27
NSFW
Trigger WarningIs it really true that over 50% of women have rape fantasies?
My teacher brought it up in psych class. I'm genuinely concerned I tried looking it because I'm highly concerned. Are there other factors. Someone explain and help
That's horrific misinformation for your Psych teacher to be pushing, especially to college age men who I'm sure we all know have been openly confessing that they would engage in "sex without consent if they could get away with it," in surveys for decades. I would complain to the staffing board even if nothing comes from it, because that's literally so horrifying for a man to say in a classroom.
There's actually a short story by Margaret Atwood from the mid-70s called "Rape Fantasies." In it, the main character and her friends talk about the "rape fantasies" they've had, cause a magazine article said all women have them. Thing is, none of the fantasies are really about rape. They're either super romanticized, like "the hot guy from my dream crawled through my bedroom window" or fantasies about stopping an attempted rape through either fighting back or talking the guy out of it.
Male teacher?
Yes
How did that even fucking come up in class? I don't trust that there wasn't a bad motive.
According to him he brought it up because he wanted to use as example of how we underestimate actual statistics and how it can actual surprise you like for example despite news coverage during the pandemic the death rate by covid isn't actually as high as we thought if you actual did data.
Yeah, I don't buy it. I'm sure he wanted to make the female students feel inferior.
I'd report him anonymously if you can. Even if that statistic is true (which I don't buy it), it's needlessly inflammatory to use it as an example. He couldn't think of another one? Really?
I'd liken it to bringing up the white v. black crime statistic and saying "wow statistics may surprise you. Who knew black people actually ARE more criminal?"
Not addressing what factors into these statistics, especially hot button ones, is at best lazy and at worse malicious.
Actually did bring up something similar white vs black thing like how white people were shot by the police than black people according to statistics he found but we're less reported in that same lesson
Did he also say that you can lie with statistics? And that if you put garbage in you'll get a garbage statistic?
So many psychological and sociological studies are biased because the input data were garbage.
This is one of those samples: when they interviewed women (if it was an interview at all!), how did they ask that question? I don't believe half of us fantasize of actual rape. I bet they confused such a strong event with something mild like "the man I like is flirting with me and is irresistible. He's a little pushy and he makes me feel sexy".
The eroticisation of inequality is what Sheila Jefferys called it. Three is a great Women's International Declaration where they discuss Kate Millets Sexual Politics which discussed this sort of idea. How it has been inserted into media and normalised. Plus the misogyny that created it, focused very much in how and why women will have internalised it unconsciously.
I too have wondered about this agent of fantasy. I think it is planted by the pornafied society we live in rather than being an inherent part of women's sexuality.
Rape = no consent
No. Women do not fantasize about not giving consent. If they report that they do it’s because they have likely been rapedPreviously and have been sold the malicious idea that they can heal through continued rapes.
I certainly hope it's not true. This is the kind of shit that makes me want to identify out of being female.
To the person who downvoted me, rape is evil. Making excuses for it is evil.
I think it more has to do with the comment you made sounding judgemental towards women who struggle with this. For a lot (probably most) of them these fantasies stem from some kind of trauma. You can recognize the fantasy isn’t mentally healthy and shouldn’t be acted out and that you need trauma to deal with the source of it, but still struggle with having the fantasy. I don’t think the women with this fantasy (who are fantasizing about being raped) are actually thinking rape is okay, they’re traumatized. The real issue lies in the normalization of enacting the fantasy rather than treating it as what it is - a manifestation of trauma.
I get that, but some women who are into this shit have never been abused by anyone and still they promote and defend it, and they encourage men to "fake" rape them in real life.
Anyone who has been sexually abused has my sympathy, and I don't think most women on Ovarit will defend these practices. But I also find it traumatizing. I have seriously considered both suicide and transition due to the fact that men think women just love rape. It's highly, highly triggering to me and more than anything else, it makes me want to dissociate from being female. I shouldn't be downvoted for that.
I think a lot of MEN use this statistic to mean “rape is okay.” Rape is never okay. Even if somehow it was possible for a woman to “want” rape (by definition it is not) and a woman DID, rape is still not okay. It is never okay and the men are the problem. Not the women.
No. There were some surveys in the 70s and 80s which indicated that around half of the surveyed women have had "forced seduction" fantasies at some point in their lives, or something to that effect.
Heterosexual women don't have fantasies about being raped by a disgusting man they have no attraction to, which is what men want to believe. Heterosexual women fantasize about men they're attracted to "pushing" them to have sex so they can mentally assuage the guilt of having sexual desires by thinking they were made to do it
It's nothing but misogyny and males refusing to understand anything about women and how women are systematically shamed out of having sexual desires to the point where they feel too uncomfortable to admit them
I don’t think it’s just this. Women are socialised to think that a man who pursues us forcefully, really really cares about us. The never ending messages about how a boy who is mean to a girl is being mean because he really likes her, and so on. So women are conditioned from a young age to view men’s desire for us, as love.
Which is bullshit.
And that if they love us we owe them something in return.
Which is more bullshit.
