Rape is about power, not sex

And other things that, if you talk about them, you know nothing about

Image: in this ancient Roman depiction, a nymph resists a satyr by punching him in the face, the absence of which would be construed as consent to his sexual advances.

I require to leave you guessing somewhat on certain matters, about which you may conclude that I am a yarn-spinner or about which you, in your own wisdom, may opine that you know vastly more than do I. Or indeed, you may repugn me for the things I know that you don’t, and that you would never want to know. If all I wrote about here was what you also know about, then why are you here?

Blogs and opinion pieces boil down into a number of different categories:

1. where the writer is an expert in their field and offers insight to that expertise (expertise);

2. where, without being an expert, the writer has looked into the field and has a view to express with respect to it (notion);

3. where the writer is contributing to a polemical debate concerning a subject on which they wish to inculcate a following, either rabidly for, or against, the matter at hand (polemic);

4. where the writer self-gaslights: contends that they have no knowledge of a matter, about which they write with innocent, wide-eyed wonder, for whatever reason: to establish their supposed innocence, or gain insights from those who do know the subject and want to put the writer right on a few things (litmus test).

The vein in which the writer writes can combine any number of the foregoing, for instance where the writer is gaslighting themselves, but a reader views them as an expert, whereas yet another reader views them as an ignoramus. However, there are fields where gaslighting oneself is the rule, and not entirely inappropriate: subjects on which any expert with truly deep insight would never write; subjects on which it might even be dangerous to write; subjects with which a writer writing on them would be signing his or her own death warrant. Some subjects nevertheless tread a fine line between being taboo, in the aforementioned sense, and being a postulation of the subject, absent all experience therein. Time to get down to brass tacks with some examples.

Espionage is unlikely ever to be written about in the factual detail, other than in a purely historical context. In fact, it was failing to keep to historical stuff that got Julian Assange’s Wikileaks into such hot water. The play Henry V by William Shakespeare traces the story of that king from shortly after his coronation (which figures at the end of Henry IV Part 2) to the king’s moving into the Château de Vincennes, which he does a couple of years after his victory at the Battle of Agincourt (October 1415). Any historical analysis of that battle, which pitched an exhausted English army of some 8,000 men against a horse-mounted French army of 40,000 men, will readily point out that the battle was won by the Welsh, from whose ranks (about 80 per cent of the English powers) came the famed long-bowmen. It was Welsh longbows that decimated the French cavalry and won the day for England’s happy band of brothers. Yet, in all the play’s 2½-hour length, there is not one single mention of archers or bows and arrows. Not one. There are two theories as to why not. One is that, even in 1599, when the play was written, Shakespeare simply did not know anything about the longbows. Either that or, two, he knew, but was forbidden from writing, about them. In either case, the reason is patent: the longbows that won Agincourt were a state secret, just like early printed maritime maps and charts for seafarers.

In the Netflix series House of Cards, there is a point at which, in true character, Kevin Spacey breaks the fourth wall, turns to the audience and says, “Everything in the world is about sex. Except sex itself. Sex is about power.” How this truism is seen by the audience depends on which of the four above categories it is taken to fall into: expertise, a notion, polemic, a litmus test. I myself view it as number 1, because I think I know in what regard it is expertise. The clue lies in the word power, because it will frequently be misconstrued to mean something like S&M, or femdoms, or dominatrices, and so on. But it is far more the simple control that sex gives to one partner over another, and I don’t mean in the bedroom. If Spacey (or his character) are right, sex and power are things that, therefore, feed off each other. And, while that is a conclusion to which J arGyle comes (who impelled me to write this article and whose own is referenced below), albeit with a note of scepticism, I think it’s absolutely right. They do. Like a maelstrom, they do.

Elsewhere in this blog, I have written about a new love that dare not speak its name, and that is perhaps the greatest exercise of such power in our modern world. If you want to hear me speak about the love that dare not speak its name, it’s here.

