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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!princeton!eosp1!robison
From: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Re: violence
Message-ID: <1177@eosp1.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Oct-84 12:50:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: eosp1.1177
Posted: Tue Oct 16 12:50:22 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Oct-84 06:36:16 EDT
References: <328@mako.UUCP> <597@gloria.UUCP>
Reply-To: robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison)
Organization: Exxon Office Systems, Princeton
Lines: 48


> For those of you who believe that the sole motive for all rape is violence:
> 
> Do you honestly believe that there are no men in the world that are so
> desperate for sex that they would, and do, force a woman into unwilling
> sexual intercourse?

I'd like to introduce a new, important point of view into this
discussion.  Have all of you had the experience of trying to force
a living organism with reasonably strong muscles to do something
against its will?  Don't you realize what an unpleasnt experience
this is? For purposes of this discussion, let's assume
that a man tries to force a woman who is unwilling, and she attempts
to resist him with her strength.

If you have even tried to force a squirrel or a dog to do something it
doesn't want to do, you know that regardless of the original intent,
one is soon aware of a STRUGGLE.  The other creature, or person, is
fighting, and is indicating a total mental disengagement from whatever
the forcer has in mind.  Even if you are simply feeding a pill to an
unwilling dog, you must concentrate primarily on the struggle, and
it is impossible to avoid receiving the communication of the other
creature that it detests what you are doing and is trying to
thwart you in every way it finds acceptable.

If a man is trying to force a woman who is a stranger to him, the
violence, and the lack of communication, are surely even more notable
than if the woman is known.  To get a vague idea of the difference, one
might compare forcing a strange dog, as opposed to your own beloved
pet, to do something.

My point in all these cases is this:  You can surely realize,
from your own comparable experience, that for any sane person,
the attempt to force a woman would become a stuggle concerned
with violence.  Only a man who is mentally quite maladjusted could
tune out the message of the struggle and continue to behave as if the
circumstances of the encounter were essentially sexual.

Now look at this situation from the woman's point of view.
Her attacker is either satisfied to engage primarily in an
event of violence, or is behaving so insanely that the violence
occurring is irrelevant to what he is observing.  In either case,
the woman is a victim of violence.

	- Toby Robison (not Robinson!)
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