i appreciate scepticism about anecdotal evidence. nevertheless, that leaves me daubed with the implication that i made up some crappy story, claiming rape, in order to win a point on an internet comments thread. that’s pretty cheesy. to clear the air (from my side):

the descriptions i recounted arose from two long-term relationships and one close friendship. the matters came up because they affected the sexual relationships in the former (ultimately leading directly to the dissolution of at least one of them), and the in the latter case, because the friend noticed that her friend (my partner) was (seemingly) comfortable talking to me about this.

what i haven’t included in my rather dry re-telling is the years of crying involved in the re-telling, the nights and days of frustration and misunderstanding, the eventual devolution of the personal relationship into an act of ongoing counselling, and the sheer difficulty with which the narratives were finally acquired. unfortunately, the medium doesn’t allow for that.

as for physiological arousal – i restate what i originally stated, and which you might have missed:

“i am not talking about a mind and body arousal. i am talking about the kind of ‘arousal’ that arises when tissue becomes congested with blood, arising from contact, and nerves in that tissue are stimulated by the compression. unavoidable. not particularly long-lasting either, i imagine.”

i think that’s pretty clear. by the way, i’m not necessarily talking about ‘clitoral arousal’ here. generally, there’s more to simple arousal than merely that organ. tissues react to stimuli as they are organized to do, like it or not. test it by poking yourself in the forearm, and observing a mild residual sensation and an automatic tactile response.

in at least one of the cases i described, there was more than elemtary tactile repsonse. but that was due to the nature and circumstances of the molestation, and that kind of planning and setting is generally ruled out in a violent, unexpected act.

as i also said:

“I think there’s a lot of types of ‘arousal’ floating around this topic, and they’re not being properly defined.”

thinking about it now, i think the conceptual language is missing things like ‘partial arousal’ as opposed to complete aousal (in which the latter might be ‘all factors, mind, body and intention involved’ or something), or ideas like ‘arousal-component’, with characteristics like ‘self-initiated/automatic’, ‘greater importance/lesser importance’ and so on.

abb1: i don’t know the numbers, and that’s a real problem. they’re difficult to find. partly, i think, this is because (in my own experience) counsellors (necessarily) downplay these reports for a variety of reasons.

(a)firstly, in a counselling environment, the imperative would be to ‘normalise’ such a self-report – to make it effectively ‘mundane’ and so pull its teeth. you’d want to recognise it, but b dismissive, to some extent. from the beginning, you’d want to make it clear that such responses have no bearing on the main case . the reason for this is that self-blame is common, it’s an obstacle to recovery, and the most common form of self-blame is “did i resist enough?”. women really are caught in a bind on this – some say ‘resist strongly’ at the risk of being beaten senseless, other’s say ‘let it happen’. if they choose the former they risk serious injury and death, and if they choose the latter, they’re left second-guessing their own behaviour. in this they’re often aided by a society that believes to some extent, that rape happens to women, because of some (unspecified) error of their own. in the cases of the people i know, even their families found it hard to get past this. so did i. i wanted to believe that it was somehow avoidable, as a way to maintain a world-view in which out-of-control things were excluded.)

so, in the organisations and communities at the coal-face, it would be understandable for such potentially self-blaming reports to be given short shrift.

(b) secondly, i think people involved in this work might leery of giving credit to exactly the kinds of arousal-confusion that this discussion has (with its attendant concerns about blame etc) and so research into women’s arousal or lack thereof might be tacitly discouraged. this is certainly true at the politically militant level, where the idea is denounced.

i’m guessing though.

interestingly, the discussion of involuntary arousal is more common in rapes when the victim is male. (according to google, that is.) and i know personally that it’s pretty common when the victim is a child. in both such circumstances, the issues surrounding women’s complicity in their rape are excluded, and i would also guess that partly, this is because it’s already accepted that men can be aroused ‘without their consent’, (not saying it’s true or false – just that it’s accepted), and it’s agreed that children can be too, based on their lack of experience. so in these domians, the matter migth be more easily discussed.

