CyranoJ
Ustuzou
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2015
- Posts
- 2,782
1. Defining those who seek treatment as "sick populations" up front is (although I'm sure you don't consciously mean it this way) a very subtle form of victim-shaming. Therapy is as much about maintenance and prevention as it is about curing pathologies. This does not work as a means of undermining the credibility of victim accounts.
2. Here's what special pleading is (from the link I provided you):
"Special pleading is a form of fallacious argument that involves an attempt to cite something as an exception to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exception."
The example they used is:
"Cocaine use should be legal. Like all drugs, it does have some adverse health effects, but cocaine is different from other drugs. Many have benefited from the effects of cocaine."
How does this apply to what you're saying?
Actually there was never anyone that I knew of who based "sex is always rape" rhetoric on actual research (that kind of thing was mostly the product of demagogues, not a few of whom were struggling with pathologies of their own). Studying rape victims to gain an understanding of how rape works will ten times out of ten, however, lead you to the very correct conclusion that rape is always wrong, as in fact, being a sane and reasonable person, you already know:
Which conclusions are, yes, broadly true in ways not really worth lengthy disputation; despite the fact that you could probably find apparent outliers to both assertions, they're simply not common enough -- and are problematic enough in themselves in so many, many ways -- to be worth mentioning as refutations of the basic statement.
Now, yes, we already agree that the assertion incest in which a power imbalance exists between the two parties is always abuse (basically, always rape). And you sum up the reasons why quite accurately. As it happens I don't entirely disagree that "sex between related adults can be consensual" in outlier cases; I just don't agree that these theoretically possible and incredibly specific outlier cases are really relevant to the general assertions of contemporary research about what the bulk of incest comprises*, and most certainly what the bulk of incest fantasy is about. That you're attempting to postulate these theoretical cases as some significant refutation of the bulk of research on incest and on where incest tends to come from (while claiming that it's supposed to be impossible to generalize any conclusions from research on incest) is the part that strikes me as special pleading.
(* For example, in a response to Harold_Hill above, I linked an article about a case where a father in his mid-forties had sex with a daughter in her twenties; the sort of thing that would be defended by some as "consensual incest" between adults. And that article did a good job of explaining clearly why this is false, including that the issue of power imbalance was not necessarily obviated by their both being "adults" and moreover that the relationship turned out to actually stem from the father's earlier manipulations of his daughter at much younger ages. This kind of thing crops up in examples of supposedly "consensual adult incest" with considerable regularity. The assumption that close-in-age sibling relationships preclude a discrepancy in power, experience or sophistication is similarly problematic and frequently proves false.)
To put it another way, we would plainly not see this sentence from you:
... as a means of disputing the conclusions of research on rape. And that is very wise.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion.
Last edited:
