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	Empowering Men: fighting feminist lies
Sex, Lies & Feminism by Peter Zohrab Chapter 3: The "Rape is Violence" Lie (N.B. some "adult" content has been deleted).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever you say, dear.

A surprising thing happened to me while working on this book: While I was attending a course for teachers, several Feminists handed me the best disproof of their position on rape I could ever hope to find! 1 In fact, this group (mainly women) is so determinedly Feminist (and left-wing, generally) that I almost had to pinch myself. Here's what happened.

One topic covered during the one-day course was Brain Sex, based on the book of the same name. After talking about a few of the differences between male and female psychology mentioned in that book, the Facilitator, addressing the women in the audience, said something like: "You know what it's like when you tell your husband not to buy you a present for your birthday – and he doesn't?"

There was a chorus of patronising agreement from the mainly-female audience. Men are just supposed to know they really do need to buy a gift. So I jumped at the opportunity to say, "That's just like rape. The woman says 'No,' and the man's wrong whatever happens."

There was a surprised, but almost unanimous retort of "No!" from this same audience. (I might have added that a man could end up in jail for making one choice in such situations, or lose his marriage if he makes the other choice.)

So, whether a woman says no and means yes in one situation, but says no and means no in another, men are just supposed to magically, telepathically intuit the correct meaning and act accordingly? Only those who benefit from the grant of such whimsy could say this makes sense.

This incident illustrates a number of points: One is that the Feminist insistence a woman always means "No" when she says "No" is a lie, as Camille Paglia, though she calls herself a Feminist, has noted. And many men have gone to jail because that lie has become official doctrine in some courtrooms.

Another point is that allowing only Feminists to have serious input into Sex/Gender policies has created a society in which women can have their cake and eat it too, while men are put into a no-win situation. In other words, western men are increasingly having to choose between avoiding relationships or risking an arrest for rape. A male no-win situation also exists in the area of domestic violence and the divorce courts. Such no-win situations are the inevitable result of institutionalising female pressure-groups, while ignoring and discouraging male pressure-groups, which is what western establishments are doing.

The final point this anecdote illustrates is how the Politically Correct are perfectly prepared to deny obvious truths and force their faith on others by sheer weight of numbers. This is shown by the chorus of "No's" my comment elicited. To be fair, by the next day it seemed my point had sunk in to some extent, so their retort was probably the knee-jerk reaction of people who recognise theological heresy when they hear it. But I should add that I had been preparing the ground for many years, with the gradual introduction of anti-Feminist heresies. But for that background, their prejudice would have remained undiminished and my career would have suffered severe consequences, I expect.

There are basically two ways of looking at rape:

1. Find more ways of saying how evil men are, possibly as a reaction to suppressed guilt over abortion (the extreme Feminist approach);

2. Understand it and take informed action to prevent or mitigate its consequences

I take the second approach, and this chapter will focus on male-female rape because it is the most known form. However, other forms, such as female-on-female rape, do occur, as reported in the article, "I was raped by another woman" (Cleo magazine, New Zealand, August 1999).

The Anatomical Context of Rape

If you think men are bad and women are good, and women are always victims when heterosexual sexual activity takes place, and rape is always the man's fault, then you should read no further. This chapter is not for you. As we will see in the chapter on equality, men and women are not in a symmetrical relationship and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the area of courtship and sex.

We can start with the reciprocally non-symmetrical genital anatomy of men and women. Men and women do not have genital anatomy that is reciprocally symmetrical or identical. Instead, they have complementary anatomies.

(censored)

The crucial elements I want to draw out of the above description are that:

1. the sexual act is a joint endeavour;

2. pressure/force, in most cases, needs to be applied by the man;

3. resistance, in most cases, needs to be applied by the woman.

So we can already see how rape can be a matter of degree. Indeed, far from disagreeing with Feminazis who scream "All Men Are Rapists," I almost agree with them. Men who engage in heterosexual sex are almost compelled to use force against a resisting woman, and that probably comes under many definitions of rape. (censored) These facts mean the psychology of an aroused man must typically be very different from the psychology of an aroused woman.

(censored)

Feminists who scream that rape is not a sexual act but an act of violence are lying, in order to make it more likely that penalties for rape will be increased, and to make the charge of rape harder for a man to defend against in court.. The article "The Causes of Criminal Behaviour – why do they do it?" reports that rapists reported urges for sex with an adult woman as a major cause of offending.3   Any studies that found rape to be the result of anger or a lust for power, need to be reevaluated by researchers who don't have a Feminist axe to grind. Feminists have a strong ideological motive to prove rape is an act of violence, and any "research" carried out by them in this area is bound to have an agenda behind it.

