[MB.]

Also, there are only two sexes

Get out of my thread. I've already explained how idiotic your statements are. There are only two types of sexes OH YAH MAN!! no doubt!!! Hermaphrodites. Oh your argument is bunk. There is no such thing as rape that isn't force!! Drug rape, criminal rape of spouse. Oh, your argument is bunk.

[yiwahikanak]

Hermaphrodite is an antiquated, and inaccurate term. People can be intersexed...they are not both sexes (hermaphrodite), but rather they cannot be identified clearly as one or the other.

[Rei Murasame]

To be fair on Figlio who is struggling to get his point across here at the moment, I think that he is not really trying to undermine the concept that MB is talking about regarding rape being possible due to drugging or due to a spouse (generally a male) using his privilege to commit a rape under cover of marriage, it seems that what he's trying to say (if I'm understanding the way he thinks) can basically be broken into two points:

• 1. How do we overcome the difficulties of getting actual prosecutions for this? Someone needs to suggest ways to make it easier to prove or demonstrate, now that we recognise that it can happen. He may be saying that recognising that it can happen is a step, but it is not the only step that is needed to help people.
  
  
• 2. After recognising that it can happen and that it is a problem, is it really a good idea to actually put the adjective in front of it in the way that they've chosen to do it? For example, if we say, "this woman was raped by her own husband", that actually sounds quite different from, "this woman was subjected to spousal-rape". I find that placing the adjective in front of the word 'rape', tends to make people think that it's somehow a lesser attack than if there were no adjective there. It shouldn't be that way, but that's just how people are for some reason.
  
  To keep it as simple as possible, in my view we all should really have tried our hardest to choose a way to describe the thing that is happening without actually placing an adjective in front of the word like that, even if it means having to consistently write longer sentences.
  
  To give an example of what happens, I present Whoopie Goldberg who is placing her foot into her own mouth in this clip:
  [youtube]fasb7tHv8XU[/youtube]
  

  I don't believe it was Rape-Rape. [sic]

  
  See, that sort of problem is what happens when we all start putting all the adjectives in front, people find it even easier to start using the language to aid them in pretending that some rape is 'real' and that some other rape magically is 'not' (which is what Goldberg is doing right there). I hope you all can see the shameful phenomenon I'm pinpointing here. For some reason in English, "She was raped by a man who drugged her", is harder for apologists to weasel out of than "She was date-raped".

I wish that the language did not facilitate that, but it seems that it does indeed make it easier for them to weasel around, and that is all that Figlio was trying to point out, I think.

[Figlio di Moros]

It's a part of it, but more so that these special subsets create frames for forms of "sexual assault" that may not be assault at all, or create the illusion of greater victimization. For example, I've had an ex fuck me while I was asleep; that behavior, if our positions were reverse, would likely be considered "spousal-rape" whether or not she cared, and there'd be great care to convince women of it. In fact, normal, aggressive actions in a relationship could be either viewed as rape, or viewed so in retrospect. This presents a different scenerio, where a man uses his position in a relationship to achieve sex, rather than strictly "raped by her husband".

Furthermore, Kon wrote an entire article on the statistical irrelevence of "date rape", albeit in it's relationship to drugs. If "date rape" is "rape in which the victim was drugged", and it's a statistically negligible occurance, there's no purpose of even recognizing it seperate from rape itself. There's more cause to differentiate "knife rape", "gun rape", "hostage rape", etc. However, these reaffirm the frame of rape itself, whereas the statistically neglible "date rape" create a seperate frame.

[yiwahikanak]

Date rape has not been used, until recently, to discuss being drugged and assaulted. The origin of the term was to bring home how the vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows, rather than a complete stranger. Attention was being brought to this because these are the cases which garner the least amount of sympathy for the victim, and have the lowest conviction rates. They are also the most under-reported of sexual assaults.

Drug-facilitated rape is different than 'date rape' though the terms have become conflated lately. A better term, to avoid this confusion, is acquaintance rape.

Date or acquaintance rape are not legal terms. Drug assisted rape might get you an extra charge (such as administering a toxic substance) depending on your jurisdiction, but it is false to claim that a new category has been created.

[Rich]

See, that sort of problem is what happens when we all start putting all the adjectives in front, people find it even easier to start using the language to aid them in pretending that some rape is 'real' and that some other rape magically is 'not' (which is what Goldberg is doing right there). I hope you all can see the shameful phenomenon I'm pinpointing here. For some reason in English, "She was raped by a man who drugged her", is harder for apologists to weasel out of than "She was date-raped".

Ah but I think there may be another agenda here at work as well. A lot of rape is just impossible to prove by the normal standards of law. So much of it is going to come down to one man's word against one women's word. I would also say rape is rather like torture that has been discussed in another thread. There is no absolute objective boundary between what is rape and what is not rape. Some sexual acts clearly are rape and some clearly are not. But some acts are in grey middle area of the continuum spectrum. Heterosexual sexual relations are highly complex affairs involving many aspects of the human organism. They tend to involve a lot of manipulation conscious or unconscious by both men and women. I'm not saying rape is OK, but it may be a social reality that is impossible to eradicate without putting every person under perpetual surveillance. If the crime is seen as a lesser one, a jury is more likely to convict.