again, i’m speculating.

back to shai: i’m not going to argue the case with you, since i can’t take you to the centres or the people. also, i’m not a survivor, and that makes me a weak proponent. google the matter (i suggest ‘rape’, ‘involuntary’ and ‘arousal’ as keywords) or talk to survivor’s groups.

in your 112, you make the same case in essence. and agree with me that such events have no bearing on the core of the matter.

kind regards

dale

since this thread is full of so much bullshit and there are no experts who can authoritatively state anything useful about physiological arousal i’ll just leave my own little story.

men in their sleep every night have erections in cycles independent of any kind of sexual gratification. translate this into the waking world with an example of a man on a bus getting an erection, presumably because of the vibration or movement clothes to rub against the genitals. totally outside of awareness i might add until he becomes aware because it is uncomfortable, and it’s true there is a feeling but equating it with sexual arousal is quaint.

now im sure there are many men who can relate to not deriving physical pleasure from mechanical stimulation from lack of positive stimuli. first we’re establishing that the idea that some mechanical act does not directly elicit gratification. following from that i will assert that a complex of a situation will most likely inhibit or alter the experience. I can assure you if someone were to perform fellatio on me unwillingly that it would feel gross not pleasurable and it would extend even to the feeling itself, most likely because the brain has the power to color feelings in just the way described.

but really you could take the intuition pump further and pretend the person has no relavent feeling at all, perhaps because of paralysis. there would surely be some shame and anger for being complicit, or self hatred for being targetted because of a false belief that they brought it on themself, or simply regret that things could have gone differently if they weren’t powerless or a coward.

certainly i would expect the feeling to be a lot stronger because the actual physical feeling of being violated would certainly cause a lot more disgust.

i am a male speaking from my own physical being but im pretty sure that the belief that simple physical stimulation of the clitoris directly causes positive physical arousal is bullshit, and irrelevant.

Belle’s deconstruction is marvellously done, but it’s effort wasted I fear.

Really? That’s what you feel? I feel as if he’s an ideologist who “speculates” and “questions” and always comes out with the predictable result. If you have a counter example, where Eugene has a thought experiment that would piss off a right winger or comes to a conclusion that strongly contradicts a Bush administration policy, then I’ll admit I’m wrong. But quibbles about minor civil liberties stuff doesn’t qualify. I need some major heresy.

What I like about Volokh is the genuine curiosity that informs his blogging. You really feel that while reading him, no mistake about it. The man’s really interested in figuring out how the world and himself work, and is helping himself do that by publishing his opinions, reactions and sometimes almost brain-dumps, looking for others to agree or disagree, to argue and change his mind (or not). Take the issue Belle’s been writing about. He wasn’t advocating this or that change to the existing laws or customs about unwanted touching. He was trying to understand why things are as they are, what principles underlie the current system, and was basically thinking out loud in his post about it. Now, since he published his thoughts about it, everyone got to see that in this case there was something rather disturbing about the way one possible reason was extremely over-emphasized, compared to the other, much much more relevant and important reason. It could’ve been due to being carried away by his argument, as it happens when you focus on something and lose track of the more important thing. It probably also reflected some serious imbalance in the way these two reasons are considered in his thinking. Since he published it for everyone to see, he got critical feedback, like that beautifully written up by Belle, and changed his mind about it. His method of blogging worked for him in this case, as it did for torture-execution a year ago. If he was worried about some chattering nitwits on some blog comments somewhere looking for opportunities to morally condemn him, rather than engage his thinking and offer their opinions, he probably wouldn’t have written about it and wouldn’t get the chance to correct himself.