This is so uncomfortable. Because men will read this and take it as evidence of “she says no but she means yes”.
I know men who are aware of the “why” behind this and that’s exactly what they take it to mean.
Yeah I myself have definitely felt this sentiment but it's vastly different than a rape "fantasy". I just feel like not being the initator will absolve some of my guilt around sex.
I can understand women in the 70s and 80s were raised in a different time, but why would young women now still feel guilty about having sex? It's widely considered normal to have sex outside of marriage, except in more conservative churches. In fact, it's gone so far in the other direction that an adult female virgin is considered weird and abnormal by mainstream society. Are there more recent studies showing that large numbers of younger women still have these types of fantasies, or are they all relying on old data?
The other explanation behind fantasies involving force is the widespread sexual trauma in women. if you have been raped or if you've watched forceful porn or even seen content like Game of Thrones which was basically rape porn,, you can develop such a strong fear association with sex it becomes hard to imagine consensual sex.
20% of women have been raped in the US and 81% have been sexually harassed. 88% of porn contain acts of aggression and women are watching more porn. 33% of women watch porn today. All of these influences can reshape a woman's relationship with sex, distorting it towards true self-destructive urges.
This especially rings true when you factor in epigenetics and the theory of the trauma can be passed down through genes
I agree porn is to blame for some of it. But unfortunately women were writing rape fantasies long before porn was mainstream.
I've never been raped, but I don't see why it would be hard to imagine consensual sex. It's still the standard in mainstream media. The average romantic comedy doesn't feature a rapist in the lead role.
Not hard to imagine it, hard to experience the same feelings of trust and love that make consensual sex passionate and fulfilling. What we get off to has everything to do with our emotional experience of sex, and things like PTSD or subclinical fears of rape can make it harder to summon the opposite emotions, or memories of them. Or for some especially if this kind of thing was set in early in life as their first experience of sex, there may be no memory of those positive emotions to help them shift out of a fear-based experience of sex.
I guess that makes sense. It's just fucking depressing. I would have hoped that rape survivors would all stand together against rape, but it seems like many don't.
Are you referring to " The Sheik " novel? : https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSheik
I was thinking of romance novels from the 70s or 80s, but I guess it goes back even farther than that.
I feel women have been encouraged to have more sex without the typical ideas of female 'promiscuity' having been dealt with first: TV and magazines and your libfem friends might insist on your having sex, but men will still consider you a slut. Instead of abolishing the idea of the 'slut' altogether, we now just encourage women to be 'sluts' and reclaim the term. But I don't think most women have embraced that idea. They don't want to be considered sluts. Hence a fantasy like this that 'absolves' them of their own sexual desires. How bleak is that, truly?
You may be on to something with that. Being a "slut" is still considered bad. Maybe some women are still very conditioned to think that their enjoyment of sex makes them "sluts."
Young women today are pushed to have sex they don't want, in ways they don't want it. In the old days women were pushed to have sex with their husbands, but now they are pushed to have sex with any guy who wants it. It didn't get better and nobody except feminists want to talk about it. Consent was a serious topic only for a little bit somewhere in the late 2000s, then it got drowned under this new rhetoric of "transphobic genital preference". I wouldn't be surprised at all that young women today struggle with a bombardment of messages about force and sex, and that affects their ideas of sex.
Violent porn hasn't helped either, I'm sure.
It burns me up how consent as a discussion topic has now turned into "how do I manipulate someone into saying yes so I don't feel bad about my abusive desires" instead of "how do I ensure both of us are genuinely doing only what we sincerely want to do with each other." "Consent is sexy!" they simper. Consent is mandatory and is only real if uncoerced.
Purity ring / purity culture/ publicly declared abstinence reached a very defined presence in the 90s-2000s inside evangelical church influence but also in the general public. I'm pretty sure even the Jonas brothers took chastity vows and wore rings or something
Yeah, but that was inside evangelical Christianity. The Jonas Brothers used to be very Christian. Their dad was a pastor and they were raised Assemblies of God.
Now at least one of them gets off on strangling women. We live in a sick world.
Those messages go beyond the outside of religious reach, though. It affects how sex is talked about by schoolteachers, it affected how I felt about sex even though I didn't even have a family that enforced purity rules or made sex seem bad. I got all of it by cultural osmosis
Did you also grow up in a very conservative area? I'm from a small town in a red state. So even public school had some Jesus and abstinence education thrown in there. I guess the difference for me is that I never believed any of it, and I didn't think anyone except the most serious of Christians actually planned on waiting for marriage. I personally never felt guilty about sex.
Wait, what? I definitely missed that...
It's Nick Jonas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6p96NVga60
I was never a fan, but it's still upsetting. He's a famous person in the public eye with a famous wife that he probably abuses behind closed doors.
Yep, and that isn’t new, either, I reached adulthood in the ‘80s and was being told not-so-subtly then that being a virgin was weird.
Someone posted this, from 2009.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/
Shit like this makes me wish I could turn off the logical part of my brain and go back to pretending I'm a man
Same. This shit is just so triggering.
I feel sick. 62% is horrible.
Thanks for the link to the study. It's just so depressing.