Where Does the Urge to Rape Come From?

Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri (left) claims to have misspoken in saying — with reference to what he called "legitimate rape" — "from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from it] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." With those remarks he created a firestorm in American politics.

He later apologized, saying that he had misspoken and that he had meant to say "forcible rape" instead of "legitimate rape."

Advocates for women's rights continued to howl. "Forcible rape," they contended, is language that Republican lawmakers have tried to use, without much success, to narrow the legal definition of rape.

Women who are coerced to engage in sex acts — who are raped — don't always have a way to prove that they were "forced" into compliance: no cuts or bruises, no witnesses to testify that they cried out, etc. So what is or is not rape?

The whole question of the definition of "rape" has changed much during our history, says Estelle B. Freedman (left) in The Washington Post here. Freedman is the Edgar E. Robinson professor in U.S. history at Stanford University and the author of “No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women,” and a co-author of “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.”

She says rape and race have been intimately tied in American belief and practice, with rape laws in the Jim Crow South routinely defanged by the perceived need to look the other way re: forced sexual relations between white men and black women. Yet for a black man to be accused of sexually molesting a white woman was a hanging offense.

Freedman says:

In the 19th century, state laws around the country defined rape as the carnal knowledge of a woman when achieved by force by a man other than her husband. According to a principle known as coverture, a husband had authority over his wife’s person and property. Therefore, women could not withhold sex from their husbands. Similarly, enslaved women could not refuse sex with their masters or testify against them in court.

We've come a long way from coverture. Yet, even with the more liberal legal view that has prevailed since ...

... the late 20th century, [when] second-wave feminism generated an anti-rape movement that identified sexual assault as an abuse of power that has been central to women’s oppression ...

... rape is both widespread and underreported.

Even if it does get reported, it continues to be hard to prove that a rape has occurred. Karen Mulhauser (left), chair of the advisory council for the Women’s Information Network, had this to say on a recent Washington Post editorial page about the time she was raped.

Several years ago, Mulhauser was attacked by armed intruders who came into her home and who bound her, ransacked the dwelling for valuables, and raped her repeatedly for 2 1/2 hours. She didn't cry out for fear of waking her young son. She wound up with no bruises or other evidence of having been forced into having sex. She reported it anyway. She does not say whether the police were able to bring her assailants to justice.

The emphasis of the response to Akin's ill-considered, ill-founded remarks has been on the question of what rape consists of and what can be done in utmost justice to aid its victims — especially those who wind up pregnant because their bodies inexplicably failed to "shut that whole thing down."

My concern is different. My concern is to figure out why rape happens in the first place.

Freedman talks of "sexual assault as an abuse of power," and I think that description is right on point. Rape is not about sex, it's about power.

But most of us want to exercise power. And advanced opinion on sexuality today — see the writings of Michel Foucault (left) — says it can't be understood without reference to power relationships.

Sex can be a tender ceding of power over our bodies and souls to a marriage partner whom we love and who loves us. That there is a power relationship that exists between the spouses is normal. Ideally, it is a good thing.

But rapists want to exert power, not tenderly but forcibly. And there are a lot of them. I have read that nearly 1 in 5 surveyed women report having been sexually assaulted.

A rapist is someone whose power urge has gotten way out of bounds.

So the question-to-which-I-have-have-no-answer is: Why has this power urge gotten so far out of whack for such a sizable number of men that they so often commit rape?