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.
"...it is just adding significant suffering for no strategic goal". Historically, not true. The strategic goal was to spread terror to induce capitulation in potential future conflicts. History is replete with examples, especially after sieges.
I associate rape with a way to get sex and an attempt to impregnate women with the semen of your tribe. Cutting off limbs, ears, scalps etc. or just murdering will induce terror just as well. As an old mode of human behavior, rape is: expected behavior.
Rape is fun for the rapist. Therefore, we can’t separate out the personal selfishness from the “justified” violence. Someone in Hamas might rape because they like rape and not because they like liberation, liberation is just the excuse for rape.
Murder by contrast isn’t enjoyable. Or at least isn’t enjoyable in a first order sense for normal people. Hence it is “purer” in a sick sort of way. Nobody (besides psychopaths) is going to murder for the fun of it.
If you gave someone absolute power over another human being with no repercussions, I bet a lot of people would rape. But few would murder.
>If you gave someone absolute power over another human being with no repercussions, I bet a lot of people would rape. But few would murder.
You don't have to bet, since slavery has existed in many forms and many civilizations. And nearly all of them have had significant numbers who purchased people primarily to rape them. There are not really much accounts of people who purchased slaves to periodically beat them up or to inflict any sort of nonsexual violence for the fun of it. (They have ofc inflicted violence but for the instrumental goals of making them work harder etc., not because it is common for people to gain sadistic pleasure from beating others)
“I don’t understand why you are confused about this: it’s because murder can sometimes be justified, especially in self defense. Rape can almost never be justified.
This is actually even more clarifying when you apply it to the Israel Hamas thing. There is at least some argument one can muster about the inevitability of a violent insurgency by people under foreign occupation. By pointing to acts of visceral barbarism as rape, supporters of Israel can try to frame it as civilizational struggle against evil Islamist barbarians vs heroic west. Same reason coverage of Gaza war victims are sometimes dismissed as “collateral damage” but the intentional slaughter of Israeli victims are humanized more. Some leftists say it’s because media is biased against Palestinians, but imo the difference is intent of the perpetrator not lack of humanization of the victim.
One can say “Vietcong bombed cafes, schools, etc to resist U.S. occupation, were called a death cult. Zionist militias like the Irgun pre-Israel bombed marketplaces, the King David Hotel, etc — were called terrorists. The issue wasn’t religion —the tactics ended once statehood was realized.” With rape evidence (which by the way also was discovered under Israeli prisons and was also a whole media cycle of denial, and grudging acceptance) one can say: “The ideology of jihadism shapes Hamas's attacks on Israel, even as the realities of occupation, blockade, and serial bombardment make some form of violent resistance likely - just as the ideology of Jabotinskyism informs how Israeli state violence manifests.” So sure, Palestinians need to get statehood but Islamism needs to also be fought separately.
I find this fascinating because I did try to follow the intra left fight post Oct7 about rape and beheadings and I found some of the points interesting. This is from Gabriel Winant:
“Once again it’s perfectly clear what that ideological work of spreading the false claims about beheading babies is, Israel announces it every day with the “Hamas=ISIS” stuff. The point is to take the specific horror of 10/7 and plug it into a larger image of existential race war, with a recognizable image of an Arab beheader enemy. It’s not that it’s the only possible way of condemning the enemy, without which war wouldn’t have been possible. Plenty of material. It’s that it was the most convenient, ready to hand, an available heuristic for describing unbridgeable human difference. In other words—racism. It can still be racism even when the material comes from actually abhorrent acts, and bad people can be the targets of racism. By way of example, do you think Americans wouldn’t have fought Japan after Pearl Harbor without an avalanche of propaganda about how Japanese people were an unnatural combination of devious intelligence and apelike brutishness? No, Pearl Harbor was enough! And yet. Ask yourself this, it’s an inflammatory comparison and I don’t mean it one to one, but it’s illustratively useful: why did the nazis need to tell a whole story about a global Jewish conspiracy when they could merely accurately describe the many crimes of the Bolshevik state? The answer is that they were interested in doing something incommensurate with what they could point to factually. So too here.”
I agree and I would venture out to say that Israel is freely mingling its legitimate self defense needs with religiously motivated land grabs so intent is murky here as well
Most of the people they murdered were civilians, many old, many babies. Does that serve any strategic interest?
You could say it serves the strategic interest of sowing terror and humiliation into your opponent. But in that case, so would rape. In fact, that is the primary purpose of rape during armed conflict. So, yes, it does serve a purpose.
It's arguably not "really popular" – there's WAY more murder mystery stories – but that's a good counterexample to the claim that it "is not a genre at all".
And there are certainly LOTS of stories with sympathetic rapists (e.g. romance novels).
Your comment inspired me to google if people are offended by the show's use of rape to generate entertainment. The main feminist critique I found was that it was "carceral feminism" which focuses on putting individuals in jail instead of addressing systemic issues like lack of social services.
I was going to make the point about SVU frequently featuring rape mysteries. Glad others had the same thought.
I suspect a lot of the critiques from the left are due to the world view embodied in the show. The perps are bad and choose to do bad things. It’s not like they’d be not bad if they had more social workers.
Yeah, I think if one were to watch the show from a left wing perspective, one could say that on one hand, it does a pretty good job of answering the, "why didn't you call the police?" question. It depicts rape victims / survivors who have a wide range of reasons for being reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement. On the other hand, it's told from the perspective of law enforcement, and so it's basically premised on the idea that law enforcement has an important role to play in providing justice for perpetrators and closure for victims (though I don't know how you would tell these stories without that being one of the premises). The show doesn't pretend that there aren't attitudes within police departments that hinder their effectiveness with respect to these goals, but it also presents them as personal character flaws and shortcomings that can be easily fixed by the individual becoming kinder and more understanding. One could argue that the show is critical of the more toxic elements of second-wave / girl boss feminism because of the way it depicts some of the corporate "glass ceiling breakers" type characters.
Granted, some have also argued that it creates the impression that the NYPD is more effective than it actually is, simply on account of the fact that they pretty much always solve the crime. But that's sort of incidental to the genre.
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?
Sympathy for murder victims extends to everyone who knew the victim and is generally public, but I've never heard of anyone sending flowers to rape victims' family, friends, and co-workers, let alone the victim herself.
And I don't think sympathy or empathy is infinite. It is indeed a limited resource. As Stalin may or may not have said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. I don't feel sad for every single dead soldier anywhere near as much as for a single dead soldier I knew. If my friends started dropping like flies, at some point the sympathy and empathy diminishes. It takes its toll and can't be kept up.
You make some good points, Bianca. Especially: hwhat's the point of wasting sympathy on corpses?
As for sympathy being infinite, I've heard some describe empathy (which is kinda like sympathy right?) like a "muscle": we have a limited capacity in the short run, but with sustained, conscious effort, we can build up more in the long-run.
I myself, for example, care a lot about starving children in Africa, but I do not care so much for homeless drug addicts in Canada. When it comes up in conversation, my response is usually something along the lines of: "Well, I only have so many fucks to give!"
I suppose I could "work out" my empathy muscles, but homeless drug addicts are hardly motivation to go to the empathy gym.
Protecting women and children is not arbitrary. They are generally less able to defend themselves so historically *needed* to be protected. Also, women are the bottleneck for reproduction. Men are much more expendable in this sense when considering the long-term maintenance or growth of a clan or country.
Dr Caplan, I'm surprised that you, of all people, haven't considered SDB in this discussion.
I think most people, if they had to choose would choose rape over death. Hence why living rape victims exist! But, perhaps people feel social pressure to SAY that rape is worse than death.
Uh, I really think this jumps to conclusions. First, fiction is often illogical. Yes, rape is treated as worse than killing, but so is mutilation and torture. No hero ever commits rape true, but only the darkest grey antiheroes ever torture anyone, even beating a bad guy up to make them reveal the location of a bomb would make a work VERY controversial, more so than killing a villain in cold blood.
Second, there can sometimes be humanely understandable reasons for murder even if the law doesn't (and can't really if we are going to maintain a rule by law society) agree, such as revenge. In fiction and sometimes even in real life we can sympathize with that. What would ever be a defensible reason for rape? Outside of some incredibly contrieved scenario I can't think of any.
