BE... what country... Belgium?

Legal consequences tend to not to discourage rape past a certain threshold. If rapists are legally put to death that makes them more likely to kill the victim.

I draw the line when it's a real state's legal system that's doing this, and when it stops preventing there from being more victims, and when the reasoning is wrong.

Testosterone is not the rape hormone. Removing it does not fix someone's hatred of women.

I do want to bring up, that, from what I've heard, the victim in the Jacob Geller stuff didn't want to come forward about it. I cannot imagine what it's like to become a social media sensation this way. I know the truth is out now, but like I don't think she wants to see randos chiming in with their based opinions on all the terrible things the legal system should have done to her abuser. It just really puts me off that this was released without her involvement.

I've seen it so often that people ignore the victim and instead go about focusing all attention on enacting violence against the rapist. It's basically like a cue for the "good men" to be allowed to pretend to be protectors of women via performative extreme violence against the "bad men." Ofc it isn't just men doing this, but still.

I'm not like an anti-violence person btw I do believe we should have feminist violence, but I believe in the violence necessary to abolish patriarchy, not legalist and performative ultra-super punishment against the endless stream of rapists that patriarchy creates; it doesn't help to whack the moles harder if you don't address why they keep showing up and it definitely can't un-rape people. If we just used half of the mental energy we spend fantasizing about creative ways to punish rapists on actually helping victims... imagine.

bingo, very well put.

Yes.
Waffles, beer, saxophone, fries and chocolate.
A goverment that has more layers than inhabitants. Only half as loud as our neighbours to the north but we're twice as stuck up and repressed about our emotions.
Our history is rich and filled with bloodshed (and some dark shame). And our roads are holy.
I mean they have a lot of holes in them.

Huzzah, Belgium.

You know that middle aged and older women are also sexually assaulted.

Yes. For some reason I thought we were talking about the Cornell case but I guess my brain short circuited?

no? is there a better way to look at it?

Good point. However, cases are likely varied and complicated, whether explained by misogyny, compulsions, poor impulse control, bad role models etc. Different cases require different solutions.

Maybe it would help if I understood what you meant by ruined?

Social impact (both negative attention from peers, along with recurring trauma of seeing your abuser get away with minimal punishment), emotional trauma, swlf-harm, loss of ability to trust (especially bad when it was someone you knew and thought was safe), and even impacts to job/school due to the event, to name a handful I've witnessed.

Are you talking overall or only focusing on the immediate future?

Sorry, I thought my parenthetical made it clear I was talking about the immediate future

I agree with you.

I just wanted to point out something I think a lot of people don't want to confront when they say something like"I've never done anything remotely similar to these men"

You remember not having done anything like the men, and I assume you're talking about the Cornell rapists, but the line is much more blurry than people want to admit.

You don't remember making anyone uncomfortable and I'm not saying the following is true for you because I can't know... But social interactions aren't a flow chart and feedback isn't always clear and this becomes even more true when it comes to sex and emotions.

Maybe you asked too many times and they gave in but to you it was once or twice. Maybe you misinterpreted a signal and they went with it half heartedly. Maybe they didn't say stop or tell they didn't want to because they were afraid it would ruin a good time. Etc. These are all things that could be labeled as sexual harassment and when sex is involved, rape.

Shit can be much more nuanced, awkward and unclear and especially to people who have trouble reading social cues. Women are often afraid to say no because of the potential for violence or more commonly, the social consequences.

It's soothing to demand justice and see situations like that and feel superior to them but I would be willing to say that 90% or more of men have done something that goes right up to the line, especially in college when people are learning to be people and having their first sexual encounters and not having parents etc to hold them accountable.

None of this is to defend rapists and idk the solution outside of raising my son to know what consent is and how important communication is.

The woman's life is already ruined, so why not ruin theirs too?

I don't think defining the entire lives of sexual assault victims by their assault, and painting them as foreseeably "ruined", is the cool rad feminist take that you seem to think it is

Well the notion of a social contract arose concurrently with the rise of capitalism, and renewed campaigns to force women into spheres of domestic and reproductive labor.

So when talking about women's issues, I don't think Social Contract theory is exactly the gold standard

...that feels pedantic. call it an agreement or a covenant then. point being if you break the rules of society you can't be protected by them.

I don't think that's pedantic at all. Social Contract Theory arose in a particular place and time, under specific conditions.

Conditions which also involved a renewed subjugation of women in the name of that social contract.

