When I had my first sexual encounter, I was dating a person that I knew genuinely cared for me. However, some of the things he wanted us to do, or did without asking made me feel uncomfortable and sometimes I questioned if they were acts of sexual abuse. So I confronted him about them and his response was that he had seen them done so often in pornographic movies that he assumed they would be okay in a real life setting: that was how sex normally is. Women in heterosexual relationships or those who engage in heterosexual sex frequently find themselves in a gray place where they aren’t comfortable with what is happening, but shy away from labeling those acts as acts of sexual abuse or rape. We usually require a woman to fight back, or say “no”, and for the encounter to be violent for it to constitute rape. However, coercion and psychological manipulation are a big part of rape culture and all three of the above criteria might be absent in some instances of rape. In this blog post, I want to look into whether heterosexual men accurately understand the nuances of the acts that might constitute rape.
I looked at a study published in 2014 conducted on a group of 86 male college students with the mean age of 21, and standard deviation of 3.6 years. The study cited that there is a significant population of men who, when used specific labels, decline having raped anyone, but will admit to paraphrased questions such as if they have “coerced somebody to intercourse by holding them down.” The researchers try to find a correlation between hostility towards women and callous sexual attitudes with men that either admit to having intentions of raping, or men that will admit to paraphrased acts that constitute rape. Here, hostility is defined as the tendency to focus on negative interactions with women and to generalize them to all women. Callous sexual attitudes is defined as objectifying women and expecting men to have sexual dominance. The results show a correlation between men that show intentions to use force but deny the intention to rape with high levels of callous sexual attitudes, but not with hostility towards women. A disclaimer: the study does not tell us whether the men that participated had accusations of abuse or rape against them, so we are going to assume that they didn’t.
This is going to sound really bad, but I have to say it. Does using force to hold down a person and coerce them to intercourse always constitute rape? The researchers claim that it does. However, labeling such acts as rape as a third party observer takes away the power from the women in these situations as actors to identify their experience. The study seems to conclude its finding in a hedgehog manner by not looking at all of the other variables. For instance, all sexual acts occur in a physical setting, with at least two people involved. If the said sexual aggression is so prevalent, what do women do whether actively or passively in this physical space to promote or constrain violence? It is likely that if the women considered these sexual aggressions to be rape, they might have spoken against it, making the men in the study more cognizant of acts that might not be acceptable. I have found that it is not only socially accepted, but expected in an American school setting that women claim to like violent sex and big aggressive men, but as soon as a label such as sexual abuse or rape is thrown in, everyone shuns the said act. The ways in which we as a society talk about and think of sex as inherently violent might be a reason for high claimed intentions of rape. For instance, the indicators of “good sex” especially in heterosexual relationships include more violence than boring sex that everyone tends to joke about. So the men in the room that fail to accurately identify instances of rape might only be an extension of a bigger problem of how we view sex and gender roles as a society.
Additionally, people tend to think that college students have a lot of casual sex, but in reality, most sexual encounters still happen within a romantic/friendly setting. Are women who are romantically involved with their partner more likely to comply or fight back? Similarly, how does knowing the person outside of the sexual encounter affect men when they are making a decision to use or not to use force? A likely explanation for the study not being able to find a strong correlation between hostility towards women and men using force during intercourse might be because they happen within a romantic/friendly setting. And if women in these situations comply, is it because the dominant culture assumes that normal sex has some form of male dominance, or because they actually enjoy it?
An important place to go from here I think, is to identify sexual acts that might constitute rape, but aren’t violent and educating people about them. I think that this would allow a lot of women to acknowledge and understand the discomfort that they might feel in their heterosexual sexual experiences, and hence expand the accepted definition of rape. Moreover, even for women that genuinely enjoy these acts of force, I think it is important to investigate the longer term harm (if any) done by engaging in the said acts. It is important to not just label the behaviors as rape but to look at each individual scenario and let the women in them decide for themselves how they felt in those moments. But in the long run, I think we would benefit as a society if we changed the way we think and talk about sex, made it more inclusive of acts that are pleasurable to everyone, and challenged the power relationships we have outside of the bedroom.
Data/Society/Decision-making Spring 2019 