I disagree with you about murder almost always being much worse than rape.
I'm a man who was raped by a woman, and if I could choose to have been murdered at any point in my life before I was raped, I would without a doubt choose to have been murdered. Nothing good that I experienced in the passed or expect to experience in the future would make up for the rape, and the debilitating anxiety and depression, loss of friends and family, loss of career, etc. that followed.
I would of course have lost friends, family, and career if I had been murdered too, but I wouldn't have been around to experience the trauma of that and the people previously in my life would have remembered me more positively. People don't tend to accuse murdered victims of making it up or enjoying being murdered.
Before I was raped, I would definitely have thought rape would be much less bad than murder. I wasn't able to predict how bad being raped would be. I think most people who have not been raped underestimate how bad it is.
I'm also a male victim of a female rapist and while it was the worst thing I ever experienced, I still think being murdered would still be infinitely worse. I'm not the same person as before and definitely suffer from a lot of mental health issues, but I didn't lose friends and family or my job. Probably because I never told anyone. Have you considered that it's not just the rape, but the rape in combination with the sexism you were exposed to as a male victim of a female rapist that made it a fate worse than death?
No, even just the rape by itself was worse than death. I guess if I could remove all memories and other consequences of it, then that would be preferable to being dead. However, no amount of sympathy or support could do that.
While I'm sure a lot of the hostility I faced was due to sexism, I don't think all of it was. While I definitely think it's worse for men on average, women also often face similar hostility.
There are a bunch of good evolutionary reasons for men to publicly declare that rape would be worse than murder. This shows that they’d never do it AND never tolerate anyone else doing it to their mate - likely they’d seek revenge if it’s ever committed. For women there are also good reasons to profess the belief that rape would be worse - for one it shows they’d go to great lengths to protect themselves from it, so their mate doesn’t need to worry as much. For men, if their mate is secretly raped it’s evolutionarily worse than if their mate is secretly murdered.
But evo explanations aside, rape seems much harder to commit than murder. You can kill a person almost by accident - we can imagine murder as what grandma would do in the heat of the moment if someone cuts her off in traffic on a bad day. But we can’t imagine grandma raping someone (forced restrained rape not the grey zone kind). It’s less a crime of passion and more a crime of total depravity. Yes, murder is objectively worse, but putting yourself in the mind of the rapist feels like a much darker and more evil place than trying to imagine murder.
One of the things I like about economists is that they have always been willing to ask these kind of questions. Many years ago, an econ prof said (something like this)"Economists are the sort that ask questions such as 'How high does the price of fuel have to go, before we throw granny on the fire?' " (at least among their economists colleagues). I am so old that I remember when the phrase "human capital" was frowned upon by non-economists. Good article, Bryan but I suspect you will get many who do willfully misinterpret what you said.
This has not turned out to go as badly as I thought it would... So I will take the risk and weigh in with some more thoughts:
As I stated before, I don't believe that most people think rape is worse than death.
Upon further reflection, I don't even think most people think we're supposed to even SAY that rape is worse than death most of the time.
We're supposed to always "believe the victim" so if the victim says that, we're not supposed to disagree. But the whole always "believe the victim" thing is a whole other can of worms for another day.
But could you imagine anyone telling a rape survivor: "OMG! I'm so sorry that happened to you! That's so awful! He should have just killed you!" NO! Of course not!
The examples you gave were mainly about shame from the perpetrator's perspective. And the comparable homicide examples you gave both involved circumstances that can be seen as attenuating from the perspective of the perpetrator.
To make it a true apples-to-apples comparison, you should compare rape (which, as others have pointed out,never has attenuating circumstances, as far as we know) to a purely selfish murder. No likeable person ever publicly confesses to rape, but no likeable person ever publicly confesses to killing someone to steal their Bentley either!
My sense around rape seeming worse than murder is that the act of violent rape seems worse because it implies the rapist is taking pleasure in explicitly hurting someone else. Murder can happen for “clean” reasons that don’t imply psychological or otherwise inhuman nature of the offender, but violent rape is a very strong signal that the perpetrator is aroused by very wrong things, or otherwise a monster. The repellent nature of the act is thus amplified.
How much of the difference between rape and murder, as a victim, lies in knowing you'd have to live with the memory the rest of your life? Yes, the trauma can heel, and does; but the memory remains. Worse, the anticipation of living with the memory of rape, or even assault in general, is something impossible with living with the memory of being murdered. Murder is final; rape and assault in general are not.
Perhaps rape would be better compared to assault which leads to an amputated leg or other permanent disability.
It’s interesting that you bring up prison rape as an example, because it really does show how differently people view men who are raped compared to women. Prison rape jokes are very common… but only made about men. A few weeks ago, the Idaho quadruple killer was sentenced, and one of the victim impact statements was like “You got A’s in school, now I hope you get big D’s in prison.” I have never heard people make jokes about women being raped in prison.
I wonder what the answer would be if you asked men whether they’d be raped or murdered.
“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.”
I think this post was fine, up until this point.
This seems like question-begging to me. If helping women is more moral than men, then we should allocate more sympathy to them. Pointing at the fact that we do this doesn’t seem like good evidence that it’s not the right thing to do.
I had a similar issue with these lines. Suddenly the concept of "more morally important" is introduced. Arguably, morality should be based on what is socially functional to bring about good outcomes for society. And this "women and children first, men to sacrifice themselves as necessary" morality is clearly driven by what is more valuable for the tribe/society.
Another thing worth considering when we're trying to figure out why rape is so shameful for a perpetrator to admit...
Consider how many celebrities openly talk about doing drugs vs. how many openly talk about hiring prostitutes. Hiring a prostitute is shameful cause it's a sign of desperation: You're somehow not good enough to convince a girl to have sex with you for free.
Likewise, confessing to rape is shameful cause it's desperate: You're not able to get a girl to have sex with you, unless you force her.
A killer might be seen (at least by themselves) as strong and even "heroic" (again, in their own eyes, depending on the reason for the homicide). But a rapist will always be seen by others and themselves as "desperate" and "weak".
Hence, why sometimes people will publicly confess to murder, but, so far, nobody publicly confesses to rape.
In stories and media, physical violence is usually a metaphor for social defeat. We are very blase about James Bond casually shooting dozens of foreign guards. It's barely PG-13.
But there's another class of bad things in media which are just bad things, and we have a reaction closer to reality when we think about them.
There are rare death/violence/torture scenes in media that snap out of this and truly do seem awful and high stakes. But very rare.
I do think men are perceived as not just disposable, but intrinsically bad. In media there is often a small number of good men mass murdering bad men. James Bond above, Star Wars, crime series, pretty much anything with action in it. This seems to suggest that male disposability is an appealing narrative to lots of men.
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.
It seems like you're describing terrorism, in which case rape seems maybe even better than murder BECAUSE it's considered worse.
Exactly. Once you’re on the side of The Angels many things are justified
"...it is just adding significant suffering for no strategic goal". Historically, not true. The strategic goal was to spread terror to induce capitulation in potential future conflicts. History is replete with examples, especially after sieges.
I associate rape with a way to get sex and an attempt to impregnate women with the semen of your tribe. Cutting off limbs, ears, scalps etc. or just murdering will induce terror just as well. As an old mode of human behavior, rape is: expected behavior.
This is my thought as well. Thanks. There is no such thing as self defensive rape. Nobody associates rape with “defending the nation.”
Rape is fun for the rapist. Therefore, we can’t separate out the personal selfishness from the “justified” violence. Someone in Hamas might rape because they like rape and not because they like liberation, liberation is just the excuse for rape.
Murder by contrast isn’t enjoyable. Or at least isn’t enjoyable in a first order sense for normal people. Hence it is “purer” in a sick sort of way. Nobody (besides psychopaths) is going to murder for the fun of it.
If you gave someone absolute power over another human being with no repercussions, I bet a lot of people would rape. But few would murder.
>If you gave someone absolute power over another human being with no repercussions, I bet a lot of people would rape. But few would murder.