But he wasn’t. He offers his thought in a somewhat geeky kinda-naive way, as if all his readers are bound to judge them on merits, rather than look for ways to score cheap rhetorical points. And, well, I just find it sad that the CT commentariat so excels with the latter. I just went and reread some of the comments during that Iranian torture-execution thing. More of the same thing. “His being sincere makes it even worse”, etc. Uncle Kvetch wrote back then: “The fact that Volokh actually wrote the words “I like civilization, but…” tells me all I need to know about the man.” Now that’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It’s stupid; it picks on a phrase that can be used to make either enlightened or depraved arguments, depending on the context, which is here ignored; it dismisses the man and all his thoughts entirely in an easy and smug moral judgement, joining the chorus of other such chattering twits, and failing to offer even a shred of a point. See what I mean now?

Belle: OMG, WTF is Volokh talking about here? Has he gone completely bonkers? I had him down as this geeky lawyer type of the goofy-libertarian variety, with his desire to analyze absolutely everything down to first principles occassionally leading him to ludicrous arguments with ill-conceived conclusions. But here he’s writing as if he’s inhabiting Bizarro World, totally disconnected from reality. Was I that wrong?

CT Crowd: OMG, Belle, you totally ripped this moral monster a new one! Except, how could you possibly think well of him in the first place? Seriously, you might as well go have a beer with Ann Coulter ‘cos there’s obviously no difference between them except Volokh’s more sinister because he hides his kow-towing to Power and other assorted kinds of right-wing kookery behind seemingly intelligent veneer that never fooled anyone to begin with, which is why we haven’t been reading him these last five years! It pains us to even discuss creeps like him, but anyway, well done, Belle.

Belle: Uhm, guys? Would you like tone it down or something? This smug moral superiority shtick you’re doing totally creeps me out. See, he even admitted his error, although in very geeky dry prose, still rather disconnected from reality it seems. But anyway, you know, there’s always lots of intelligent, interesting people holding opinions we find crazy or twisted, and pretending that they are monsters outside bounds of civilised discourse would just make us appear smug idiots who’re only good at shouting people down. You know that, right, guys? Guys?

CT Crowd: Belle, way to go with another stellar post about this crazed, morally depraved Volokh person! Erm, what are you hinting about with your repeated insistence about him probably being a basically decent, intelligent, interesting person? We know you know better. Remember, he endorsed torture! Is it a politeness thing, Belle? Is it about those friends you have in common? We’re totally not getting it, but apart from that, stellar post, Belle.

The assumption here seems to be that if a woman grabs your nuts in a subway train (or man woman’s breast), you might have an involuntary erection. I can’t imagine this happening. You would feel humiliated. Humiliation doesn’t lead to arousal, voluntary or involuntary; at least in vast majority of human beings. Well, at least this is what my intuition tells me.

Everyone here is stating this as a fact, but is it really a fact? Can I see some proof, please. Is this “some” like 20% or like 0.5%?”

No, I can’t do that, but before I go on, remember we are talking about involuntary physical reactions here. People who don’t understand the difference between that and voluntary reactions – well, I suppose the ones that end up as rapists or pedophiles are in that group.

My “evidence” is an anecdote from Ola Ødegård, leader of a norwegian organisation of adults seeking some justice and truth about their awful, abusive childhoods (Rettferd for taperne, “Justice for the losers”). I remember he explained in an interview once that there are some things an adult man can do to you (when you are a boy) that makes your body react in ways you don’t want. Since he was abused by men, Ødegård thought he was gay, and was deeply ashamed of it for many years, until he found out we wasn’t gay after all. I want to point out that he is in no way an anti-gay activist, nor does he make loud claims of being healed or anything. I would be suprised if he has anything against gays, he merely realised he wasn’t one.

What happens to other boys? Well, we know that all too many grow up to abuse children themselves, so one theory is that they convince themselves at one point that they liked it, because of how their bodies responded to the abuse.

The trouble is that it’s not just children (who understandaby are ignorant about how their sexuality works), many adults don’t understand either, they figure that if their bodies like a certain thing, then that’s the way they are and they should accept it, and suppress any emotional or even moral discomfort they might have.

I don’t know how much people’s bodies respond to unwanted direct stimulation, which would be the answer to your question. What I do expect is that it varies with age and gender, and greatly from person to person.