suspect that no one single aspect of your personality is responsible for your ability to commit a rape. There are a number of factors that change fluidly from situation to situation.

There was a side argument (and a really galling one at that) as to whether or not Stephanie Zvan was justified in, while evaluating any particular situation to determine whether or not a person was capable of rape, applying the term “rapist” to that person in her decision process and acting accordingly — whether she ever voiced that internal label or not. That conversation mostly came out of the comments, and frankly, the original post only argued that she was within her rights to act as though the worst case scenario was true no matter what. Now, you can be in a dark alley and run away from an otherwise harmless man, and mistake the person as a rapist in the process, but if you were to pass the person in the street in broad daylight the next day and identify him as being a rapist, frankly you’re in the wrong in that situation. But that wasn’t the argument at hand, nor was it that armed soldiers or cops trained to react with the same level of certainty and people end up dying as a result. A few people kept pulling the conversation in those directions, and I honestly feel it was both out of line and disgusting. No matter what, a person has every imperative to protect themselves whether the danger is real or imagined — because you can’t tell for sure one way or the other unless you refuse to act, at which point you’ll find out for certain and there’s no going back from there. That Greg is voicing the idea that this is possible — that there is a subset of people capable of rape and might therefore actually rape when presented the opportunity — may be heavy-handed in saying “let’s call these people who CAN rape, ‘rapists’,” but that heavy-handedness only comes from stretching a term already agreed-upon to apply only to people who have committed the act, regardless of whether the actual idea (e.g. that all men are “potential rapists”) is justified. This should not be extended under any circumstances to the internal thought processes of someone who has every right to defend themselves against even the merest potential of harm.

This brings me to my argument proper. In order to counter a particular misconception I had regarding BDSM, Becca provided a verbal illustration that started tying it all together for me, which I will quote:

I need a visual model; let’s try a quadrant.
Put “consent” on the X axis and “violence” on the Y axis.

(upper right = both violence and consent, e.g. some BDSM; lower right = no violence but with consent, e.g. positive stuff; upper left = violence without consent, e.g. war rape; lower left = no violence or consent, e.g. necrophilia? roofies?)

Any given person can be represented by both a single dot (representing some average or their primary proclivity), and a “bubble of probability” around that space (which need not be regular in shape but could be thought of a little like an electron cloud- where the probability of occupying a given space fades to practically nothing at some point). It is probably possible to have multiple noncontiguous bubbles.

For an average person, war zones tend to increase the sample size of that bubble of probability toward more violent and less consent. They can also move the primary-proclivity dot (which may be related to why it’s difficult to “turn off the switch”).

(I get that being a Dom doesn’t necessarily mean you’re willing to forego consent, and I get that Doms consider themselves to be subservient in the relationships, DuWayne kindly took me aside and gave me lots of reasons to open my mind a bit on the topic, most of them involving the fact that I was being really closed-minded about it in the first place, so let’s drop that tangent for now.)

Out of context of whether it’s possible for a Dom to rape someone who isn’t consenting, let’s apply that quadrant to the issue at large.

There is definitely some intangible difference between those that are capable of raping someone in a given situation and those that are not. What that intangible difference is, what Greg refers to as a switch, is whether this particular situation falls inside one of those proclivity bubbles or not. With regard to the original postulate, I’d contend that there are more axes than just this — some of which factor into whether or not you’d be willing to ignore a lack of consent. And not only that, but each person could have a different set of axes that factor into this diagram.

Let’s say in the average person they include: a) social acclimation, b) your perception of the victim’s humanity, c) general inhibition, d) stress factors (e.g. the more stressed you are, the more likely you’d act otherwise out of character).

So you take a group of people. Train them to be killing machines, and strip them of their inhibitions against killing. Teach them to impose their will on others with force, deadly force if necessary. Then let them congregate with and rely upon only one another, with very little contact with their pre-war home life. Let them get shot at, lose a number of friends senselessly. Repeat until they’re just about totally crazy. If a culture emerges where rape doesn’t seem as repugnant as all the death that’s around you, then social acclimation is diminished — the morals imposed on you by “civilization” are reduced or depleted. Also, if you’ve been taught that the population you’re at war with, is sub-human, then your perception of your victim’s humanity is decreased, stretching the proclivity bubble further on that axis. Throw in a desire for revenge for your fallen bretheren and you might as well just double the size of the bubble on every axis.

Likewise, as we know rapists can spring up naturally in the populace without a war going on, whatever conditions that need to be met in the particular person might be met by other means (e.g. psychological or chemical problems in the person’s brain, sexist upbringing, being taught some group of humans or even just women are not human, etc). So it’s not like only soldiers are rapists — just that all the events in wartime are likely to drag your proclivity bubble larger and larger on a number of fronts until the likelihood of a situation coming up landing even at random on all those behavioural axes where you can potentially rape, and where you actually DO, approaches 1.

