It's also a pretty insane burden to place on women. Focusing on this sort of device could conceivably divert attention from that could have a real impact (more police, harsher penalties) without forcing women to armor up before they go out into the streets.
That is one sickening device. And I concur: it offers no real protection.
I saw this yesterday. I have a question, though.
Is this something women are supposed to wear all the time? If so, couldn't it be awkward if she meets a nice guy? Or, once the situation turns sour, is the woman supposed to ask the perp to hold on so that she can insert barbs into her vagina?
How does it work?
Wait, that's not Fontana Labs at 2 (I'm pretty sure). FL, appreciate the comment, but you'll need a different handle.
Sam, yes, as I understand it, it's something women would wear if not all the time, then in situations where they fear being raped, which is apparently a lot of the time.
See also the "imaginary product" that serves as a mascot for FemDefence, and the Feministing thread that beat us to the punch by three months.
Fontana Labs?? Try Florence Lyons.
Is the handle FL taken? I didn't know there was registration at this site. Sorry.
No registration, but one of the bloggers here is Fontana Labs, and signs his comments FL, so I just want to avoid confusion.
I agree that rapists may just check for these devices -- how hard is this really? Unless there is something I don't understand (such as that they are hidden in some way) this seems like a no-brainer. [Especially as if you do get snagged by one it must be removed at the hospital, which is awesome btw.]
I don't agree that men would revert to "raping women with objects," though. Most rapes really are driven primarily by sexual urge. Take out the possibility of fulfililng this urge, and most men won't rape. The whole 70s feminist idea that it's "all about power and control" has been pretty well debunked. Except for a very small fraction of truly deranged psychos.
Most rapes really are driven primarily by sexual urge.
There are a number of ways to get one's jollies without, you know, assaulting someone. So forgive me if I remain doubtful.
Re: #8: Then I am seriously behind the times. I'd be interested in hearing/reading about how it's been concluded that 'Most rapes really are driven primarily by sexual urge.' Seriously. I wasn't aware that this is common theory now.
'...it had been tested on a plastic male model but not yet on a live man.'
I don't think they're going to get any volunteers.
Seriously. Citation, please.
And:
Ass, Rob's "I heard this one guy say it." Journal of Self-Proctologic Revelation 17;1 2005, p. 372.
doesn't count.
Can anyone point me toward a good argument for the position that rape is solely about power? Not trying to be troublesome, I've just never really heard the case made (although I've heard the assertion many times).
So I take it none of the commenters thus far has read Snow Crash?
Well, thinking about it some more, I wonder if Rob doesn't have a point. We don't dispute that a rapist tends to use his penis to rape. And the penis is widely regarded as an uncomplicated signifier of male sexual urges. So, I may have been too hasty in my criticism.
You can also be raped in a different place that doesn't have a product that... that is, you wouldn't... ah, you know what I'm talking about.
So I take it none of the commenters thus far has read Snow Crash?
I was derelict in my commenting duties.
The Snow Crash solution was better, though, in that it just injected a an animal tranquilizer into the assailant.
On the other hand, PCP, ketamine and other psychotic dissociatives are commonly used as animal tranquilizers. So that might not improve the situation a whole lot.
Not if you just randomly selected any ol' animal tranquilizer, no.
It strikes me that "rape is about power, not sex" and "sexual coercion/date rape is rape" are, on the surface, incompatible. True and interesting? Neither?
Volokh made the Snow Crash connection to this product last week. Perhaps some of us refrained from making a similar comment out of hopes for originality.
This is a review in the NY Times of a book called "A Natural History of Rape"that seems to make the case that rape is about sex, from an evolutionary perspective at least. The authors argue that it's about reproduction at its most basic level. Though the review points out a few flaws with the argument in the bok.
19: Huh. Date rape consists of violating the "no means no" dictum, no? If that's the case, when assent is not given, and unwanted physical acts are performed, how is that *not* about power?
