February 24, 2000
Subject: Re: UNDERSTANDING RAPE and EVERYTHING
I-dialogging with DORA
ON RAPE (II)
Jacob, you say women being dragged around by the hair is a cartoon.
Well, you should have known I was using a metaphor to illustrate an
imagined cave man.
Dora, I'm very pleased by your interest, which is rare on philosophical matters. I certainly understood your metaphor, but humor is one of my many virtues, and among my very few defects irony or sarcasm or any demeaning expressions are outstanding for their absence.
We do not need to know this evolution of violence toward women to understand it is unwanted by the victim.
It is not violence toward the victim, but an uncontrollable manner of manifesting a need to perform a sexual act in a non-consensual manner.
Also, I did not call my metaphor domestic violence, you did. Violence toward women has a whole range of incidences and perpetrators. One of them being rape. I find it interesting that you thought my metaphor applied to the
domestic scene.
It was you who brought up the subject of domestic violence, and I attempted to explain it. My wife sometimes hits me, while I don't respond in kind. Rape is a completely different matter. I find it interesting that you thought that I thought your metaphor applied to the domestic scene.
I do not know what ivory tower you are living in but anger generally
precedes violence. Sometimes it is used against a victim because the
victim is an easy target, not because the victim is the cause of the
anger. Bullies usually fit this definition. Women make easy pickings.
Another reason can be feelings of fear and insecurities. I do not like
the idea of finding some kind of social mind-tinkering solution. It
sounds like the road to a dictatorship.
This is a very complex issue that should be dissected for constructive dialogue, in a different context.
One question that has puzzled me for a long time now that I think about
it, is the power of the pack. This usually applies to males. It is found
in gang rape, and in lynchings. Although, a lynching is more of a mob
rule, while gang rape seems more of an expression of identification with
being a male. Perhaps aggression is more the problem. In this matter of
gang rape it is hard to know whether or not it is anger. There is a
famous case in a Polish community in one of the New England states,
where the ethnic community did not want the men punished. Jodie Foster
was in a movie about the incidence.
Again, I ought to stress that D-SP is interested in psychology only as a subject for scientific analysis, evolution being its characterizing underpinning. All the manifestations of violence you mention derive from evolutionary --valuable-- behavior. The neutral observer thinks it is violence, while the actors consider it correct behavior. Animals do not behave with conscious violence, they just react. I did not see the movie, but I would guess it dealt with cultural manifestations of a foreign community posed in front of unfamiliar rules of behavior.
You speak of animals. I know from personal experience that dogs that are
normally gentle will change if running with other dogs. I do not know if
they are all male or not.
We are born with a collective unconscious and with dormant genes. Homo sapiens may revert to pack behavior. Dogs the more so, are prone to shed their human-dictated acculturation.