So after all these conditions are met, and the particular situation and confluence of all the proclivity bubbles on all the axes lands this particular situation on this multi-dimensional array within one of these bubbles, then this person is a potential rapist. Now, because the human mind is not a binary state, giving a man a shotgun does not make him a murderer until he points and shoots. Just because a potential victim is well off assuming the man with the shotgun could very well shoot him or her, does not mean that person is de facto a murderer ahead of time — but the victim is well advised to get the hell out of Dodge as though he was aiming right for his brainpan.

So, it could very well be a matter of young kids, hormones raging, getting their aggression sliders cranked up to 11 by basic training (if not by the training then at least by the aggressiveness of the other recruits), finding themselves expected to be “adults” and able to restrain this newfound “power” when this is the first time they’ve been out on their own, like, ever. Put them overseas, where the social inhibitions, and inhibition in general, are negated or culled, and they’ll do some really sick things, like throwing puppies off cliffs, shooting up intersections, dehumanizing and torturing and killing otherwise innocent people they’ve been trained to see as non-humans, raping 12-year-old girls then killing the families and burning the houses down. In the case of these soldiers, it’s honestly like they get that “no killing” part of their moral centres turned off in order to make them capable of killing, and that has a cascade effect through the rest of their psyche, only it’s a whole bunch of different factors all adding up and, in aggregate, turns your sweet teenage boy into a slavering rapist.

So is Greg right that there’s a “rape switch”? In my opinion, yes and no. Yes, there is a confluence of behaviours and conditions that have to be just right to do something that you would otherwise think repugnant. No because it’s not a binary switch that you could, say, hard-wire off, or justifiably kill everyone with it set to on. It’s, as Becca rightly pointed out, more like a fluid, organic set of proclivity bubbles on a number of axes that might correspond with each of the “factors” that one can identify as contributing to a rapist mindset.

Seems like a bit of a cop-out ultimately, doesn’t it?

Oh, and while I was drafting this, Greg totally poked the hornets nest some more. Great read, and makes me look like a “me too”.

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Is there a “rape proclivity bubble on a multi-axis quadrant?”
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76 thoughts on “Is there a “rape proclivity bubble on a multi-axis quadrant?”

  1. 51

    Why don’t you do that then? Like, now. That way people who WANT to hear what you have to say, can hear it. And I’d admit, if you hadn’t been so noisy over the last week, I might even be one of them, because you’re a hell of an eloquent guy for a douchebag.

  2. 52

    Fuck you. What’s next, the fake comment where I admit that I was never a soldier? Maybe the one where I accept defeat and crawl away only to banned so I can’t deny it? Shit… and I thought you threw a low blow before. This is beyond contemptible.

  3. 55

    …and you’re an IT guy. You really expect anyone to believe that anything is impossible to fake? Your friends will believe you, because that’s what friends tend to do, so it’s basically a waste of my time to even bother at this point, but since when have I ever let that stop me?

  4. 58

    Right… your friends will believe you, because that’s what they do. It’s the nature of most friendships. It’s a dirty fucking play you pulled just now, Jason. Dirty as Hell. I don’t know how you can live yourself after something like that. Bastard that I am, I’m not sure I could.

  5. 60

    What? You’re under the impression I thought I’d get some sympathy around here? Not bloody likely. I know better than that. I can’t even get sympathy for being a little miffed at someone openly calling me a rapist.

    Dan, I’m not sure I get what you’re referring to here… Maybe the part where I ascribe myself enough self-knowledge to understand that I’m capable of truly horrific atrocities under certain extreme circumstances? Because everyone is, I just admit it to myself… or are you one of those people that thinks BDSM is a psychiatric disorder?

  6. 61

    Fair enough. I am pretty far down towards the end of the bell-curve on this. Although, full disclosure here: I do act upon the urge to throw people down, violently beat them, and have sex. Entirely consensual, I assure you, but it do act. I would like to point out, though, that I don’t get off on enacting violence. I get off on getting other people off, and the people I happen to be with sometimes get off on receiving violence. Honestly, it’s never entirely easy for me to overcome the internal barriers to hurt someone I care about at first. No matter how much they ask, I’m never completely comfortable with it until after, when I know I haven’t gone too far. I’ve only left scarring on one person who did not explicitly ask for it, and in my feeble defense, they were very shallow cuts that would not scar most people.

    Honestly, I probably could not bring myself to cross that threshhold except for the fact that I myself am a fairly extreme masochist, and know from experience how much pleasure there can be in it for some people. I am neither a sadist nor a violent person by nature. I don’t see what I do as all that much different than body modification, which may weird people out, but rarely makes people think you need to see a shrink.

    Of course, if these kinds of thoughts suddenly sprang into your head, I can imagine it would be traumatic, and you might want to see someone about it. I’d probably encourage it, personally, depending on how well I knew you and what I knew about you (which at this point is pretty much not at all and practically nothing, so I’d say yes, go). I know at least one person who came to it fairly suddenly and describes it as a very unpleasant and difficult period, coming to terms with it. I came to it far more gradually, as most people do, I think, and so it was a relatively easy thing, internally, at least. The reactions of other who find out… well, sometimes it’s not so simple.

