Brain on rape.

Look, I get it. You trust your brain. I trust my brain. Our brains have served us well in our lives. Wherever we are, we wouldn't be there without our brains. Our brains understand things. When an object is coming toward our head, our brain knows to duck, often before we do! Our brain understands subtle body language and facial expressions that I would never notice. But, sometimes we need to show our brain who's boss. We need to say "no brain, I know you think it's like that, but it's not, it's just not." Sometimes, our brain is so used to being right that it thinks it's better than facts.

For instance, my brain thinks sex is about sex. This is so simple, that my brain is really convinced it's correct on this one. So when my brain hears about a rape, it thinks "that guy must have really wanted to have sex with her." Wrong brain! You see, my brain is not a rapist (thankfully), and so it doesn't really understand how rape works, or why it happens. So my brain might think, maybe that rape wouldn't happen if the victim hadn't been so sexy looking. Because, (my brain figures) then the rapist wouldn't wanted to have sex with her so badly. But, wow, just wow, brain, that's all kinds of wrong. It's factually incorrect. So, sometimes, we have to tell our brain to take a backseat. Us, as a society, we have to take charge, and use facts to over-ride our brain. It doesn't always work, and it's certainly not easy. But in policy and public discourse, it's essential.

Take, for example, the fact that someday I am going to die. Both my brain and I agree on this fact. We, however, disagree on the method of my death. I'm fairly certain that I will die of heart disease, stroke or maybe a car crash someplace near my home. My brain on the other hand is pretty sure I will die in an airplane crash, an armed robbery or from a spider hidden in my shoe. I told you before, sometimes my brain is an idiot. So when a plane goes through some turbulence, my brain makes sure that I'm good and scared, because I'M IN A FLYING TUBE OF METAL! Yet at the same time, my brain will let me shovel bacon cheeseburgers into my mouth like they're tic tacs, without so much as a tiny bit of adrenaline. What's up with that brain? And, really, this isn't a big deal. I'm capable of making decisions in my life. It requires work, and effort, and knowledge, and ordering salad instead of fries (and recognizing that an iceberg lettuce salad with thousand island dressing isn't much better than fries). The real problem emerges when we all start talking together, and making decisions together, as a society and a culture.

You see, it's fine for me to grab the armrest of an airplane with a deathgrip every time the airplane I'm in adjusts its flaps, but if I insist that billions of dollars be shifted from heart disease research into increased airplane safety, well, that's not fine. That's not OK brain! It would result in more people dying, probably me among them.

So, on rape. I get it. Guys, and people closely related to guys, are scared that AT ANY MOMENT some slutty lady will seduce him and then, upon realizing that other people will judge her for voluntarily having sex, accuse him of rape. Then his life will be over. Sure, it's a pretty scary scenario. Your word against hers. It would also be pretty scary to fall from the sky in a giant metal tube. And, here's the thing, the trump card your brain can always play: It does happen! It happens. So no matter what kind of facts we throw at our brain, it can always point this out. But, it's a brain trick. The fact that something is technically possible, doesn't really do us any good in addressing whatever it is we should be addressing.

The facts on the issues of rape are clear. But so many people's brains don't like them. Rapists don't rape for sex. They rape as part of violence, dominance and power. They choose victims based on opportunity. Does that mean they sometimes pick victims who are dressed provocatively? Yes. But it is because the provocative dress or behavior provides an opportunity, not because they it inspires the rapist to want to have sex with that person. Our brains might not get it, but it's how it works. Often, this opportunity is increased because society will assume that that person was "asking for it." The person will know society will assume this. The person will be less likely to report the rapist. Because of us. Our brains' belief that rape is about sex actively empowers rapists to get away with rape. Bad brain! So, we must have the ability to look at reality, and say 'no, brain, that's not right."

Even if we wanted to lower the number of false rape accusations. Lets just pretend that is our priority. Then why are we attacking women for slutty behavior? Aren't those attacks *the exact reason why we think women make up rape accusations*? So now our brain has us both empowering rapists AND incentivising women to accuse innocent young men of rape. After all, if they don't accuse the first guy of rape, then we will use the fact she slept with that first guy so willingly as an example of how she's being stupid by increasing her risk of being raped, because she's a slut.

Our brain says rape is about sex, and then says that therefore sluttiness leads to rape, which results in us empowering rapists to get away with it, AND we creating the very environment that causes our brain to imagine that women are out there "crying rape" all the time. (Guess what brain? They're not! Repeated studies show that false rape accusations occur at the same rate as false accusations for other crimes.)