And then to the subject in the heading: rape. I gladly give you the reference here to the blog article¹ that prompted the one you are reading right now. I think the article is written as a type 2 article (with a notion of the subject), but the writer will have written it as type 1 (expertise). That’s my view, but it doesn’t need to be yours. Of one thing I am reasonably sure: that neither he (or she, it’s not clear which) nor I (I’m male) has actually committed the crime of rape, and so neither of us speaks of it from a position of experience. However, I, at least, have known three victims of rape in my time. One was female and two were male. That doesn’t give me any authority with which to opine on the motives of the assailants, however. I know of a fourth victim through an acquaintance, and I (through him) have a shrewd idea as to what the motives were in that case but, again, I wasn’t there, and moreover, I don’t know the assailant (or, most likely, assailants) in her case (she was female, and died as a result of the assault).

We are herewith in an area in which they who have most to opine about the motives of a rapist are least likely to be writing about them. I have written an extremely extensive article on the subject, which you can read yourself here, and I have written a somewhat shorter piece looking at a recent case of teenage group rape, which I felt had been punished too leniently. That you can read here.

The reason why a rapist is least likely to be writing about their true motives (in many jurisdictions nowadays, but not all, both a rapist and victim of rape can be either male or female) is because, if they are still at large, they obviously will not want to disclose who they are; if they are incarcerated, they have no interest in revealing themselves further to the curious onlooker, be they a member of the public or a researcher in criminology. However, my own view is that the disinterest of the rapist in discussing the motives for their crime lies fundamentally in the reason why they commit it in the first place. They are sociopaths. So, let us look at the cases of which I am aware. In all cases, names have been changed or invented.

Stephen was an apprentice baker, and needed to rise early each morning to be at the bakery at some time after 4 a.m., in order to fire up the ovens and mix the dough for the day’s batch of bread. He was between 17 and 19 years of age and, one morning, was attacked by two of the bakers who forcibly penetrated his anus, contrary to his loud protestations, which went unheeded given the few people around and the fact it was so early in the morning. There is a suspicion of complicity by other workers at the bakery. Stephen filed a complaint with the police but the public prosecutor declined to pursue the matter on the ground that he was the sole witness and there was a lack of any public interest in pursuing the prosecution.

Ralph was a youngster of 18, who arranged a tryst with an older man. The arrangement was that he would be picked up by the man in his car and they would go to some remote spot to engage in sex. The pick-up went fine, but when the remote spot was reached, the man bound Ralph hand and foot and proceeded to abuse him, hanging him from a tree, with a sock in his mouth to prevent him calling out. The man penetrated Ralph without condoms, because he had recently discovered that he himself had contracted HIV and wanted to pass the illness on to Ralph as retribution for the calumny he viewed God has having rained down upon him. Ralph was bundled naked into the car after the assault, and driven to the square in front of the local railway station, around which people were sitting at cafés, enjoying a drink in the sunshine. The car was driven at speed onto the square, and Ralph bundled out into the roadway to the consternation of all, before the car sped off again, but not before onlookers had noted its registration number. Ralph was seen to by the shocked witnesses to this outrage, and the police and an ambulance were called. He was seven weeks in hospital as a result of the attack. The man had literally ripped him a new ass. The police located the car some time later the same day: it had been set ablaze in a wooded location. The man had hanged himself from a tree close by, by the neck. Ralph contracted HIV as a result of the act.

Caroline was on her way home from work, I believe, on a dark evening in a city environment when she was attacked by a single man of foreign nationality in a park or other open area. She gave a statement to the police who challenged her aggressively on her version of events. The assailant was caught and charged, but the case took four years to come to court and the events of that evening, not being something that Caroline particularly wanted to retain in her memory, had been erased from her recollection sufficiently for her testimony to be rejected. The assailant was acquitted.

So, the question put so simply in the blog article referred to above is whether each of these cases was based on a desire for sex, or a desire to exercise power.