This agenda has gone so far in New Zealand (for example) that the maximum penalty for rape is greater than the maximum penalty for murder! There is a sentence called "preventive detention" – i.e., an indefinite term of incarceration – which is imposed for sex crimes but not for murder, on its own. Here, as in the case of abortion, we find Society values the rights and convenience of women more highly than the life of unborn children or the rights of men.

In fact, arguing about whether rape involves sex or violence is missing the point, to some extent. We have words like "sex," "violence," "pleasure" and "pain" which allow us to divide the world into arbitrary concepts. Reality itself is amorphous. There is little real difference between a sexual act and an act of violence. It would be a huge coincidence if the above words (in English) could each be demonstrated to correspond to totally separate and distinct biochemical reactions. I am not a Biochemist, however, so the most that I can do is wait to see research findings on this issue and examine them carefully.

The standard sexual act in the Missionary Position is, to some extent, an act of violence, as I have explained above. Moreover, there is no definite dividing-line between pleasure and pain. These are sensory experiences, and some are clearly pleasurable while others are clearly painful – with a grey area in between. So certain acts can be both sexual and violent at the same time and the person experiencing those acts can experience both pleasure and pain.

Quite a few experiences – especially during sex-play – are a bit painful and more than a bit pleasurable. Quite a lot of biting and scratching and digging-in of nails goes on, in some sex-acts. Since the "victims" of this sort of violence are usually males, the Feminists have not seen fit to make an issue of it. Bondage and sado-masochism are merely at one end of a spectrum of sexual behaviours and they are not that different from normal sex. Snuff movies – appalling though they are – are just the extreme end of a sex/violence continuum.

The Social Context of Rape

The different sexual behaviours of men and women are to some extent isomorphic with their different anatomies. In other words, men have the main tool/weapon of the sex act, and they are also the main initiators of courtship. Women have the receptacle for the sex act, and also tend to be the recipients rather than the initiators of courtship. It is biologically efficient for women to behave generally as passively during courtship as they do during sex itself. Similarly, it is biologically efficient for men to behave generally as aggressively during courtship as they do during the sex act.

This is because both women and men can apply the same sort of mind-set (her: "Let him make the moves"; him: "It's up to me to take the plunge") in both situations. It would be a bit schizophrenic if women made all the moves during courtship then suddenly lapsed into passivity during the sex act itself. In terms of hormones and personality structures, I doubt living beings could evolve in that contradictory sort of way.

Since all men are faced with the necessity of coping with frequent rejection or apparent indifference (and women are not), the survival of the species demands that men adopt a thick-skinned attitude to apparent rejection. The old proverb "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" only makes sense if women are seldom "scorned." You certainly don't get the impression there are millions of women running around feeling enraged because they were rejected.

Women may well feel rejected at times, in the sense they do not receive the attentions of a man whom they are trying to attract. But that pales in comparison with the frequent experience of men who make (and are expected to make) an overt pass at a woman, who then rejects them crudely and out of hand. There is no proverb such as "hell hath no fury like a man scorned" for the simple reason that being scorned by a woman is an extremely common experience for most men, and they simply couldn't cope with normal life if they went about feeling furious every time this happened.

There is also a status issue involved here. You can only get "furious" if you feel you have lost face and been humiliated. For a woman, it is humiliating to expose herself to rejection only to be rejected, whereas a man does not have the sort of status or pride in the context of the mating game that gives him the luxury of feeling humiliated by rejection. He can feel depressed, certainly, but not furious. (In fact, men who do feel enraged by rejection are generally considered very dangerous and potentially criminal.)

Such rejection can be very traumatic at times – especially for adolescent males. So a man has to either put up with celibacy or learn to be thick-skinned. There is only a thin line between such a mentality and the mentality of a rapist, and it is inevitable this boundary will be crossed from time to time. Hence, in the context of defining, recognizing and prosecuting sex crimes, it is grossly unjust to penalise men too harshly for crossing this boundary – particularly while allowing women to behave as they like without running any serious legal risk.

The Legal Concept of Rape

We have to decide whether, or to what extent, rape and female passivity are two sides of the same genetically programmed coin, then design our legal system accordingly. A significant problem is the effect the pervasive Feminist propaganda has, and how it tries to let women have their cake and eat it, too. Women have the luxury of expecting men to make all the moves, then accusing them of rape as and when they wish.