Back to the airplane analogy. Our rape situation is even worse than redirecting all our heart disease money to excessive airplane safety. It's more like redirecting all our heart disease money to making airplane flaps not make that scary noise. More people will die of heart disease, and, at the same time, just as many airplanes will crash. Because our brain doesn't understand why airplanes crash. Our brain is stupid when it comes to airplanes! We have to spend time to learn about airplanes before we know how they work!

Intuition serves us well in many areas of our lives. Sexual assault is not one of them (neither is airplanes). So, yeah. It takes a lot of work and a lot of knowledge to tell our brains to shut up.

Sexual assault is very real. Somehow this is true despite the fact that we have been slut shaming for quite awhile. So it's time we look at the facts, and tell our brains who's boss.

Do We Restrict the Definition of Rape by Labeling All Rapists Equally Evil?

Rape is a reprehensible crime. In our culture the rapist is the most reprehensible of criminals. On this point, almost everyone would immediately agree.

Yet, as a culture, we have a hard time defining the act of rape. Ben Roethlisberger is a good example of our culture's difficult confrontation with rape. This article does a great job of recounting the Roethlisberger rape, the events around it, and the ways in which he demonstrates the red flags of a sexual predator.

Yet he will go on in public life. Any attempt at criminal prosecution was sunk by shoddy police work. But, it appears there will be few repercussions for Big Ben in the court of public opinion. Many people are prepared to decide that he did not commit rape.

The topic and discussion of rape is well traveled by greater and more informed minds than mine. There's a lot to cover. So I would like to throw just one small and potentially controversial hypothesis into the conversation. That we make it difficult to label all rapes as rapes in the eye of the public, because the rapist is so thoroughly reviled.

It works like this. When confronted with a 'non-violent' rape* (UPDATE: after reading a bit I found the term I should have used here is 'not an over-force rape') a person might have the following thought process: Rapists are evil and irredeemable predators. I don't think Ben Roethlisberger is evil and irredeemable. Therefore, I don't think he committed rape.

At this point we might hear certain lines trotted out. She never hit him. Why didn't she scream? He would stopped if she had done these things. She let it continue. All bullshit. All not factors in whether or not there was rape.

To call what Big Ben did rape, is to exile him to the darkest of places, the deepest of jail cells, never to return. People who are unwilling to do this to Ben the rapist, turn a trick in their own brains and decide that Ben's actions were not 'real rape.'

But Ben might be a bad example. There is lots of evidence, one might point out, that suggests he is pretty evil and pretty irredeemable. That he acted like a sexual predator. There are other examples where this thought process could take hold.

What about a college student who has sex with a girl who is too drunk to properly form consent? He has committed rape by any reasonable definition of the word. Yet many people would hesitate to call this rape. Saying that if she never said 'no' - never pushed back - it can't be rape. Why would reasonable people cling to this view? I suggest that it is because they don't believe the perpetrator is the most evil incarnation of man. In fact, I would suggest that this could even cause confusion among victims. The victim of an acquaintance rape who expresses a confusion about whether she was actually raped, could really be expressing a confusion based on the fact that she doesn't really believe her attacker is evil. After all, she might tell herself, maybe it was her fault for not being more forceful.

These are all disturbing thought processes that help enforce a rape-culture that only considers the most violent sexual assaults rape. Often these excuse phrases are chalked up to confusion about the nature of rape itself. That people need to be educated about consent and sexual action. But, these pro-rape excuses could also result from an insistence that people who commit rape are all equally unsalvageable as human beings.

The reality is that we all know someone, from some point in our lives, who has committed rape. If you went to college it's virtually guaranteed.

I can illustrate with a story told to me by a friend in college. One night, while he was in bed, someone came into his room. She was a friend of his, and he had had a crush on her for awhile. On that night she showed up without warning and climbed into bed with him to try to make out with him. My friend quickly realized that she was too drunk to form words or sentences. He tried to talk to her, but she was unable to respond in any coherent fashion. My friend assured me that he didn't do anything with her, and that she was gone before he woke up in the morning.

If he had had sex with her that would have been rape. It would have been sex without her consent. In such a case, how many people in our society would be willing to assign my friend the label of 'rapist.' Very few. I contend that a criminal conviction would be virtually impossible, even with uncontested facts. So in our reluctance we instead decide that such an act can't be rape, because he's not a rapist.

The unwillingness of people to label rape as rape is frustrating. If there isn't consent, it's rape. The decibel level of the denial of consent isn't relevant. I suggest that we're going to have a hard time pushing back against this reluctance until we start to approach some rapists as salvageable, as redeemable human beings.

Where this idea goes from here is still a work in progress. It's a problem that jail is so poorly equipped to rehabilitate inmates. It's a problem that people like Big Ben are reprehensible sexual predators. This idea can't be seen as saying that some rapes aren't that bad, just that to get some people to see that rape is rape we might have to consider that some rapists can be fixed.

