Quote Originally Posted by Sean Malone
I find it hard to understand how a man can be turned on by the brutal destruction of the source of his pleasure. No degree of visceral need can explain it.
I question whether a woman is a source of a man's pleasure or a man the source of a woman's but that is another discussion.

Rape, like any other crime, is cultural. If a society does not have a sexual crime defined as what we in the west describe as rape, then rape does not exist. We are horrified by rape because we have been socialised into being horrified by the crime of rape. There are no fundemental values to the human condition other than to get by the best we can. Thankfully, for most of us in the west, co-operation is the best way to get by. However the beast is in all of us and to anyone who has interviewed rapists and murderers or witnessed them be being interviewed first hand, the horrifying thing is that they are ordinary people and not monsters of the tabloid press.

But if we as a culture have a defined crime, should we consider that defined crime to be a crime in another culture or should we consider that crime acceptable when it is in another culture? As a society, we in the west are pretty ambigous as to what is acceptable in another culture. We invade countries where our economic interests are at stake and we are willing to stand back and watch genocide take place. We are horrified but being horrified enables us to live with our complicity in a crime.

Seneca - 'We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?'