Murder, Rape, and the Sexism of Sympathy
I humbly request that no one willfully misinterpret my carefully-chosen words.
Rape is very bad, but murder is almost always much worse. This is common sense: Where there’s life, there’s hope. While rape may scar you for life, the cold, happy truth is that rape victims normally recover from the trauma by the grace of hedonic adaptation. The average human really is resilient — so you probably are, too.
Not convinced that murder is much worse than rape? In economic terms, just ask yourself: If you could either be raped for sure, or murdered with probability X, what probability leaves you indifferent? 10%? 3%? .7%?
Too close to home? Then ask the same probability question for anyone you care about. You can and should tell a victim of rape, “This horror does not define you.” You can’t say the same to a victim of murder.
Does anyone think otherwise? Yes. In fact, most people think so, or at least feel so. Consider: Off the record, professors of criminal law routinely confess that they are far more uncomfortable talking about rape than talking about murder. Why? Because rape is a far touchier topic for their students. “Murder mystery” is a beloved genre of fiction. “Rape mystery,” in contrast, is not a genre at all. People who find murder fascinating may seem a little odd, but people who find rape fascinating are terrifying. Indeed, under the right circumstances a likeable person will publicly confess to murder (“Yes, he robbed my aged mother, so I killed him!”), but no likeable person ever publicly confesses to rape.
Although I’ve been dimly aware of all these facts for years, it was the reaction to the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack that brought the facts into focus. As you know, Hamas murdered about 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023 — and they never denied it. Indeed, they were proud of themselves.
During the same attack, Hamas terrorists also clearly raped some women. But Hamas vociferously denies such accusations. Wikipedia:
Hamas officials, including Basem Naim, denied the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, citing Islamic principles that forbid any sexual relationship outside of marriage. Hamas accused Western media of bias and said the reports of sexual violence demonized "Palestinian resistance". They also demanded that The New York Times apologize following a report on the matter.
International investigations of the Hamas rapes have received massive global publicity. The United Nations spent about six months investigating the issue, then cautiously declared, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.”
When proud mass murderers are accused of rape, you have to be careful not to sully their good names!
Not convinced? Imagine Hamas murdered 1,220 people, but scrupulously avoided any sexual violence. International revulsion at Hamas would be noticeably less, even though their behavior would have been objectively worse.
How can we begin to understand this Kafkaesque situation? By remembering that contrary to feminists, human beings have a deep pro-female bias. Both men and women care more about female well-being, and especially female suffering. Women are wonderful, but men are disposable. Since the stereotypical victim of murder is male and the stereotypical victim of rape is female, humans’ emotional reaction to rape is more negative than our reaction to murder, even though rationally speaking, murder is definitely much worse than rape. (Yes, I am well-aware that many men are raped in prison, but when humans hear about rape, the victim they picture is almost always female).
“Doesn’t pro-female bias serve the useful social function of protecting women?” What a question-begging question! If female well-being and suffering were actually more morally important than male well-being and suffering, then pro-female bias would be socially functional. Otherwise, however, pro-female bias leads to misallocation of sympathy — away from men who need help more, and toward women who need help less.
P.S. I’m well-aware that hypersensitive and incurious readers are likely to willfully misinterpret everything I’ve written here. But I do not apologize for politely saying true things. Except under extreme duress.
I think it is because murder can be arguably justified. Self-defence, or protecting others. If you believe Israel is unfairly oppressing Palestine, and you also believe armed conflict could lead to better conditions for Palestinians, Hamas murdering Israelis would be a good thing under many different moral systems. But there are virtually no moral systems in which the rape is justified- it is just adding significant suffering for no strategic goal.
I think you conflate two points that should be considered separately — the sentiment about the crime, and the sentiment about the victim. Your ultimate argument about misallocation of sympathy is based on faulty reasoning. I will explain.
The benchmark you’re using to determine “badness” of the crime is vitality — that is, the effect the crime has on the victim’s ability to live. Through this framework, it follows that murder is “worse” than rape; that is, broadly speaking, what ends your life is worse than what doesn’t end your life.
Statistically, most murder victims are men, and most rape victims are women. You contend that despite the crime of murder being worse, humans tend to display more sympathy for rape victims than murder victims. You argue that this sympathy delta is irrational, attribute the irrationality to pro-female bias, and express how this bias “leads to misallocation of sympathy — away from men who need help more, and toward women who need help less.”
Your reasoning illogically considers sympathy as a resource. Sympathy is an emotion, not a resource, and thereby functions according to a different dynamic. Unlike a resource, it is not finite, measurable, or part of a zero-sum game. As such, the only person who can fully know and decide the value of sympathy is the recipient. A recipient of a financial settlement can know the value of $20k, and an observer can recognize the value of receiving $20k, because the value of a dollar is a quantifiable, universally agreed-upon, objective metric. But a recipient of sympathy cannot quantify its emotional weight, they can only feel it; similarly, an observer can consider what it might feel like to receive sympathy, but cannot quantify it. The value comes from the feeling of receiving it, which is an individual experience.
Individual experiences are only able to be had by people who are alive. Of the broad pool of murder and rape victims, based on statistics, more of the victims who die are men, and more of the victims who live are women. In other words, the majority of the pool of victims of these crimes who are able to receive and feel sympathy are women; you can’t receive or feel sympathy if you’re dead. It makes perfect sense that people would be more sympathetic to a victim of rape than of murder, because their sympathy has somewhere to go — though I think the word “allocate” reflects your miscategorization of sympathy, wouldn’t you agree that it would be most illogical to “allocate” sympathy towards someone who wouldn’t be able to receive it? Emotions are human currency, and you can’t offer this type of currency without a live human recipient.
Again, because sympathy is not a finite resource, it is not tethered to the severity of the crime, but the consideration of how the victim may suffer as a result of the crime. In other words, as an emotion, sympathy is not afforded based on the crime, it’s afforded based on the victim, because it is not an effort to assess the value of the crime, but to express an emotion towards the victim. If your argument were that pro-female bias leads to female rape victims receiving more sympathy than male rape victims, that would make logical sense, considering cultural norms downplaying the experiences of male rape victims. But when you contend that sympathy is not appropriately given towards “men who need help more,” I’m not sure what you’re frustrated about — that we aren’t sympathetic to corpses? What are you suggesting we do instead?