It strikes me that "rape is about power, not sex" and "sexual coercion/date rape is rape" are, on the surface, incompatible.
I'm not even sure if date rape and "jumping out of the bushes" rape are the same sorts of behaviors. It seems like it would be much easier for a person to rationalize date rape; not so much with the stranger-in-a-dark-alley kind.
Except for a very small fraction of truly deranged psychos.
Re-reading Rob's 8, I'm now thinking that Rob meant "Except for a very small fraction of truly deranged psychos, for whom rape really is about power not sex;" rather than "Except for a very small fraction of truly deranged psychos who still believe that 70s feminist hoohaw." If that's the case, the overt snark of my 11 was misplaced.
Although I am kinda proud of the fake journal name, anyway.
Two comments:
1) Query whether the existence of the Rapex won't have an assault-discouraging effect well in excess of its use. In the US, there is a service called Lojack that provides a radio transmitter for your car that allows the police to locate it if stolen. It has significantly deterred auto theft even though relatively few people subscribe. This product could have a similar effect.
2) The feminist lawyer and theorist Catharine MacKinnon has remarked, "If it's only about violence, why doesn't he just hit her?" (I'm quoting from memory here.) Her broader point is that male sexuality in general is tied into violence against women, but you don't have to accept that broader point to appreciate the rhetorical question.
25 is the correct interpretation of 8. Sorry for the ambiguity. Also sorry, but I'm far too lazy to offer sources for the things I say.
re: 26(1)
Ian Ayres provides a good summary of that study (which he also conducted) here (scroll down). The obvious disanalogy is the great difficulty of checking for Lojack and the relative ease of checking for use of ths product.
What about Abner Louima? Not the typical rape case, but also explicity not about teh butt saxxxy.
Also, though, it seems that it can be a little from column A, a little from column B: rapists must get some sort of sexual charge out of overpowering a woman; otherwise, why would their penises be erect?
Maybe I'm oversimplifying.
I believe that many evolutionary biologists and philosophers who study biology think A Natural History of Rape is crapola. Here's a really tendentious review of an interdisciplinary book of essays criticizing the book.
"rape is about power, not sex"
We have to decide what we think this means first. Is it a claim about the urges and motivations of rapists? Or is it an attempt to define rape itself, along the lines of "what makes 'rape' 'rape' is not that it's sexual, but that there's an imbalance of power in the sexual interaction"? Or is it a useful rhetorical stance, intended to rightly move the focus of discussions of rape out of the context of sexual interactions, with their ambiguous rules, into that of violent interactions, for which we have clearer boundaries? Seems like it makes a big difference how we answer.
Labs, I generally consider the jump-from-the-bushes kind of rape to be about some form of mental illness. (Disclosure: I knew a guy who turned out to be a serial rapist, breaking into the apartments of women who lived alone. The only way I can reconcile the nice guy I knew with what showed up in the newspapers a few years after I lost touch with him is by figuring that he must have had some sort of chemical imbalance.)
Date rape, OTOH, is surely motivated by a desire for sex. My contention, and the theory as I understand it, is that at the point one's desire for sex overcomes the others right to decline the sex, it becomes, ipso facto, about power. The line becomes a lot fuzzier when you throw in miscommunication, alcohol or other drugs, etc.
Re 33: That link expresses typical outrage over evolutionary psychology. I have *no* idea whether or not it's justified, not having read the the book or the whole review, but I can point out that a commonly made error in these criticisms is mistaking an argument that this or that behavior is an evolved adaptation as an argument that the behavior should be acceptable. An evolutionary explanation is not an excuse and should not be used that way. This was a big problem in the recent uproar over some recent book arguing that the female orgasm was an evolutionary spandrel; while the author had no intentions at all of belittling it, a whole bunch of people took her to be.
On the other hand, some evo. psych. authors make the same error themselves, and specifically and explicitly try to excuse the behavior, and that's condemnable.
Joe,
Maybe I'm oversimplifying.