The Hobbesian origins of the social contract are, notably, not merely an agreement, but an arrangement entered into by citizens, with a Sovereign who will protect them from themselves. Without a powerful state apparatus to create security, people exist in a state of nature where life is "nasty, brutish, and short".

This is historically inaccurate, and Hobbes was formulating his theories as a reaction to the English Civil War, which he was living through. But maybe you can see the parallels to this thread, which unnerve me.

People in this thread, in the same of an ostensible social contract, are desiring that state power be utilized to punish perpetrators of sexual violence in ways that are themselves also quite violent.

This feels emotionally satisfying, but it's an instinct that can hardly be trusted to protect the rights of women. When the social contract this violence is meant to enforce is being carried out by men, by a state populated by men, especially wealthy men, who run that state in their interests as wealthy men, I'm not sure it can be trusted to do what it claims to do.

That said, I don't think the solution is is to simply have more women cops, or what have you. Rather that any reasonable justice system ought to be rooted in genuine rehabilitation rather than the spectacle of punishment, and that this rehabilitative justice system he attached to a state project which is rooted, not in principles of bourgeois contracts, but in principles of solidarity, and providing all citizens with their basic needs.

Not only does this cut down on violence against women insofar as the material instigators of that violence are less common, but that it would ideally lift up women to leave abusive situations, and to speak up about them more readily.

Punitive 'justice' often prevents victims from coming forward because the abuser is often someone the victim also knows and loves on some level.

So long story short, social contract theory encourages punitive solutions to problems where punitive punishment is often a hindrance to real justice.

Death sentence is the only way to go.

well today i learned that it's an actual theory. i was rather looking at it from the paradox of tolerance perspective.

"if you don’t address why they keep showing up and it definitely can’t un-rape people. If we just used half of the mental energy we spend fantasizing about creative ways to punish rapists on actually helping victims…"

....

Instead of just helping victims why not we create a world where becoming a victim is almost impossible? Things like universal mental health care for young peoole, of all genders, who are having thoughts of becoming violent so that they rarely ever do become violent towards their partner? And also univeraal acccess to housing so that a partner isnt stuck with a violent partner cause they have no access to housing elsewhere?

I do not mean reforms. I mean complete revolution!

These are just a few uncompletely-thought-out suggestions that Ive thought up. There are other peoole out there who have thought up my idea more thoroughly and have more and better suggestions as to how to make such a world a possibility.

The harsh truth humanity has to face is that stories like this will keep on and keep on and keep on coming out again until humanity substantiates a substantial permannent change in all societies to ensure that committing intimate partner violence or SA or domestic violence is almost an impossibility because the average person innately realizes how self-destructive it would be for them.

Edit: ALso I was able to find a narrative review on sexual violence of both adulfs and children and they have suggestions as to how to prevent both forms of sexual violence by giving children mucu deeper education than we cureently have on the importance of sexual boundaries and bodily boundaroes and the importance of embracing each of our identities (for example 'gay conversion therapies' are still legal in most parts of the planet if my memory about tje topic is correct even though they shouldnt be legal anywhere!) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6283686/

indeed!

But I will also say we should try to make life as 'fair' as we possibly can for all humans.

So if a human deliberately and maliciously did something awful to anither human they should be forced by the community to be very publicly known for what theu did and bs forced to live a 'very unfair' life as a result of their actions. And they should be constantly reminded by allmemmbers of the community that the reason why they are forced to live this very unfair life is becausr of what they knowlingly did that harmed thst person or those people. I see this as fair....

We should also treat the genocidaires who participated in The Bosnian and Palestinian Genocide the same way ....

But huumanity will never listent to us even though we are right about this😅🤷🏿‍♂️. They would rather live peacrfully next to literal genocidaires and pedophilic politicians 😂🤣

its good that she said that the average male has to be the one to hold other males accountable when things like this come up and thats true. . And indeed, it is males who need to play an important part in creation of a feministic socoety where all genders are finally treated equitably. I think that non-males have the most importsnt role to play in the creation of such a society.

But in my opinion these people who have been shown to be guilty of SA and intimate partner violence need to be MUCH MORE than just prevented from running in office .... 👀

Ya. There was that one survey of rapists and people guilty of SA who admitted that it wasnt a lack of access to enough sex that made them committ the acts they did .Most of them admitted thst it was having power over another human being that was their main motivation. I am sure that this is still true.

