Sexual Assualt and Rape Are About Dehumanization

That’s the real reason that consent matters

“I mean, so someone puts his dick in you for a while. It doesn’t really change anything. You know, what’s really a lot worse than that? Having to pay alimony. At least rape is over after a few minutes. Alimony is like getting raped over and over.”

Some guy actually said that to me one time in a discussion about rape and I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed about other aspects of body autonomy from other men. Everything from Joe Biden’s propensity to be overly familiar with women he doesn’t even know to groping and other kinds of sexual harassment, and even outright rape, some people just don’t get it why it’s so harmful.

“What’s the big deal? I’d be happy if somebody sniffed my hair.”

First of all, you’d maybe, perhaps be happy if somebody that you were comfortable with and attracted to sniffed your hair or was overly familiar with your body in some other way. But to imagine that you’d be happy about it from just anyone in any situation goes to show how little experience you, the person putting forth that opinion, has had with other people acting as though your body belongs to them — and just how disrespectful that feels, particularly in a professional setting. No-one who has routinely experienced that would ever say that it was no big deal or a pleasant thing. No one enjoys being disrespected.

If someone who was significantly bigger and stronger than you, more socially powerful than you, or otherwise had some kind of other advantages where you didn’t feel you could say no did that, you’d find it was a very different experience. Or if you did say no and it wasn’t respected, you wouldn’t like that either. Our society is built around a dominance hierarchy, where might makes right and those who have more power feel emboldened to bully those with less. If you don’t win, you lose didn’t get invented in America, but this is a place where we’ve perfected those ideas, in part because they go well with the social Darwinism brand of capitalism that we practice, where only the fittest survive. By fittest, we essentially mean the most ruthless.

The look on this young woman’s face in the picture below says it all about how this dynamic manifests in interpersonal relations. Since she can’t physically escape this violation of her personal space and body autonomy, she looks like she’s trying to dissociate or at least convey how awkward she feels so that maybe Biden will get the hint and get off of her. What his conscious or unconscious intentions are is immaterial. It doesn’t matter whether this has overt sexual intentions or not.

He is accessing her body in the way that he wants to with complete disregard for what she wants. It conveys, “You are an object for me to touch as I wish to and I have the power to do so, whether or not you want it.”

Violations of respect for body autonomy are dehumanizing. It’s not so much the unwanted touching itself, but what it communicates to the person being touched about their right to control their own personal space and what happens to their body. The purpose of rape, sexual assault, and unwanted touch of any kind is to convey to someone else (even if it’s subconscious) that they are a thing and that their body does not belong to them. It’s an act of exerting domination. This is why rape is such a common weapon of war, both historically and in the present day.

Its use as a weapon of war was gruesomely demonstrated during World War II, when both Allied and Axis armies committed rape as a means of terrorizing enemy civilian populations and demoralizing enemy troops. Two of the worst examples were the sexual enslavement of women in territories conquered by the Japanese army and the mass rape committed against German women by advancing Russian soldiers.

Encyclopedia Britannica

These mass war rapes were not about sexual attraction — they were about exerting power and engendering fear. Although there may indeed be times when a rapist is physically attracted to their victim, it is still overwhelmingly an act of dehumanization and control. There is no rape demographic. It is not only pretty women who get raped or ones who are wearing revealing clothing. Old nuns and little babies get raped and assaulted, as well as women wearing sweatpants and other everyday outfits. Men get raped as well, both by other men and sometimes by women. How they are dressed or what they look like often has very little to do with that. A woman raping her husband is not overcome with lust. She’s demonstrating her power over him to use his body to her own ends.

The photo below is taken from an art exhibit entitled What Were You Wearing that displays clothing worn by people at the time they were raped. As you can see, most of it is basic pants and t-shirts.

In other words, a rapist may find their victim physically attractive, but it’s not necessarily the case, and even when it is, it’s only one facet of the dynamic. Sexual assault and rape are about exerting dominance. It’s true that some people may find that sexually stimulating, but that doesn’t mean that it’s about attraction. Forcing someone else to relinquish control over their own body to you against their will is not about lust. Abusers don’t molest children because they are sexually alluring; they do so because they have power over them and they can.

This domination/power dynamic can be difficult for some people to understand.

“But Harvey Weinstein was attacking beautiful women that he was sexually attracted to. He didn’t just want control over them.”

Yes, they were attractive women, but he wasn’t looking at them as human beings. He was looking at those women as objects that he could appropriate to satisfy his lust because he could wield power over them. Whether the attacker is truly sexually attracted to a victim or not, in that moment of forcing themself on someone else, they are consciously or subconsciously dominating and dehumanizing them because they are saying, “What you want doesn’t count.”

There is a lot of shame that goes with being raped and sexually assaulted. You have been reduced to an object that is in the power of someone else. Your very being will be appropriated in whatever way the rapist or assaulter decides. This undermines a person’s sense of self in a very detrimental way.