Power is arousing.
On a separate topic - as a playwright, could you define the word "bungle" when used in this lyric?
"Years past all lived in the jungle,
scooping out a bungle, nature's bowl."
Excuse or belittle, as the case may be, depending on whether the behavior in question is supposed to be an adaptation or a spandrel, or something else.
pdf--OK, though I think the link there is an actual biologist, who probably wouldn't make that mistake. As I understand the book it didn't. Anyway, I do reading an article on ev. psych. that basically began "Evolutionary psychologists often complain that their research is evaluated in terms of terrible pop-cultural examples like blah, blah, and a natural history of rape instead of the good stuff, so let's look at that...." The point is, I'm pretty sure that that book isn't universally considered a shining example of the best that ev. psych. can do, naturalistic fallacies aside.
(The article concluded that ev. psych. faces serious challenges as a research paradigm anyway.)
Tripp --
As a lyricist, that use of the word "bungle" is defined as "groping desperately for a rhyme".
That's the short answer. If I were you, I'd make up my own definition, just for performance purposes.
Re 40. Man, for a second I was trying to figure out how "bungle" would make sense with that literal meaning. Now my head's spinning.
It was actually supposed to be "bunghole."
Ah. As suspected, Chopper and I give the appearance of disagreeing because of the ambiguity of "it's about power." I was taking this to be a claim about motivations. Of *course* a coercive act is an exercise of power, but that makes the claim about rape trivially true. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Matt, on a more careful reading I see that you're right--the book would appear to be about as scientifically grounded as Darwin's Black Box, and perhaps more pernicious.
Joe,
If I were you, I'd make up my own definition, just for performance purposes.
Oh, yeah, I've heard that before.
Director: Cross to stage right. It balances the picture. You provide the motivation.
Weiner -- you might be right in 43. That would certainly be consistent with the scat humor of the show.
Bop-diddley-do-wop. Yeah.
Labs, or an expert in the language Labs speaks, could you please define "trivially true." I feel like I'm not grasping a term of art, here.
True, but doesn't tell us anything new, interesting, or contested.
Weiner could be right, and he was clever to suggest "bunghole," but I think I'll use that as a mnemonic device only.
Heck, the thing goes by so fast I doubt anyone will even notice, anyway.
Tripp -- or, they'll just use context clues and fill in their own definition, and presume that there's some definition of "bungle" that they were unaware of.
I say we blame the Soviet-style censorship regime at MTI.
Wouldn't, you know, a gun be a better rape self-defense implement? Guns have the added benefit of working to counter non-rape crimes, which are also very common in South Africa.
Ah. Thanks, w/d.
Labs, I'm not sure we're on the same page yet. Because I don't think that the "it's about power" concept *was* trivially true when it was initially introduced. That is to say, could you clarify for me what *you* thought "it's about power" meant?
Joe,
Oh - I get it. Nothing kills a show like too much explicitness. Except maybe bad subject matter. Or a bad title even. That could kill a show pretty good.
Well, if you keep the dentata in all the time it works even if you're surprised. You have to worry about whether you can get to your gun in time. Something like that, maybe.
Also, doesn't a product like this sort of put undue preventative burdens on the victims, which they can later be blamed for not taking on in the event of a rape?
"Sucks that it happened, but you shoulda had those plastic Jaws of Life installed in your bits!"
Also, isn't South Africa the home of the car manufacturer that will provide flamethrowers as an accessory?
Chopper: I thought it meant "rape is motivated not by the desire for sex, but the desire to place others in a subservient position." If "about power" means only "involves the exercise of power" it's less interesting, since that seems to fall almost definitionally out of what rape is.
And matt, you know that was a little reference to the other thread about you, right?
Labs: Ah. I may not be being very clear then. Try this: the rapist's desire for sex is such that he is willing to coerce another person (physically or verbally) into sexual acts, and said coercion is the equivalent of a speech act declaring "My needs are more important than your desires and rights as a full human being. By declaring that my needs as more important, I am declaring you to be less than me."
