2.24.2005

Now, this is rape!

A man Chicago is suing a woman for Sperm Theft Distress. He has to pay child support after the woman "regifted" the semen he gave to her mouth to her vagina without his knowledge. He should sue her for rape, and this child should be seen as a child born out of rape. Does that lawyer tell female rape victims that it is wrong to put the rapist in jail or claim any emotional damage because it might be damaging to the child to hear its mother claim she didnt want to be impregnated? And I can't believe that the defense admits she did this, and just thinks it is something that a woman ought to be able to do.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Now, this is rape!"no. no, it really really isn't. and to say so is to trivialize in the most shameful fashion one of the most violent & degrading crimes women & men suffer today.

John Howard said...

the word "rape" comes from a Latin word that "to seize and take away by force" The key isn't the force or the violence or the degradation, the key is that they are seizing something. What they are taking away is control of the victims reproduction. It needn't be violent to be rape. And I do not trivialize rape, I consider it the most heinous crime. I just do not consider all forms of assualt, no matter how violent and degrading, to be rape. To call them rape ADDS to their degradation. There should be nothing degrading about being the victim of assault, but YOU insist on it.

Anonymous said...

hey Moral Boy....

the word "rape" comes from a Latin word that "to seize and take away by force" The key isn't the force or the violence or the degradation, the key is that they are seizing something.tell it to the judge. try looking up the legal definitions of rape of any given state in the US. the key is not that "they are seizing something" - that's called theft. the key is that a rapist has physically penetrated or touched in a sexual fashion another person without their consent.

I just do not consider all forms of assualt, no matter how violent and degrading, to be rape. To call them rape ADDS to their degradation. There should be nothing degrading about being the victim of assault, but YOU insist on it.no one said you did. nor did i insist anything like what you suggest. try arguing with what people actually say instead of constructing straw dogs.

John Howard said...

The legal definitions of rape used to be nonconsensual sexual intercourse. They were expanded in my state to include things that weren't sexual intercourse, including puting your finger in someone's mouth. I think that misses the essences of what made rape a special crime, and what was most heinous about the crime. The laws needed expanding, but it should have been to include sperm theft and other forms of taking away someone's control over their own reproduction.
I think jam does add to the degradation sex assault victims feel, by claiming that it is degradation itself which is the crime - that tells the victim that they have been degraded, and that means they must have done something wrong and they are now broken and no good. They should be treated more like victims of theft, and only the perpetrator should be degraded and made to feel no good.

Christian said...

That's not rape. If the guy's not used a condom, then he's made a sperm donation. What she does with it is her own business, unless she comes after him for child support, in case it's not rape, but possibly fraud, defamation, or false light invasion of privacy.

To be fair to our blogger, this isn't the first time someone has misused the word rape. A few years back a fertility doctor was caught putting his own sperm instead of that of anonymous donors into his female clients. Many of them turned around and accused him of rape. What he did was wrong, but not rape. Rape is having sex with someone without their consent.

If a man pretends to be elvis, and has sex with a woman who thinks that he's elvis, that's not rape, because she has consented to sex (though not with him). But if he has sex with her while telling her that he's putting something else into her (like a medical tool), courts have correctly held this to be rape, because she did not consent to sex.

Another example of rape is when someone has sex with someone who is too young, insane, or drugged to legally consent. In the Bible, Genesis, what Lots daughters do to him is arguably rape, since they have sex with him after getting him so drunk that he can't remember it the next day. It's not the fact that he can't remember it that makes it rape -- it's that if he can't remember it, then he was probably too drunk to consent or to even know what he was doing.

Rape is not about reproduction. Two men can't make a baby together, but one man can rape another man. A sterile man can rape a woman, and a woman can rape a sterile man. A man doesn't have to ejaculate to make it rape.

[Rape] laws needed expanding, but it should have been to include sperm theft and other forms of taking away someone's control over their own reproduction.

Good heavens no. Killing someone takes away someone's control over their reproduction. Does that mean that killing is rape? You can kill in self-defense, you know. But in a world where the definitions of words are sane, you can't rape in self-defense. That US soldier hero who just died in Iraq -- by your definition he raped 50 people before he died, since killing them (even in self-defense) took away their reproductive rights. I hope you concede that your definition creates much more problems than it is worth.

John Howard said...

Christian, I disagree that a man can rape another man. I think that is offensive to people who are actually raped and have to worry about the consequences nine months later. That is why a woman can be raped by a sterile man, because it's the worry that he inflicts. A pregnancy certainly isn't required for it to be rape, just the threat of pregnancy, the attempt at inflicting the threat of pregnancy.