Masculists should demand sexual equality in the area of sex crimes. The types of crimes women commit should be more heavily penalised than they are at present. To balance the crime of rape (unless it is downgraded in some way), I suggest there should be some legal way of penalising women to an equivalent degree for failing to take the initiative in sexual relationships – or, alternatively, for rejecting a man when it could be argued she "led him on."

Women on top?

In practice and the overwhelming majority of cases, men have to initiate sexual relationships with women in the face of a female attitude ranging from active discouragement (often, but of course not always, turning into acquiescence if the man persists), through to apparent indifference, all the way to ambiguous non-discouragement with possible "signs" of receptivity. One study claims to show that, in singles bars, it is primarily women who initiate sexual relationships. As far as the first actual physical contact is concerned, however, the study apparently included "incidental" or "quasi-accidental" touching of the man by the woman. This would be typical of the general "deniability" stance of women in sexual relationships. Hence, the actual unambiguous, risk-taking transition from casual acquaintance to physical/sexual relationship is still a male responsibility.

Relatively recently, the concept of "date rape" hit the headlines, particularly in the United States. It resulted in the notorious Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy (1996), which centres on the following definition of "consent": "the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual behavior." (formerly at Antioch College)

What is new about date rape is that it marks an attempted shift in the definition of "rape." Previously, most people assumed rape was sexual intercourse forced on a woman who stated she was unwilling to participate. With date rape came the idea rape was what a man committed if he had sexual intercourse with a woman who did not explicitly agree to it. This is totally unfair to men. As Thomas (1993) puts it:

"(T)here seems little way in which a boy can avoid being accused of rape. For boys are still expected to take girls out, pour a couple of drinks down them, plead everlasting love and then make a pass.... If you don't at least try to seduce them, girls are apt to get offended (and start casting aspersions on your virility – PZ). And ... there may never be a moment at which anyone actually asks, 'May I?' or gets the answer 'Yes'." (op.cit., page 178)

Then there's the old problem of women who say "no" and mean "yes", which I referred to above. Many Feminists deny this ever happens, but Thomas (1993) cites a 1991 poll, conducted among female students at the University of Texas's psychology department, where nearly 50 percent of respondents admitted to saying "no" to sexual advances, while really meaning "yes" or "maybe." Most men must be aware of this sort of behaviour from their own experience.

The Political Context of Rape

I find myself in agreement with Barbara Amiel (quoted by Thomas, 1993, pages 178-9), who wrote that Feminism...

"...has moved from the liberal goal of equality between the sexes to the political goal of power for women, and is now well on the road to legislating out of existence the biologically based mating habits of our species.... Feminists wish male sexuality to be immaterial in criminal law. Women should be free to engage in any type of behaviour that suits their own sexuality without regard to the consequences. This approach views men as vibrators: women may pick them up, switch them on, play around and then, if the off-switch doesn't work, sue the manufacturer for damages."

I also agree with Amiel's conclusion that the hidden agenda behind the whole date-rape issue could be found in the fact that the senior leaders of the U.S. National Organization for Women, America's leading Feminist organization, are Lesbians. It would be psychologically hard for Feminist activists to keep attacking men in the way they do if they were at the same time emotionally and sexually involved in relationships with men.

In fact, I once went – uninvited -- to the launch of an "Anti-Violence Week" in Wellington, New Zealand. I got there early, and found that the organising was being done almost exclusively by butch Lesbians ! When I interrupted the opening speech to complain that no men's groups had been invited, one of the Lesbians told me that men should organise their own anti-violence week ! In other words, she was admitting that "Anti-Violence" was a specifically pro-women, anti-men concept, as far as she was concerned.

Clearly, many Feminist writers and activists hate men, possibly because they are Lesbians. Anyone who reads the SCUM Manifesto, for example, is left in no doubt that this is the product of Lesbian man-hatred (misandry) dressed up as political theory:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. (Opening paragraph of the Scum Manifesto, Valerie Solanas, http://www.flash.net/~twinkle/psycho/DARK/links/scum-man.htm)

It may also be a chicken-and-egg situation, to some extent: some women may become Lesbians as a result of joining the Feminist movement and meeting Lesbian Feminists; others may have started out as Lesbians and then seen the Feminist movement as a way of expressing their dislike of men. Still others may have been bisexuals or closet-Lesbians who found the Feminist movement provided an environment more conducive to Lesbianism than to Heterosexuality. Some may even have joined the Women's Movement mainly in order to find partners!