I haven't been raped, I have no close friends who have been raped (who have told me that they have been raped), but my understanding is that much of the trauma of being raped is in the humiliation of being treated as someone who can simply be *used* at will to meet another's needs. (I am operating from limited knowledge here, so please correct me, anyone, if my understanding is off base).
Re 57: I think a thread on feministe about this made the analogy to robbery and locking your house door. If you leave your front door unlocked and someone robs you blind, you're going to get *some* of the blame. But the reason this is is that door-locking is such a widespread practice. These little penis-eater things would have to get pretty common for that sort of social expectation to happen.
But that would really suck. It's terrible to have to make women responsible for their not getting raped. Not to say that it isn't good for women to take some active precautions, but that it isn't negligent for them not to.
I don't know that carrying a gun around would help. I heard a statistic somewhere that people that carry concealed weapons tend to die a lot sooner or something. It would probably take a lot of training for it to be effective, anyway.
Chopper, this is really interesting, but I need to work on this paper. I don't think we disagree about anything large though-- I was just puzzling over the power claim, but not in a consequential way.
I have little knowledge of the history and context of the "it's about power, not about sex" claim, never having taken a women's studies class or something of the like, but I thought it meant that rapists are motivated, at least unconsciously, by the desire to restrict the freedom of movement and behavior of rape victims and so affect the victims' self concept to preserve the dominant status of the rapist or the rapist's class. I think this is sometimes true. Prison rapes and wartime rapes (as in kill all the men/rape all the women) definitely fall into this category, although I'm sure they have a component of sexual gratification as well. The rape scene in Boys Don't Cry also did, as would any version of a "Becky Sue/Billy Bob just don't act right" rape. On the other hand, I think there are plenty of other rapes, including jump from the bushes rapes, that are primarily about a sexual disorder of the rapist--that they find the nonconsensual suffering of their victim, and their own power, arousing. And then there are just assholes who may not even be getting off on the power, per se, but have internalized a lot of rape myths so they don't actually believe they're doing anything wrong; they're just taking the thing they're entitled to. But all of these categories can bleed into each other, and to say that someone is consciously exercising power does not mean they're not also sexually gratified.
MY, I suppose the presumable advantage of the whats-it is that your hands can be restricted and it still works and it can't be used against you. I'm agnostic is to whether it would actually be helpful.
re 61 -- from friends who have suffered both acquaintance rape (would you believe "acquaintance rape" figures in 8 of the first 10 Google hits for plain old "acquaintance"?) and jump-from-the-bushes molestation, I get the sense that each tends to produce a different form of humiliation. Acquaintance rape produces a feeling of lack of social worth, as if you've come to believe you're completely domitable in some or all situations. Stranger rape produces more of a learned helplessness, where faith in the safety of the world is stripped away.
Excuse the gross generalizations from a very small sample.
since that seems to fall almost definitionally out of what rape is
The same could be said for every other crime with a victim, for that matter.
I'd be very surprised if the "rape is about power" idea isn't supposed to pertain to the rapist's motivation. I've certainly had conversations/classes* where the person arguing for that position explicitly maintained that it was. This idea was then then used to assert or imply that generally resolving the power imbalance problems facing women would help to resolve the problem of rape (about which I'm agnostic). But perhaps I misunderstood what the speaker was trying to convey.
* not necessarily classes where the instructor should be assumed to be representative of feminist theory, though
63: Likewise, Labs. I have to go to class, so I would have been ducking out of the conversation anyway.
The rape is about power idea evolved in response, so I understand, to the idea that rape was about really really needing sex sooo badly, usually as a result of something the woman did (what she wore, got him excited, bitch was askin' for it, hey a man's got needs, etc). 'It's not about sex' is meant to challenge the now disavowed notion that rape results because women are prick teases or men are just crazed sex fiends.