Beverly Engel is a psychotherapist and author of more than 20 self-help books, including a forthcoming book on surviving sexual assault. She said shame and self-blame are central reasons why survivors of assault don’t report these crimes.

“Victims are often too ashamed to come forward. Sexual assault is a very humiliating and dehumanizing act against someone. The person really feels invaded and defiled, and there is a lot of shame attached to that,” Engel told ABC News.

This is the real reason that consent matters in everything that has to do with another person’s body and their own autonomy over it. Stripping away that control, whether it’s with a too-familiar hug or a pat on the ass all the way up to actual sexual assault and rape, robs that person of their sense of themselves as an individual, as a human being who is not, in fact, owned by someone else.

The offensiveness of this is acknowledged and codified in the legal definition of battery:

Although the statutes defining battery will vary by jurisdiction, a typical definition for battery is the intentional offensive or harmful touching of another person without their consent. Under this general definition, a battery offense requires all of the following:

intentional touching;

the touching must be harmful or offensive;

no consent from the victim.

If you are of the opinion that touching by people who haven’t been given permission to do so is not really a big deal, it’s because you’ve never experienced it even once, much less on a recurring basis. One of the things that detractors rarely take into account is that most women have experienced being told that their body does not belong to them from a very young age. For many girls, starting at about age 10, before they are even truly into puberty, catcalling begins as well as inappropriate remarks made by both boys and adult men. It conveys to these children, “Your body is public property.”

Street harassment is not as some have asserted, a compliment, because a compliment is by definition a polite expression of respect. Although some women may find it flattering, overwhelmingly most find it somewhere between annoying and terrifying, and a large part of this is the pervasiveness element. One instance might be a nuisance, but if from age 10 onward you can rarely leave your house without your body being commented upon or touched by strangers, it creates anxiety and often fear. Sometimes street harassment is just words, but in many cases, it escalates to following, groping, and sometimes even violence. There is no way to know ahead of time which this particular instance will be, and even dehumanizing words can be detrimental — particularly when the message is conveyed over and over again.

Workplace harassment is also rarely a one-time occurrence and the stress of knowing that you have to go back again tomorrow and face that same treatment again is the cause of both physical and mental health problems for victims. In a study done of female Vietnam veterans, a surprising 20% suffered from PTSD, not from war-related trauma but from the dehumanizing experiences they had at the hands of men that they served with.

Because most of the female veterans had served as nurses, researchers at first assumed the PTSD was caused by exposure to gruesome injuries or danger. But after surveying the experiences of more than 4,219 women, they found that sexual harassment and gender discrimination were the leading causes.

“For the most part, these were not necessarily major traumas like rape. It was touching and fondling, snide remarks, constant comments, pressure to fraternize,” said Magruder, who has since retired as a researcher for VA.

Sexual Harassment Can Make Victims Physically Sick

In other words, having to live in a situation where day after day you were made to feel that you were not only not a colleague who deserved to be treated with respect, but that you were not, in fact, even a person. Instead, you were merely an object of sexual gratification that could be accessed at will, and this was what caused their PTSD. It is incredibly illustrative that the worst part of being in a war should be the way that others who were ostensibly on your own side treated you. It speaks volumes about just how damaging these behaviors and this attitude of dehumanization truly are.

Men and children experience similar negative outcomes as women who have had their body autonomy violated. “Survivors of childhood sexual abuse, unwanted sexual contact, and rape experience elevated risk for multiple psychological disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, disorders of sexual functioning, eating disorders, sleep disorders, and substance use disorders.”

Even in instances where child abuse feels physically or emotionally gratifying at the moment, it is still a profound violation that negatively impacts a person’s sense of confidence, of self, and self-esteem long into the future. Violence or overt coercion need not be in play in order to be harmful. It is yet another example of how damaging it is to treat someone as if they are there to service you rather than as an individual who can make their own decisions about their body.

Consent matters because body autonomy matters. All people should have the right to determine what happens to their bodies and no-one should feel emboldened to believe that they can access other people’s bodies without their consent. Teaching children that they have the right to decide whether or not they want to hug Aunt Tilly is the first step in creating a culture that grants body self-determination as a matter of course.

If inadvertent innocuous touching happens between people who have the same relative power, it may make someone a little bit uncomfortable, but it does not have the same level of dehumanization as when those with more power foist themselves into the personal space of someone with less. Still, if you can’t read the receptivity of the other person, it’s better to ask — “Can I give you a hug.”

It’s long past time to stop defending the people who exert dominance over others through violating body autonomy — whether that has a sexual component or not. Despite the fact that we live in a dominance hierarchy, dominance posturing is not really socially acceptable behavior. All forms of non-consensual touching are inappropriate because they are overwhelmingly intended to dehumanize the other person.