Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Foreword
- Warm thanks
- The point
- 1 Why are people violent?
- 2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
- 3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
- 4 The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
- 5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity
- 6 Honor and shame
- 7 War
- 8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
- 9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed?
- 10 The prevailing wisdom
- 11 Intimate partner violence
- 12 Rape
- 13 Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration
- 14 Torture
- 15 Homicide: he had it coming
- 16 Ethnic violence and genocide
- Chapter 17 Self-harm and suicide
- 18 Violent bereavement
- 19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
- 20 The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model
- 21 Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather than using some other medium?
- 22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
- 23 How do we end violence?
- 24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research implications
- The dénouement
- References
- Index
12 - Rape
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Foreword
- Warm thanks
- The point
- 1 Why are people violent?
- 2 Violence is morally motivated to regulate social relationships
- 3 Defense, punishment, and vengeance
- 4 The right and obligation of parents, police, kings, and gods to violently enforce their authority
- 5 Contests of violence: fighting for respect and solidarity
- 6 Honor and shame
- 7 War
- 8 Violence to obey, honor, and connect with the gods
- 9 On relational morality: what are its boundaries, what guides it, and how is it computed?
- 10 The prevailing wisdom
- 11 Intimate partner violence
- 12 Rape
- 13 Making them one with us: initiation, clitoridectomy, infibulation, circumcision, and castration
- 14 Torture
- 15 Homicide: he had it coming
- 16 Ethnic violence and genocide
- Chapter 17 Self-harm and suicide
- 18 Violent bereavement
- 19 Non-bodily violence: robbery
- 20 The specific form of violence for constituting each relational model
- 21 Why do people use violence to constitute their social relationships, rather than using some other medium?
- 22 Metarelational models that inhibit or provide alternatives to violence
- 23 How do we end violence?
- 24 Evolutionary, philosophical, legal, psychological, and research implications
- The dénouement
- References
- Index
Summary
In this chapter we consider moral motives for rape. We must emphasize again that our focus is on the perpetrator’s motives, not the victim’s experience or perception of the act, and not our own moral values. From the victim’s perspective (and the reader’s, and our own), the rapist is the epitome of evil – it seems that his actions could not possibly be morally motivated. But as we have already learned, perpetrators do not see themselves the way that victims do, and, as we will demonstrate in this chapter, by our definition, many rapists’ actions are morally motivated to regulate relationships.
It might seem obvious that most rapes are primarily instrumental acts in which the perpetrator just uses the victim like an object for simple sexual satisfaction, and this is sometimes more or less how the perpetrator perceives his action. But more often, forcing someone to be a sex partner against her will is unequivocally meant as the enforcement of AR hierarchy. The rapist controls the victim, making her obey his will, in order to assert his superior AR position, especially when he feels his superiority has been challenged. A man may rape because he feels entitled to demand sex from his partner. He may rape because he feels that his victim has demeaned herself by her “provocative” dress, behavior, or unaccompanied presence in an inappropriate locale – so, since she’s “asking for it,” he’s entitled to give it. Likewise, a man may rape because his attitude is that women in general are “whores” and “sluts” who are “asking for it” and deserve what their immoral status evokes. Other men rape to avenge either the victim’s affront to the rapist’s dignity, or to collectively avenge offenses committed by women, where women are all equivalent. These men feel that they have been humiliated by a woman or women, and avenge their humiliation by degrading the humiliator or any other woman who serves as a substitute. Gang rapes are often motivated by the metarelational desire – the “need” – to belong: raping together is an act of consubstantial assimilation, connecting the rapists in a CS relationship through their body fluids like blood brothers (on consubstantial assimilation, see Fiske, 2004; Fiske and Schubert, 2012).
- Type
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- Information
- Virtuous ViolenceHurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships, pp. 168 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014