i’Lux Alptraum·
Authorship unclear. Published by Facebook on Maggie Beaumont’s page on 15 October 2025 as a memory from 7 years ago.
I always forget that this is not common knowledge, so here goes:
In the historical sense, rape is a crime that men do to other men, specifically, by damaging/stealing another man’s property (yes, we’re talking about women as property). A whole reason why rape was considered a problem in the first place is because men wanted to be assured that the babies their wives were pumping out were actually related to them, and rape was a theft of that paternal certainty (or, for a woman who hadn’t been married, it was a theft of the seal of virtue her father could present to a potential husband)..
Anyway. When you keep this context in mind, *a lot* of fucked up things about how we treat rape make a lot more sense.
Rape is positioned as something you can never come back from because if you’re talking about property damage, it’s to your benefit to position the damage that’s been done to your goods as permanent (this also ties into the bizarre fiction that loss of virginity changes a woman forever, but we can get more into that later). And rape victims and survivors are largely shut out of the criminal justice response to rape because, within this framework, their feelings are no more important than the feelings of a bicycle that has been stolen. (Not saying all prosecutors feel this way, just that it’s the framework from which everything is derived.)
In the historical sense, rape is a crime that men do to other men, specifically, by damaging/stealing another man’s property (yes, we’re talking about women as property). A whole reason why rape was considered a problem in the first place is because men wanted to be assured that the babies their wives were pumping out were actually related to them, and rape was a theft of that paternal certainty (or, for a woman who hadn’t been married, it was a theft of the seal of virtue her father could present to a potential husband)..
So. In the late twentieth century, we started to see a shift in how rape was framed and discussed, remapping it from a kind of property theft to an injury done to an individual (this is a big reason why we suddenly started to see marital rape becoming a crime). And I would argue that the big reason why we can have two people who both claim to be anti-rape come to *wildly* different conclusions about an individual instance of rape is because we still have two competing viewpoints about what rape is.
For conservatives (which I’m using broadly to also reference people with traditional views, not just right wing people), rape is about protecting the interests of men, and powerful men in particular. A victim testifying to their own pain is irrelevant, because the crime is not about the victim’s pain, it’s about the man whom she belongs to.
For feminists and allies, on the other hand, rape is about the violation of the individual, and the individual’s pain and testimony *are the whole point*. And the big challenge for feminists is that we’re still trying to find justice for this new understanding of rape through a system that’s set up to adjudicate and address the old measure of it.
I don’t think we’re ever going to truly address rape until we remake the system around from the ground up, starting from this idea of rape as a crime against bodily autonomy.
Anyway, smash the patriarchy, smash the system, happy Tuesday.E
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