In Stephen’s case, I think it’s very likely to have been an exercise of power, although Stephen is a very attractive man, as well. Rapists do not go around raping every attractive person they see, however, and assaults in the context of an institution, be it a school or a prison or, like here, a place of work, will regularly have a strong element of establishing rank. He or she who takes control of what they want without the consent of him or her of whom control is taken (a vital element to rape, both psychologically and, of course, legally) is seeking to establish their superiority over the other. The ways of gratifying purely sexual desire are too obvious and too available in the modern world for sexual libido to be the simple explanation for rape, at least not for all rapes. There will be cases where a prospective partner has second thoughts about wanting to go through with the act and at the last minute withdraws consent and, in those cases, I think there is more room for an analysis of sexual expectation driving the act of rape. For a more detailed analysis, see my Pickup article, however. The prosecution’s refusal to proceed with the case is indicative of attitudes to male rape, then and now.

Ralph’s case was complex. There is a sense of true tragedy in this tale. The story of HIV has been accompanied by widespread hatred and death wishes by the straight community, which absolved itself of all and any interest or culpability in the spread of the disease, and by members of the gay community actually seeking to be infected with HIV, along the lines of here’s to a short life and a merry one, a little bit à la Freddie Mercury, and patients suffering from the disease using it like some loaded gun to try to infect as many others as possible as some form of retribution. The assailant in Ralph’s case was married, to a female.

The last case was Aileen. The rape took place in a country in which female homosexuality is prohibited. She was lesbian, and a band of thugs entered her environs, singled her out and, it is thought, wanted to cure her of her lesbianism by showing her what fun a jolly good shag can be. She was, I believe, group raped, after which she was cudgelled to death and her body was burned. The crime was likely impelled by the immunity that the culprits believed they would enjoy, and did enjoy, on the basis the woman was easy pickings, could not report the matter to the police, who would not have acted on her complaint anyway and may well have been involved in the commission of the crime.

There are individuals, and if you don’t agree, you must simply believe me, for whom the sexual act lacks any spice or attraction unless it is committed in an atmosphere of illegality. In that sense, rape is driven by both elements of control, or power, and sex, or desire: the exercise of the power is the generator for the sexual urge.

The simplest form of illegality would be public sex, aggravated perhaps by the high likelihood of being seen, or even doing it provocatively, such as from a motorway overbridge. Or doing it under the influence of illegal drugs. Or contravening the consent and will of the partner. Or banding together with others to seek out an anonymous victim. Commission of the sexual act with a child, or in a nursing home, which one has broken into for the purposes of committing the crime (I know of such a case). The depravity of child sex can be aggravated to the point of engaging in the act with the least consenting of all infants. Then, all that aside, there is sex with the beasts of the farmyard.

All this illegality inculcates a sense of perversion, and that is the key to the actor’s pleasure. It is the mere fact that the act is prohibited that drives him or her to their crime (the feminine gender is not simply included out of considerations of political correctness, I can assure you). The greater the onlooker’s abhorrence, the greater the actor’s pleasure. What the illegality lends to the sex act itself is a sense of holding not just the victim in the offender’s thrall, but the very legal system itself—a form of megalomania. This is by no means a serious proposal, don’t understand me wrong, but it is an interesting theoretical point to ponder: which of the acts referred to in these paragraphs might be committed less frequently suppose they were to be legalised? Would their legality render them less attractive to commit?

I myself believe that rape is a crime impelled by the desire to exercise power, and I have in my time been acquainted with persons who confirm that viewpoint, without further comment (and who are in a position to do so). I think that such was the case with Stephen, Ralph and Aileen. I have less with which to judge Caroline’s case. The accused hailed from a part of the world with a strong patriarchal tradition, shall we say.

Rape can be an uncomfortable subject to deal with and to talk about. I believe it is vital to talk about it, because it is one of the most endemic crimes in modern society. It is a weapon of war and it enjoys a level of acceptability that is itself utterly unacceptable. It cowers in the shadows of decent living and suffers such taboos that few, if any, express an interest in putting a stop to it, even if that would be remotely possible.

It is the Sudan of capital crimes: more serious than you could ever imagine, but utterly hidden, and in plain view.

1. After a very cordial exchange, initiated by the author of the blog article referred to, and against my encouragement to keep it up as a valuable contribution to a vital debate, the writer has informed me they wish to remove the article in question. Of course I respect their decision. At the same time, they have provoked thought about this important subject in my own mind and, I am heartened to say, I have provoked similar considerations in theirs. It is an amicable state of affairs.