“Rape switch”? Or “aggression switch”?

I’ve been involved (on and off) in a comment war all day long over at Greg Laden’s, where Greg attempts to explain the plausibility of a “rape switch” that is turned on in men when they are subjected to the trials and expectations of a war zone, and how men in whom this “rape switch” is turned on are then capable of raping the indiginous women where they might not have been previously. A semantic war erupted, where no less than three commenters have driven a counter-offensive against such a sweeping generalization or indoctrinate affront. I personally suggested that the more likely scenario is that war, by virtue of being war, turns on an aggression switch in its soldiers, by the designs of their higher-ups, that these soldiers can’t necessarily channel in an appropriate manner (e.g. by killing the locals), instead resorting to raping the locals’ women.

I’ve been going back and forth with a commenter by the name of Thomas, who seems to have approximated the same “vagispiracy” position that The Real Meme did in my recent Oprah-bashing post. At the time of this post, he has challenged me to provide some citations for my claims; I’m about to attempt to do so, though some of them weren’t made with citations in mind (e.g., I pulled them out of my ass, or Colbert’s favorite fact source, the gut).

I wanted to write a post today about Roguelike games, or get around maybe to writing part two of Blogging the Election, but you get this instead. Enjoy!

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“Rape switch”? Or “aggression switch”?
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3 thoughts on ““Rape switch”? Or “aggression switch”?

  1. 1

    I wrote a post on this discussion and at the end specifically address the rape switch question.

    My basic take on that, is that until the act is committed, one is not a rapist.  I would posit that while all men are capable of rape (or all humans are capable of all manner of atrocity), until the specific set of variables that will cause a man to rape are met, he is incapable of rape.  And if a set of variables doesn’t cause him to rape, no matter how many men do under those circumstances, then those variables cannot cause him to rape.

  2. 2

    I made a point to stay out of those threads because I didn’t want to get involved. I agree, DuWayne, that until a person commits that act, they aren’t a rapist. I certainly wouldn’t call someone a murderer unless they had (through action or order) intentionally caused another person’s death outside of the defense of themselves or another person.

    I suppose some men become rapists when variables A B and C are met, and others only when D is also met, but what about men in the same circumstances who don’t rape? Obviously, they aren’t rapists.

    I think the war-time military mindset is something that really can’t be understood to any great degree by those of us who haven’t been in that situation. I recall seeing some young men who were friends of mine in high school after they had returned from a stint in the military. They had turned into raging pricks with a chip on their shoulder who seemed eager for a fight at the drop of a hat. These guys hadn’t even seen active fighting overseas.

    You certainly can’t paint every soldier with the rapist paintbrush, but take young impressionable men just out of high school, run them through basic training and send them off to war in a distant country and you can get very strange results. A large portion of these guys probably never lived away from Mom’s and Dad’s house and rules before basic training.

    I don’t think I ever would have made it if I had entered the military. I’d still be serving time in Leavenworth for fragging a DI.

  3. 3

    While I agree with Greg and others that rape isn’t necessarily JUST a matter of being aggressive, I still think if there’s a switch that’s getting turned on, it’s got to be aggression, and that’s having an effect e.g. fulfilling variables A and B (ability to be aggressive, and dehumanization of the local populace perhaps?).  I tend to agree that anything ending with a suffix of “-ist” is a descriptive term that implies some absolute quality about the person, and that the specific term “rapist” means “someone who has raped”, rather than “someone who is capable of rape”.

    So, like Dan suggests, it could very well be a matter of young kids, hormones raging, getting their aggression switches turned on 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, 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…  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.

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