THESE DARK THOUGHTS I HAVE...

TRIGGER WARNING:

Below the cut I will be asking rhetorical questions and writing conceptually about the nature sexual assault and/or violence which may be triggering to survivors. The descriptions themselves will not be graphic in nature but I thought I should include this warning as a courtesy.

    I've heard it said and have read it repeatedly online that 1 in 4 college women will become victims of rape or of attempted rape. I regard it both with shock and disbelief. Shock, because holy shit that's a lot...like really, a lot and disbelief because knowing I couldn't bring myself to do that to a woman, even ones I've really been frustrated by, makes it difficult for me to project how more than just a few monstrous men could do such a thing.

    But no, my mind was piqued by another statistic found both in the original article linked and this one here, which was the basis of my thoughts leading to this entry I was supposed to write over a month ago already.

    That statistic said that "[o]ne in 12 male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape."

     Did that catch your attention? 1 in 4 versus 1 in 12. The percentage of women being raped does not equal the percentage of men doing the rape. It doesn't even come close. The other article I linked pegs it at 6% of men (about 1 in 16). Sticking with the former statistic, three times as many women are raped than there are men committing those rapes.

     What does that mean outside the obvious that many of the men committing these rapes are serial rapists? And what I'm asking is, and I'm not sure how to phrase it, is what does that represent from...let's call it, an evolutionary perspective?

     Like, these men are predators right? Sexual predators. They want sex, right? I know the narrative is that rape is not about sex, it's about power but that doesn't seem right. Author Steven Pinker argued against the "rape is about power" narrative in his book The Blank Slate. I'm sure the answer lies somewhere in-between. Rape would bear a percentage of both power and a percentage of desire for sex.

     But I mean it can't be a simple overpowering thing. There's gotta be more to it, especially when "84 percent of the women who are raped knew their assailants." Like, do rapists have a strategy and are the women who are raped more vulnerable to this strategy?

     I know I'm treading dangerously close to blaming women for their rapes but that's not what I mean. I don't know how to ask these kinds of questions correctly and I do apologize for the inadvertent offense I am likely to cause. But I do wonder if women who have been raped were already statistically more likely to be raped in the first place? It's not a justification. I guess you could think of it like moths whose coloration makes them look like tree bark so that birds cannot easily see them. Some are born white and others, black - very unlike tree bark. They stand out and thus are easy prey for predatory birds. It's not impossible for such moths to survive to a reproductive age, but it's also unlikely. They were statistically more likely to end up as bird food when compared to their brethren.
     I'm already working on the assumption that rapists are fucked up in the head but does it stand to reason that those who are raped have a complementary psychological disposition leaving them vulnerable to the predatory actions of a rapist? Is that disposition, if it exists (and I think it might considering some people are much more suggestible and easier to manipulate than others), a result of nature or nurture or some combination thereof?

     I'm trying to look at it mathematically, stripping the specifics to leave the generalized variables because it doesn't seem as simple as RAPIST + WOMAN = RAPE. Like, that could happen as simply as stated, but I would think that the minority of cases. I can't simply shake the idea that there is another variable or variables required for that equation to be true. The equation as presented reminds me of the Pythagorean Theorem. a² + b² = c² is only a special instance of the true equation (as for a rape example, I would say it would be when it's presented on television as the random woman being attacked by a masked man in a public place which, based on the statistics provided, is certainly the minority of rape cases). It only works when applied to a right triangle. The true equation is the Law of Cosines, a² + b² - 2ab(cosγ) = c². The cosine of 90° is zero, cancelling out the third term. And if that's the case, what's the 2ab(cosγ)?

     I say this because it seems strange that so relatively few men actually engage in rape (or rapity rape rape behavior) compared to the number of female victims of this crime. Is it simply a matter that "[o]nly one out of 10 rapes are actually reported [and r]apes by someone the victim knows are the least likely to be reported"? I could see how this alone would explain the ability for these 6-8% of men to commit multiple rapes over their lifetimes but why would report rates be so low? Is it simply societal pressure or is it more shame? Shame, like the kind of shame one would feel when realizing they had been scammed by a con artist or pressured into overpaying for something. I mean, if someone conned you out of your money, you would be both embarrassed to report the crime and to admit it to friends and family. You would be afraid of the negative judgement which would result; how you should've known better...
     Again, it is not my intention to equivocate rape with a scam...just the source of the feeling. Shame that you could've fallen victim to such a terrible crime. Shame that you should've been able to see it coming and avoid it. I don't know...

     I'm sure I'll come up with additional thoughts after posting. Maybe I'll come back with an addendum.