    Well, this is getting rather lengthy and is yet another completely off-topic issue (I’m extremely prone to falling into that). Maybe I’ll post something about it on my own blog, and in the future I can just link to it and move discussions of this nature there.

  7. 62

    Because I’m a stubborn motherfucker who doesn’t know when or how to quit and is really bad at following instructions, doubly so when they’re given is such a fuckwad manner. I’ll probably do it sometime in the wee hours tonight when everyone else has gone to bed and there’s not much else to do. It’s not going to hurt Kull’s feelings if I finish the book on Monday instead.

  8. 64

    Please tell me it was the rambling and not because you don’t know who Kull is… Please, please tell me your not so benighted. If you really don’t know, get thee to the library, my friend. Seriously. Set aside whatever personal dislike you might harbor and read. You owe it to yourself.

  9. 66

    Rystefn said: “I get off on getting other people off, and the people I happen to be with sometimes get off on receiving violence. Honestly, it’s never entirely easy for me to overcome the internal barriers to hurt someone I care about at first. No matter how much they ask, I’m never completely comfortable with it until after, when I know I haven’t gone too far.”

    Thank you for posting that part. I feel a bit better about it now. Yes, the “gradual” vs “sudden” thing is what I had in mind. Arriving at that point suddenly would seem rather odd.

  10. 68

    I know better than that. I can’t even get sympathy for being a little miffed at someone openly calling me a rapist.

    You totally have my sympathy in that regard.

  11. 69

    Jeez, what planet are all you guys on, anyway? And am I, like, the only person who’s noticed that you are all guys in this discussion?

    And OMG, somebody took YOUR redefinition of a word and ran with it, and now you’re all bent out of shape? Awww, poor babies.

    What I’ve gotten out of covering a pair of blogs spanning this topic, just being kinda nosy, is that one person – notably FEMALE – expands on a hypothetical in her internal conversation with self, expands it into a method / rationale for protecting herself in situations where doubt of her actual circumstances justifies the urge to protect herself, and takes a chance at trying to explain it to all of you. And all you seem to be able to see is a slur on your character and a hit to your ego. YOU all know you are better than the worst possible case scenario. Or at least so you state. I don’t get that a single one of you has the least idea of what she’s feeling, or how hard it is to try to communicate with any of you. You just don’t FEEL it – and you try to justify asking for her knee-jerk trust?

    But hey, get a clue guys. We women don’t have the assurance of knowing whether or not any one of you is an angel or devil, and that is true no matter how well we think we know you!!! Dates, husbands, brothers – all can be rapists. And for every rapist there’s a first time. I don’t give a crap what the trigger for any of you might be for that, though much of this discussion aims at pinning that down. I just take offense at any one of you thinking you can assure any one of us with words – written or spoken, delivered in caress or shout, that it could never be you and there’s something wrong with us for thinking about whether it could, and further, how to protect ourselves proactively in any situation. A single word, already stretched past meaning, is the very least part of the issue.

    We don’t read minds. We don’t scan and interpret souls. We’ve often tried trust and found out the hard way just where that doesn’t get us. So all of you, please, please, get off our case because your dear little egos are offended. If you never grow past your own egos, you’ll never be able to understand what’s going on in the other half of the world, or why.

    We’d like to like you. We’d love to trust you. Ain’t never going to happen when you can’t see past your dicks. And this self-reinforcing commiseration society thing you’ve got going on here is absolutely no help.

  12. 70

    And am I, like, the only person who’s noticed that you are all guys in this discussion?

    one person – notably FEMALE – expands on a hypothetical in her internal conversation with self, […] And all you seem to be able to see is a slur on your character and a hit to your ego.

    Five guys total posted in this specific thread, mostly because I was taking Rystefn to task for his doing exactly what you are upset about. I really hope you meant to post this elsewhere, but I’m honoured that this was the endpoint in your reading about the topic. You may want to visit the Silence is the Enemy main page for more links about this specific topic.

    Your anger at men is valid, and your point that women are not mind readers is good, and the idea that everyone is capable of despicable things is not just received, but the whole point of the conversation. Also, my ego is not bruised by talking about the fact that all humans are capable of these despicable acts so… uh… who are you disagreeing with specifically? I don’t think all of us need to be painted with the same “ego is bruised and wants your trust and tries to make himself look like an angel” brush, as we’re definitely not just chattering on the same (e.g. wrong) side of this argument… but I can understand how you might get that impression if you saw the wall of text between me and Rystefn and didn’t want to actually read it. If you do, I’m sure you won’t find anything like a “self-reinforcing commiseration society” between us.

    Or are you just venting? Because that’s okay too.

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