The Pros And Cons Of Rape

At the beginning of this school year Jessica Valenti, a columnist for the guardian, wrote about rape. She stated that in America people are very concerned about rape in universities but didn’t really pay attention to what she called invisible rape. Invisible rape as she describes is the rape we never hear about. The people that are usually involved in this kind of sexual violence are homeless, prisoners, mentally ill people, disabled, children, sex workers and addicts. Most of these mentioned come from a lower class. This raises a question. Does social class affect the probability of being sexually abused? Most of the studies done about sexual violence are centered in race, sexual orientation and college campuses but in most of these are somewhat

Working women are seen as promiscuous and vulgar. “The Girls Next Door (a reality TV show) portrays young women describing their sexualized behavior as empowering and positive. The more sexual they behave, the more they are rewarded in the form of attention, material rewards, and monetary success.” (Cato & Carpentier, 2010, p 275) This just adds to the already bad image that lower income women have had for centuries. These descriptions about women make them less credible as rape victims in the courts and in public opinion. If a woman is seen as too sexy then they are asking for it. If women seem laud and immoral then they are lying to the court in order to gain something. These ideas are in the minds of many people. Most cases of rape that go to court are decided by one thing, consent. Did the woman give consent for that sexual act? But because women are seen as ‘cheap’ “women are thought to have already consented to all forms of sexual activity” (Lee, 1997). How a woman looks or act does not mean they have given

Rapists are product of “defective urban cultures that espouse perverse ideals of masculinity”(Bourke, 2007). This idea of men having to be stronger than women has been seen through many cultures. Sexual violence is seen as one of the ways in which working class men demonstrate masculinity. In a study done to 175 nineteen year olds about “Hypermasculinity Inventory and a newly constructed Aggressive Sexual Behavior Inventory” was found that the “majority of the men used force or exploitation to gain sex from dates.”(Anderson & Mosher, 2004) In the modern day there has been an entry of women into the labor market. The idea that women were just here to have kids and take care of them no longer existed. Men had to change that thought of them being the only provider of the house. Because of this men needed to feel superior to women. In the book “Inside the minds of sexual predators” by McGrain and Ramsland its said that “rape by a stranger … can be categorized according to one of three motives: anger, desire for power and sadism” (2010, p 48) Men having to show that they are more dominant. The desire for power is known as power rape. In this kind of rape “sexuality becomes a means of compensating for underlying feelings of inadequacy and serves to express issues of mastery, strength, control authority, identity and capability.” (Groth, 1988, p 25) Power rape takes the ideas of machismo to