I think they even found that SAers actuallt admitted that they had MORE sex than the control population and then STILL went on to commit SA...

So clesrly they dont care about their lack of access to enough sex and their hormones are not the reason t hey do what they do. They jsut do it causr they were raised to be an asshole or the communities around them have convinced them that being an asshole with control over other people's bodies is somehow a 'cool thing' ...

Yeah, that makes sense to me then. I think we're on the same page. I thought you were saying "permanently ruined."

TL:DR nuance, personal accounts as a victim, and a call for better consent education, better communication of misunderstandings in all aspects of life, and a shift towards an attitude of restorative justice

I get that, and yeah I'm a woman who has been violated in such ways. Once by someone who I had slept with many times, but we were drifting apart as I met my wife and it was easier to have sex than to have the uncomfortable conversation I would've had to have had I given and held a firm no. That and a far less ambiguous incident between them and a friend of mine were both tied to their lack of emotional regulation from BPD. I definitely don't think that person should face consequences for anything they've done to me, even if I would probably advise my younger self not to get involved with them in the first place, and absolutely to have the fight instead of the sex.

I also have another incident with a woman (who also had BPD) who kept negotiating away every no I gave, especially the ones that contained reasons (turns out it's really hard to say "your face and personality are both very unattractive to me"). That one was much more obvious and serious to the point that by the time I was able to break away I was having nightmares of her. It was absolutely a form of violation and had we been in college together or something I would have deserved protection from having to interact with her, even if I personally don't know if I think she should be arrested for it.

Things like these are within the blurry part of the bad side of the line, and in many ways can be contrasted to the "fully enthusiastic and everyone is fully intoxicated" sex which is potentially in the blurry part of the good side of the line though if I am a firm believer in one's right to get down while drunk/high. Sex is a messy topic and it often involves people being young and not displaying great judgment and having big feelings. Hell, I've even had sex where there was pain and regret through no fault of anyone.

I think we do need to be teaching that this all is messy, but we also need to be teaching how to ask for consent in a way that's appropriate as well as teaching everyone the confidence to say no even if it means being a buzzkill or ruining someone's mood or whatever else. I was taught abstinence only sex ed, and that didn't prepare me for the "hey, I'm having a great time doing x, but you seem to be reaching for y, but I'm not up for it right now" type conversation or for people trying to pressure me because I keep blunting my "no"s to avoid hurting their feelings, especially with weaponized self depreciation. And with this some basic emotional regulation techniques would be good to teach people.

But yeah I get that young people are often bad at seeing the fact that communication that had seemed clear to everyone resulted in a miscommunication and I find that in all aspects of life that's something we culturally need to work on being better about noticing when it becomes visible and starting a non-judgemental conversation to clear things up.

And all this with the fact that some people are going to keep going right up to the line, some people are going to not care about acting in good faith. Some people will pretend to be naive.

A carcereal attitude will assume all naivete malicious, and all grey areas blacker than the night. It will see my first story and aim to punish rather than to solve the problem. I think when we talk about consent we can easily fall into a carceral mindset. Especially when society encourages us to think that way about sex crimes and yet clearly is more concerned with using that attitude to reinforce existing hierarchies than to pursue justice or help victims.

This carceral mindset also leads to underreporting because most people don't want to respond to what felt like a single minor violation with what feels like disproportionate force. This can be especially true when the violator is marginalized in a way that's associated with disproportionate response or presumption of guilt in sexual violation (racialized people and transfeminized people especially) or when the appropriate response feels like it should be mental health based (the first person who hurt me just needed to continue DBT, the second probably should be kept away from society until she can get far enough along in some form of BPD treatment, but treatment is needed). And that's to say nothing of when the victim is marginalized in a way where they're presumed sexually aggressive against the violator.

I'm a believer in an attitude of restorative justice. First do right by the victim in proportion to the severity, then try to work to help the other party not do anything like it again. When approached naively it can very easily fail to the aforementioned malicious people, but when we prevent our communities from overly relying on any one person and we remain aware of the reality that some people aren't acting in good faith we can create systems that strive to find a balance and actually minimize harm and maximize happiness. And I've seen at the very least the beginnings of something like that in a kink community and I hope it works and spreads.

Sorry about the rambling. I'm tired as hell from the weekend and had some thoughts which snowballed.

Are you saying that because she was assaulted young it will happen again to her in the future? I don't understand the argument. Also even if an older woman is assaulted they can still live a fulfilling life after? This feels pessimistic and defeatist