In 2009, during the Silence is the Enemy campaign raising awareness about rape and the rape culture that leads to drastic underreporting by victims of all genders, Greg Laden made a particularly bold claim in a post wherein he postulated a “rape switch” where people exposed for long durations to rape cultures like that of wartorn Congo might have a switch flipped making them suddenly capable of rape. I thought it was a little more complicated than that, something more like probability bubbles on a multidimensional matrix, making one more or less likely capable of rape. I wrote out my modification of his hypothesis in my post Is There a Rape Proclivity Bubble on a Multi-axis Quadrant? I had intended the post to be floated for the purposes of collecting dissenting opinions and refining the argument thereafter, but save for our good friend DuWayne Brayton, I didn’t have any serious takers.

Well, save for one. A guy by the name of Rystefn, a self-proclaimed “performance artist” (read: long-con troll) who’d once faked his own death on Skepchick’s comment areas. His objections could be summarized as being the same tired MRA arguments you’ve heard a dozen times now regarding how evil and horrible and delusional it is for a person to attempt to protect themselves by considering every stranger a sort of “Schrodinger’s Rapist” — though more specifically, how terribly misandrist it was when women braced themselves thus against strange men. The fight raged on and on in multiple places: at Almost Diamonds and Greg’s blog primarily, but near the end of that particular blog debacle, on my own blog. He privately attempted to claim another instance of performance art, that he was simply trolling for the purposes of raising awareness and building up hits on our various blogs, thus increasing the amount of money we could contribute to the Silence campaign. My blog and Almost Diamonds did not make any ad revenue at the time, however. The fact that we had no ads leads me to believe his trolling was a form of metatrolling, where his “admission” to me in private was merely an attempt to bait me into some sort of trap, which backfired spectacularly when I outed him publicly for his mendacity almost immediately.

Anyway, after making some changes to reflect some ways I’d had my mind changed on a number of border subjects, I reposted the argument here to see if anyone would seriously like to poke holes in the post, but nobody made any such attempt. In honor of Stephanie’s recent work on the topic of rape, and Greg’s laudable attempt to resurrect the Silence campaign, I’m reposting this again here at FtB, where it’ll hopefully get a larger audience and better discussion. Some of my understanding of psychology has since improved, and my thoughts on the subject of rape and privilege have been significantly fleshed out in the interim. So, take your best shot, please and thanks!

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