In that context, I think it points to the rapist's motivation; part of it is about sex, but part of it is about power over another person. Surely it has to do something with sex; but why rape is a different question, involving some humiliation/entitlement/power/most effective way to shame someone.
Back after a while had to go to a class. After reading the subsequent comments, I feel I should point out that I haven't read or know much of anything about A Natural History of Rape; stumbled across it while googling the topic after reading this post. Just felt it might have been relevent.
And now back to lurning.
Didn't intend my posts to be directed at you--just in the nature of spreading the bad word about the book.
And matt, you know that was a little reference to the other thread about you, right?
71 was me. Didn't mean to go all anonymous.
re: 65. Child rape is also very wrong, it should be noted. (Morally wrong, I mean).
re 65 - I know some victims of each type, as well, and it's almost my impression that it's harder to deal with acquaintance rape, because there is much more of a sense that you did something wrong--both internally and in the perception of others.
It's not that I would say that one is preferable to the other--my notion would be that stranger rape would be the more violent. Although that may be a myth. In one of the acquaintance rapes I'm thinking of, well, I could go into details of how violent it was. But the story makes me kind of sick, so I don't think I will.
What is to stop the violent would-be rapist from beating or killing the woman who locks a spiky trap onto his penis?
Is he supposed to just slink away muttering, "You got me fair and square. Good one."
Maybe you'll find the answer if you insert a spike in your penis? My guess is that 95% of males won't be able to mutter "mom" after that, much less "You got me fair and square."
It's not a spike in the penis, if I understand correctly. It's a number of short barbs that prevent the device from being pulled off.
I am not willing to self-experiment, but I imagine a guy could attack someone even with a Rapex in place, especially if he is a violent sort to begin with and is now enraged.
If that's all there is it's crap. But it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a device that, once it gloms on to the guy's penis, sends him into a world of pain where further aggressive action drops down pretty far on the rapist's acute to-do list.
re: 73
Child rape is also very wrong, it should be noted.
I agree!
(Morally wrong, I mean).
I agree! And wonder why the qualifier was necessary!
I stopped an 'acquaintance rape' once. [As in kicked down a door and physically put a stop to it]
The shocking thing was the attitude of the police when they turned up. They really didn't take it seriously. They weren't going to ignore it, but they made it pretty clear that unless the girl concerned was prepared to be steadfast in her desire to pursue the case legally, the guy would probably just get stern telling off....
First of all, that's badass.
As for the cops, I'd guess that they've encountered so many women who don't want to press charges that they don't proceed unless the woman impresses her seriousness upon them. Not an ideal situation, but the cops aren't necessarily bad people.
To be honest, the cops were later proved 'right' in the sense that the girl concerned rekindled, very briefly, her relationship with this guy. [Despite what had happened]
However, they didn't know that at the time, and they could definitely have handled it in a more serious manner.
Yeah, I don't have much time for the "but won't the rapist just KILL you now" arguments. Women often don't fight back in rapes because they've been so paralyzed with fear that they will be killed or hurt more that they don't realize that if they just screamed or kicked, or ran away or something, there was help nearby.
I'm not blaming the victim here--obviously, people in a dangerous situation should do whatever they feel is necessary to get out of it whole. I'm saying there's a learned helplessness that's really pushed on women, and it explains why women so often freeze up or feel their options are more limited than they actually are.
If our fear is men will kill women, my counterpoint would be to put poison on the device. With an antidote in a separate keychain container, so women could use it in case they pricked themselves getting this thing in and out.
But more importantly, my point is let's worry about the backlash when and if it comes. I think it would be good for men to be a little nervous that if they stuck their pecker in a hole without saying "pretty please," they might not get it back. Might make them think twice before the sticking, and I fail to see how that's not all good. For decent guys, there's no change in their behavior (which is great, because they're great) and pushy date rape boy will probably listen for those "um, really, I like you but I don't want to do this yet..." a little more clearly, won't he?
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