Further, even if rape is primarily sexually motivated there is no way to pull power completely out of rape or even to pull power out of sex, as it is laced within everything we do. Just because a primary (conscious?) motivation might be sex that doesn’t mean that power isn’t another factor. As I said, I can believe that sex can be a powerful motivation for rape, and I believe that it is often the motivation, but is it the underlying cause or reason for rape, or is it just a conscious motivation? Can we say that rape is not about power, even if it is not the primary motivation?

And, actually, viewing rape as power-motivated has helped me untangle why it turns me on. As I mentioned I am a control freak, and that is at the basis of a lot of my desire for rape play. Viewing rape as sex-motivated is also understandable, but I think that would actually make me understand it less if I were to view it as only sex-motivated rather than a combination.

However, I have a (rather long) piece of constructive criticism. Recent work in biological anthropology is starting to show that most rapes (ie significantly more than 50%)seem to be motivated predominantly by evolutionarily-successful reproductive strategies (from the male’s perspective), and not a desire from the male to establish power/dominance.

Most of the lines of evidence that are leading evolutionary biologists to support this viewpoint consist of the relative ease with which evolutionary theory (as compared to the “rape=power” meme) can explain puzzling trends in studies done on rape.

To me, the most fascinating “discovery” is that married women who are raped violently (ie leaving bruises, scars/any sign of struggle etc.) suffer less psychological trauma than those who survived their experiences with relatively less physical marks. Evolutionary theory can explain this variation in the wife’s psychological trauma as inversely reflecting the husband’s degree of certainty that the intercourse was not consensual. In other words, assuming she is otherwise satisfied in the marriage and wishes to keep her husband, the woman wants her spouse to feel confident that her children are in fact his (paternity certainty being one of the main evolutionary variables that monogamous males seek to maximize since expending parental effort on unrelated offspring represents one of the least successful evolutionary strategies [providing for the current children of a new spouse being the major exception]).

If you can’t tell already, I study things that make me anxious.

Anyway, thanks for the contribution to my understanding of what women can enjoy. As for you, I suspect that viewing rape as sex-motivated could potentially help you untangle why it turns you on.