As far as I can tell, the following tweet kicked off the whole rape hullabaloo.
“how your gf looks at you when you ask her to block the guy who ‘raped’ her in 2019,” the X user wrote Monday. Attached was a photo of actress Inde Navarrette as Nikki in horror-comedy film “Obsession,” pouting.
Some participants in the rape discourse posted their own encounters with women who remained on good terms with their rapists.
One user posted a screenshot of a text from another person, which reads: “I don’t understand what’s so confusing about it, yeah I’m not going to lie. He did rape me, but for some reason, i still fell in love with him. And I decided to date him and we dated for four years, but he kept being emotionally abusive to me. So I decided to leave and we got back together for a little bit, but it fell apart. I just feel like you’re judging me right now.”
Other respondents insulted the original poster and men at large.
“this is why men deserve to be lonelier, and women need to be more evil.”
“Men who think rape is funny should die.”
“i don’t give a single fuck about the male loneliness epidemic yall deserve it[.]”
“men out here thinking rape is funny and something to meme about but tell me more about why I should care for men’s mental health[.]”
Note that the punchline of the original post is not ‘rape is funny.’ It is: ‘Staying on good terms with a man who supposedly raped you is absurd,’ the implication being that the raped “gf” remains romantically and/or sexually interested in her rapist.
Note, too, that the angry female respondents did not dispute the premise that women do remain on good terms with their “rapists.” That is because some women do.
Reddit contains many stories written by women about dating, sleeping, and falling in love with their rapists, usually posted to r/relationship_advice, r/offmychest, or r/TrueOffMyChest.
Befriending — or sleeping with — one’s “rapist” was practically a genre of confessional writing in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
“I Dated My Rapist,” reads a 2018 article by Jessica Knoll for The Cut. Knoll recounts going on a date with “the guy who sexually assaulted me, two years after he sexually assaulted me.” Knoll says she was “grateful” when her rapist asked her out.
In a 2022 article titled, “My boyfriend, my rapist,” an anonymous woman writes of her boyfriend-rapist: “I loved him even after he raped me.”
Committing infidelity with one’s rapist is a subgenre within the “dating my rapist” genre.
In a 2023 podcast titled “The Shame of Cheating with My Rapist,” a woman describes how she was “raped by a trusted friend and continued to have a relationship with him for three years which resulted in the dissolution of her marriage and the alienation from her daughters.”
For another instance, consider “I Cheated On My Boyfriend With My Rapist,” written by Lana Hoch for fashion and lifestyle magazine Elle in 2018. Hoch says she got extremely drunk at a party, had sex with a “relative stranger” (the brother of a close friend), then tried to put the incident behind her. She got a boyfriend. One evening, she accepted an invitation to a dinner party at which the “relative stranger” would be in attendance.
Hoch writes: “... I started to escalate my small talk to flirtation … Eventually I suggested we go back to his apartment.”
Hoch admits she “should be ashamed,” but that she was not. She compares the feeling of sleeping with her “rapist” to scratching a “hard-to-reach itch.” Hoch chalks her sunny perspective up to “reclaim[ing] the narrative.”
This is the basic claim at the center of most “I dated my rapist” stories: the narrator was trying to wrest back a sense of control over her life after it had been senselessly ripped away.
Dating one’s rapist is apparently such a common occurrence that it warranted an explainer in Psychology Today. In “Why Some Rape Victims Continue to Date Their Rapist,” Psychology Today notes that some rape victims may desire to “reframe” the incident, or be in denial that it even occurred.
What is going on here?
To make a long story short, the definition of “rape” has broadened, while constraints on sexual behavior have weakened.
Consider the oft-repeated claim that one-third of female undergraduates are victims of sexual assault.
Basically, there are Rapists with a capital ‘R’ and there are rapists with a lowercase ‘r.’ But the two are often, insidiously, conflated.
In the former category: Two Pakistani men who raped a Pakistani-origin French woman in front of her children after her car ran out of fuel on the highway. The men were sentenced to death.
In the latter category: A woman getting drunk at a party and sleeping with a man who also got drunk at that party.
But maybe I’m applying a binary frame to something which is better conceptualized as a spectrum.
Consult the “rape thermometer“ for examples of the variety of experiences which are described as “rape.”
“Has sex to make partner happy in a relationship”
“Not revealing being transgender until after sex”
“Sneakily removing a condom during sex”
“A stranger forcibly assaults someone, who screams and fights the entire time”
By far, the most absurd increment on the thermometer reads: “A person has a rape fetish. Their friend, trying to be helpful, gets a stranger to abduct and forcibly penetrate this person.”
Ah, the pitfalls of trying to be a good friend.
I am sure many women do feel disgusted, violated, and traumatized after having sex with a man who is a relative stranger, especially if alcohol or other drugs precede the intercourse. This is a good reason to avoid getting black-out drunk, or approaching black-out drunk, and to exercise discretion in who one sleeps with.
Your definition of “rape” depends on your perception of female agency.
If young women are perfectly capable of governing their own sexual behavior, and to suggest otherwise is pernicious paternalism, then the drunk girl who sleeps with a guy simply made a bad choice.
If young women are poor stewards of their sexuality, and must be protected, then the guy who sleeps with a drunk girl is taking advantage of her.
In truth, many young people of both sexes are poor decision makers and do things which they come to regret: tattoos, excessive drinking, “casual” sex. It would be wise to impose cultural restrictions on certain behaviors, for the good of young people and their future selves. Thankfully, we have the technology to do just that. It’s called “taboo,” or at the very least, “stigma.”
Derogatory terms like “slut” serve an important purpose. They inform women that engaging in certain behaviors will earn them a nasty label and social alienation. The fear of alienation steers women away from bad behavior. Likewise, a man who routinely sleeps with women and discards them might once have earned the reputation of a lothario, rake, libertine or manwhore.
Feminists, and those with feminist priors, maintain that young women are perfectly agentic, should comport themselves as they see fit, and are extremely vulnerable to abuse by men. This is improbable. Think of the woman who is somehow always dating “toxic” men, through no fault of her own. At a certain point, one begins to suspect that the woman is seeking out “toxicity.”
The feminist perspective is one which perpetually contradicts itself, until one must conclude that the governing principle of feminism is letting women do whatever they please, free of repercussions. This is a recipe for unhappiness. And, more importantly, civilizational collapse.
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
Both can be rape but there a distinction between being "raped" by a man you are in a relationship with as opposed to being attacked and raped by someone you did not know beforehand. No women would "date" her rapist in the latter situation. However, in the former it can happen and does happen. A prior relationship with a man is never forgotten. The remains of a relationship in anyone's mind male or female can be confused as to what the reality actually is.