*I'm far from an expert on the subject. But it is my understanding that most rapes that don't involve physical violence still use the inherent threat of violence to corner and isolate the victim. Big Ben is an example. He's well over 6 feet tall and 240 lbs. If he corners a small woman in the corner of a bathroom, I'm loathe to consider this a 'non-violent' encounter, regardless of whether or not blows were exchanged.

How We Know Anti-Choicers are Anti-Sex

The position that a woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term is hardly extreme in this country. It might be a minority held position, but it's a large and vocal minority. Many politicians openly and proudly espouse this view.

The position that a woman who was impregnated due to rape should be forced to carry that child to term is an extreme position. Very few politicians openly espouse this view.

The differing status of these two positions helps us to see the hidden motivations behind the anti-choice agenda: punishing sex. Personally, I don't think that this is the thought process of people who are anti-choice. Rather, I think the anti-sex culture leads to a certain mindset, which leads to certain positions, and those positions are then justified in the mind of the holder.

For the anti-choice crowd the justification is a simple equation:

Life of 'child' > 9 months of mother's time/effort + adoption proceeding

That's the simple equation that is trotted out. Life over short term loss of liberty. Smart liberals even buy into this equation (myself included). We say 'I don't believe that a fetus early during pregnancy is a life, but I think that's an understandable position.' In this way, we accept that this equation is the reason someone is anti-choice, rather than just an after the fact justification.

So lets look at the equation in the situation of a rape. The equation doesn't change. If you believe a fetus is a 'child' then an abortion is still murder. The nature of the events that created that fetus have no bearing on this position. Yet many people who claim to be motivated by this equation would consider a rape exception to be obviously required.

The reality is that pregnancy is a primary 'consequence' of sex. It's used to frighten teenagers into not having sex, along with STD's and getting a bad reputation. Safe, legal abortions threaten to take that consequence away, and we all know that evil deeds should have serious consequences.

When a woman is pregnant, ultimately the anti-choice crowd views it as her fault. She did this to herself. It doesn't matter if she used birth control like the pill or condoms (or if she took abstinence only education: chewed spearmint gum and did it standing up), she is guilty of getting laid. If she didn't want to be pregnant, she shouldn't have had dirty dirty sex. The pregnancy, the adoption, the government telling her what she now cannot do with her body, is the consequence of her wrong action.

But when a woman is raped, none of that feels right. It's not her fault. So the underlying anti-sex motivations aren't there. Despite the fact that it's still a life, despite the fact that it's still 9 months of her liberty at stake, still a lifetime of having a child, the situation has changed. It's changed because she doesn't need to be punished for having sex. In that way the rape exception just makes sense to many anti-choicers, even if they would have a hard time articulating why.

This exact pattern is evident in refusal to support Plan B, while supporting in vitro fertilization that requires the disposal of fertilized eggs. It isn't about life, it's about not letting people get out of the consequences of their dirty dirty sex.

By wrapping itself in 'protection of life' the anti-choice group is the most powerful wing of the anti-sex section of our culture.

P.S. In fairness, there seem to be an increasing number of people who oppose the rape exception for abortion bans. See here. But it's still a minority position among anti-choicers, and another topic entirely.

P.P.S. While I'm on the topic. Can we dispel the whole 'if abortion had been legal, my mom would have aborted me. Do you want me to be dead?' argument. How many people are the result of broken condoms? or failed birth control? of power outages? If I was conceived during a power outage would it make sense for me to oppose a better power grid? "If these redundant power lines had existed 29 years ago I never would have been born, do you wish I was dead?" There are a lots of circumstances that line up to result in a human being of adult age. The 'I wouldn't be here' argument is an intentional distraction from any real discussion of policy implications.

Rape by deception

This story is interesting from a lot of angles: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/07/21/trust-but-verify

At first I really didn't like the idea of rape by deception. It seems like a dangerous slippery slope. I decided that a solid legal standard would be if the perpetrator tells a lie that s/he knows or should know will be a critical factor in the granting of consent. That's a fairly high standard, but we're talking about criminal law, if anything it felt potentially too low. We laugh at characters like Barney on How I Met Your Mother, when he lies his way into a girl's bedroom. Do we want to send him to jail?

Upon further consideration I've realized this is an odd social programming. There is a crime called 'larceny by trick.' If I lie to you in order to convince you to give me your stuff, I've committed a crime. If I lie to you to get you to consent to sexual activity, no crime. Shouldn't our sexually repressed culture be more concerned about chastity than things? I think I'll have to reconsider what is a fairly patriarchal view that boys lying and tricking their way to sex is just boys being boys.