“Most girls do not really understand how horny guys are, how much stronger guys are, how guys will rationalise what they do.”
Be as horrified as you feel appropriate:
It is, of course, uncommon for people, mostly men, who take advantage of passed out roommates or routinely anally rape their wives to come out and give a no-holds-barred account of what they know to be a horrific act.
So when a reddit thread began in 2012 asking perpetrator of sexual assault to tell “their side of the story” — attracting more than a thousand responses — researchers pounced on the opportunity.
It’s the first time the viral social media site has been used as the basis for an academic study, and the results are as fascinating as they are disturbing.
The result, to the one, is about as morbid as we might expect; to the other, neither is it unfamiliar. This is what a rapist says:
The same respondent, who admitted to raping a woman while “extremely horny”, even after she “realised what was happening and tried to clamp her legs shut”, disturbingly describes how he plans to educate his own daughter about the dangers of men’s uncontrollable sexuality.
“When my daughter is old enough, I’m going to have a very frank conversation on male-female relations of the sort that I do not think most girls get,” he wrote.
“Most girls do not really understand how horny guys are, how much stronger guys are, how guys will rationalise what they do.”
And it is not, by any measure, unfamiliar. Chicken or egg; art and life. Liz Burke notes that researchers “found the motivations the responses illustrated were consistent with what is commonly described as ‘rape culture'”; we ought not be surprised. The rapist is, after all, the living manifestation of rape culture.
Unsurprising, to be certain, but how can that familiarity not be unsettling?
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Burke, Liz. “Victim-blaming, hormones and objectification: Reddit-based study reveals why men rape”. News.com.au. 22 January 2016.
This Is 