Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Eh, harassment is harassment.
What ticks me the fuck off is when people call harassment "rape".

[wierd]

rape is when somthing gets inserted against ones will, and is of a sexual nature.

assault is when something is not inserted, but sexual contact happens by force. (groped, et al.)

harassment (to me) is when somebody wont take a hint, or a polite request seriously, and says or does stuff around you on purpose with the sole intent of causing you to feel distress, or compel you to action.

and, finally, sexual dicomfort is what you feel when you are exposed to something sexual that just maks you feel icky.

you dont have a right to not feel icky. people have all kinds of kink they get into, and you have no right to tell them they cant have those feelings or do those things just because you find them icky.

you do have the right to not be sexually bullied (real harassmen), assaulted, or raped.

the definition of harassment currently covers discomfort. it is absurd because of that.

[Rolan7]

Sorry to spam this thread, but I agree with all of that post.  Well said.

[Shadowlord]

Agreed.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

rape is when somthing gets inserted against ones will, and is of a sexual nature.

assault is when something is not inserted, but sexual contact happens by force. (groped, et al.)

harassment (to me) is when somebody wont take a hint, or a polite request seriously, and says or does stuff around you on purpose with the sole intent of causing you to feel distress, or compel you to action.

and, finally, sexual dicomfort is what you feel when you are exposed to something sexual that just maks you feel icky.

you dont have a right to not feel icky. people have all kinds of kink they get into, and you have no right to tell them they cant have those feelings or do those things just because you find them icky.

you do have the right to not be sexually bullied (real harassmen), assaulted, or raped.

the definition of harassment currently covers discomfort. it is absurd because of that.

Eh... I agree with most of this, but if someone does something around you with the knowledge that it will cause you distress, even if their main goal wasn't to cause you distress... could that be harassment?

[wierd]

I would say motive and intent are the instrumental factors.

Say I sing as I walk to the bus stop. say it is "no rain" by blind melon. a person at the bus stop hates that shit, and likes 50cent instead. I do not mean to be offensive to this person, I am just feeling happy and singing a song I like.  am I harassing that person though?  at this point, I say no.

say he asks me not to sing that shit, in a reasonably nice way, but I just sing louder because I dont care what he thinks, and feel he is being a jerk (raining on my favorite song like that!) and needs some grief for it.  am I harassing him  now?  I say yes.

[Reelya]

http://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/

And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

One of those surveys is the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence.

So when only talking about rape, women are raped a lot more. But when talking about sexual assault in the form of intercourse, there's not much disernable gender difference in the data. These numbers are meaningful because they come from the same surveys with almost identical wording for the male / female questions. The only difference was whether the survey respondent had a penis or not.

The problem with only highlighting "rape" statistics is that the definition of rape is virtually a gendered definition. It used to literally be a gendered definition until about 2012, but even now, ideas about sexual politics / gender relations are encoded into how we define which sex is, and is not, rape. e.g. if a woman drugs a man and has sex with him, that's not "rape" according to the textbook definition.

It's only logical that if you ask inherently gendered questions, you get gendered answers, so it's circular logic to claim that differences in rape statistics show some gender difference. When looked at in terms of non-gendered "sexual assault" then the differences basically vanish, as the CDC study shows.

[wierd]

i worded my definition of rape carefully.  with rape, penetration happens. I did not say to who, or where, or even with what..  a man being forced to penetrate is rape, and penetration happens. a woman is forcibly penetrated? that too is rape. a person is forced to take a cucumber up the butt? sill rape.

sexual assualt is when no penetration happens, but it is still forced, and sexual. EG, getting your tits grabbed, or as Mr Trump likes to do "grab em by the pussy", getting felt up, or getting grinded on--all sexual assault.

[Reelya]

i worded my definition of rape carefully.

Sure, that's perfectly fine. But then it's apples and oranges when talking about any specific rape statistics, because your definition is not how the people doing the statistics are doing it.

So there really is a dissonance here: people generally mean the broad non-gendered definition you described when they say rape, but then the cite rape statistics based on the much more narrow (and gendered) definition used by the FBI and CDC.

[Shadowlord]

Or how the people doing the answering think of it.

[Reelya]

That's not how it works. Rape surveys don't mention the word "rape" at all. They describe specific behaviors and ask if those happened to you. That's why these numbers are significant.

e.g. the wording of both the rape and "made to penetrate" questions are "did X happen to you while were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.”

[Shadowlord]

All rape surveys?

[Reelya]

That's not how it works. Rape surveys don't mention the word "rape" at all.

All rape surveys?

Yes. For the last 30 years or so. It was found that if you ask about rape then it's biased by the persons understanding of what is and is not rape, and is open to interpretation. So since about 1985 all reputable surveys have described behavior and ask if that happened. So you ask about behavior, then cross-check that with the legal definition of rape, and you have your rape numbers, but in a way that's not dependent on victims knowing what the definition of rape is.

The CDC studies I mentioned were based on the work of Mary Koss, who was the pioneer in rape victim studies (and was involved with the CDC setting up national victim surveys) and have a lot of her wording intact. That's what gives their numbers especial credence: they're based on the same methodology used by the leading rape campaigners for their headline figures such as "1 in 5".

Can we really scoff at the survey results when they tell us things we don't wish to hear, at the same time as loudly repeat cherry-picked conclusions from the same surveys? The female victimization data from the 2010 survey was widely repeated by the media as backing up the "1 in 5" idea, but the almost-identical male victimization data from the 2010 survey was virtually ignored. That doesn't sound much like objective science.

[Neonivek]

Except here is kind of the thing... The definition of rape is vague.

"Have you ever been coerced into a sexual encounter?"

But lets go further lets use Wierd's definition of rape for a moment here

rape is when somthing gets inserted against ones will, and is of a sexual nature

So... using this definition, a woman who forces herself upon someone... do not constitute rape. Whether it be a man or another woman.

---

That is why I never EVER give much credence to ANY survey on this subject. It is far too easy to manipulate the numbers both up and down AND it is far too easy to have the numbers be wildly inaccurate as well.

And this isn't even getting into "assault and harassment" territory, because even the courts have problems telling which is which sometimes.

For example you know those famos scenes where a woman is insulted and splashes her beverage all over a man's head? Legally that is assault if I remember correctly. How many people would accept that as assault on a survey?

[misko27]

rape is when somthing gets inserted against ones will, and is of a sexual nature

So... using this definition, a woman who forces herself upon someone... do not constitute rape. Whether it be a man or another woman.

Legally It's sexual assault. It being not rape and "merely" sexual assault doesn't make it more ok, which is what you are implying with this question. Rape isn't defined as "the only real sex crime," and if people didn't use it that way - like you are right now - the world would have zero problems about it. The only reason that the difference matters is people attributes immense power to the word rape and use and misuse it all the time.

The solution isn't social progressivism or LGBT rights; it is the universal adoption of linguistic prescriptivism as the highest law of the land. If you use a word wrong, you are shot for crimes against Merriam-Webster.