Brownmiller (Against Our Will, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980) stated a very radical, misandristic (man-hating) theory of rape:

"Man's structural capacity to rape and woman's corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself.... Anatomically, one might want to improve on the design of nature, but such speculation appears to my mind as unrealistic.... In the violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man,... rape became not only a male prerogative, but man's basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear.... It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." (Brownmiller 1980, 232-233).

Although Brownmiller eventually repudiated much of what she said in Against Our Will, such claims were very influential nevertheless, particularly the idea all men consciously keep all women in fear of rape, which is a blatant lie. It is certainly not true of me, and I doubt I am unique. When I have thought of rape at all, it never crossed my mind to think of it in terms of any power the hypothetical possibility I might rape someone might give me. I only thought of it in terms of how I would feel about it. Whether all women are afraid of being raped is another matter, and Feminists have certainly worked hard to infect women with such fear.

Nonetheless, Brownmiller has a point, hidden amongst all the hyperbole: It is plausible to suggest that the possibility that almost any man could rape almost any woman colours the power relationship between the sexes. Equally, however, one could say the fact that any woman could cry "rape" after any instance of love-making also colours the power relationship between the sexes.

Women are usually comparatively passive in sexual relationships in general, and in sexual intercourse in particular. So the male always runs the risk that a woman who usually means "yes" when she says "no" (and this is fairly common, as we saw from the survey cited above) might claim afterwards that she had actually meant "no." This is especially the case in societies where it is now possible for a woman to accuse her husband of rape. Rape has to be seen in the context of dating, foreplay and intercourse customs, pressures and practices. Brownmiller talks of "man's structural capacity to rape and woman's corresponding structural vulnerability." The other side of the coin is woman's structural capacity to be passive and ambiguous and man's corresponding structural vulnerability to rejection and false accusations.

(censored)

Bill of Sex Act Rights?

Feminists pooh-pooh the idea any men ever experience such strong urges they literally cannot control themselves. I don't know how they could possibly know this for a fact. Maybe all it means is that women never have such feelings. Certainly a legal system should never require a man to stop intercourse, once started. Nor should a woman have the right to expect a man to control himself to the extent she can tell him to stop once he has actually started the sex-act itself. I assert this as a Men's Rights activist! Men need to have some rights in the sex act, and this needs to be one of them. A man is not merely a living vibrator at a woman's beck and call. He cannot be just switched on and off as it happens to suit some woman and the anti-male Legal System. Perhaps we need a Bill of Sex Act Rights, with this point as Article One.

Then there's the issue of blue balls. The medical reference work Rosenfeld (Symptoms, New York:Bantam 1990) contains the following passage:

"Another cause of testicular pain is unrequited love and unfulfilled passion. The resulting congestion of the scrotal tissues causes pain. The condition, known among its sufferers as 'blue balls', is easily remediable – but not by a doctor!"

Women suffer no analogous pain from unrequited love, and in societies where masturbaition is frowned upon a man might indeed find himself fighting a sexual compulsion to rape a woman because of a real, pressing physical need to relieve his pain. This does not make rape excusable (morally or legally), but it does place men in a different situation from any that women have to face.

Conclusion

The issue of rape needs to be rethought in western societies. As with other Men's/Fathers' Issues, there should be – and probably will be – a two-pronged assault on the status quo:

1. Specialist groups of men will concentrate on lobbying for specific law changes.

2. Generalist Men's Rights activists will gradually make society realise that the feelings, interests and rights of men and fathers need to be taken into account when legislative and administrative decisions are made that affect them. This will gradually apply to laws relating to rape as well as to other parts of the legal system.

In this context, the customs of societies where women make an effort to be modest and to keep themselves hidden from unrelated men no longer seem very strange. They are one solution to an age-old problem. Modern Feminist societies have taken the line that women can "have it all" - i.e., if something goes wrong, the blame is put squarely on the man. That is unfair on men.

I see no obvious utopia, as far as the law on rape is concerned. Rape is a problem. Part of the problem is that the law is intervening in the the areas of courtship and the sex act, and these areas do not put the same pressures onto both men and women. For now, I suggest only that we think beyond and around the "Woman as Goddess-Victim" mindset we are suffering from at present.

See also: Chapter 5: False Accusations and the Child-Abuse Lie

See also: The Issue of Rape & Rape Resources