| Is sex somehow fundamentally different than every other act that it should be treated so differently? Yes, sex is different from other things. That was the point of the post you're replying to. If I used my power at work to make you eat a literal lunch of feces, is that more or less egregious? I mean, I'd say "more egregious", but that's because it strikes me as unrestrained cruelty. A rapist at least has clear selfish motives with a disregard for human decency; someone who's power-tripping and saying "you're going to do this thing just because I know you don't like it and want to make you suffer" is far scarier. But it doesn't matter which one is more egregious. The point is that you can call the one thing "rape." That is a valid word to use to describe it. Isn't the core bad behavior the concept of abrogating another human's free will? Why is sex in this other classification? You're looking at a two-dimensional figure edge-on so that it looks one dimensional, which causes you to think that these two questions are related, but they are not clearly -- they are about different things. There are lots of things that are scary about rape. It's not just that someone has "abrogated your free will" -- they're using you as an object and thereby dehumanizing you. This means that certain other questions emerge naturally, like "where exactly does that stop?". And that's a matter of fear for your life (which in law is the crime of assault). It's as if an axiom of our logic has been violated: If someone disregards the basic standards of human decency, we lose all proofs/guarantees that they won't, say, kill us for fun. If you don't understand where this fear comes from, rape will be an academic question for you, and you will miss the real need for social change. |