You don't have to bet, since slavery has existed in many forms and many civilizations. And nearly all of them have had significant numbers who purchased people primarily to rape them. There are not really much accounts of people who purchased slaves to periodically beat them up or to inflict any sort of nonsexual violence for the fun of it. (They have ofc inflicted violence but for the instrumental goals of making them work harder etc., not because it is common for people to gain sadistic pleasure from beating others)
Well, sure, to answer that last paragraph. Murder victims are single-use. Rape victims are recyclable.
Yes I agree I made a similar comment:
“I don’t understand why you are confused about this: it’s because murder can sometimes be justified, especially in self defense. Rape can almost never be justified.
This is actually even more clarifying when you apply it to the Israel Hamas thing. There is at least some argument one can muster about the inevitability of a violent insurgency by people under foreign occupation. By pointing to acts of visceral barbarism as rape, supporters of Israel can try to frame it as civilizational struggle against evil Islamist barbarians vs heroic west. Same reason coverage of Gaza war victims are sometimes dismissed as “collateral damage” but the intentional slaughter of Israeli victims are humanized more. Some leftists say it’s because media is biased against Palestinians, but imo the difference is intent of the perpetrator not lack of humanization of the victim.
One can say “Vietcong bombed cafes, schools, etc to resist U.S. occupation, were called a death cult. Zionist militias like the Irgun pre-Israel bombed marketplaces, the King David Hotel, etc — were called terrorists. The issue wasn’t religion —the tactics ended once statehood was realized.” With rape evidence (which by the way also was discovered under Israeli prisons and was also a whole media cycle of denial, and grudging acceptance) one can say: “The ideology of jihadism shapes Hamas's attacks on Israel, even as the realities of occupation, blockade, and serial bombardment make some form of violent resistance likely - just as the ideology of Jabotinskyism informs how Israeli state violence manifests.” So sure, Palestinians need to get statehood but Islamism needs to also be fought separately.
I find this fascinating because I did try to follow the intra left fight post Oct7 about rape and beheadings and I found some of the points interesting. This is from Gabriel Winant:
“Once again it’s perfectly clear what that ideological work of spreading the false claims about beheading babies is, Israel announces it every day with the “Hamas=ISIS” stuff. The point is to take the specific horror of 10/7 and plug it into a larger image of existential race war, with a recognizable image of an Arab beheader enemy. It’s not that it’s the only possible way of condemning the enemy, without which war wouldn’t have been possible. Plenty of material. It’s that it was the most convenient, ready to hand, an available heuristic for describing unbridgeable human difference. In other words—racism. It can still be racism even when the material comes from actually abhorrent acts, and bad people can be the targets of racism. By way of example, do you think Americans wouldn’t have fought Japan after Pearl Harbor without an avalanche of propaganda about how Japanese people were an unnatural combination of devious intelligence and apelike brutishness? No, Pearl Harbor was enough! And yet. Ask yourself this, it’s an inflammatory comparison and I don’t mean it one to one, but it’s illustratively useful: why did the nazis need to tell a whole story about a global Jewish conspiracy when they could merely accurately describe the many crimes of the Bolshevik state? The answer is that they were interested in doing something incommensurate with what they could point to factually. So too here.”
The issue is intent of perpetrator, I agree : but the lack of humanisation of the Gazan casualties was still disgusting.
I agree and I would venture out to say that Israel is freely mingling its legitimate self defense needs with religiously motivated land grabs so intent is murky here as well
Yes, the whole war is so murky in all aspects, it's very hard to work out the best course of action.
Most of the people they murdered were civilians, many old, many babies. Does that serve any strategic interest?
You could say it serves the strategic interest of sowing terror and humiliation into your opponent. But in that case, so would rape. In fact, that is the primary purpose of rape during armed conflict. So, yes, it does serve a purpose.
For a man, the tactical goal can be reproduction
Murder of civilians isn't the same as armed combat.
What are you disagreeing with?
Rape Mystery kind of is a really popular genre though, right? Like, isn’t that basically what Law and Order SVU is?
It's arguably not "really popular" – there's WAY more murder mystery stories – but that's a good counterexample to the claim that it "is not a genre at all".
And there are certainly LOTS of stories with sympathetic rapists (e.g. romance novels).
Your comment inspired me to google if people are offended by the show's use of rape to generate entertainment. The main feminist critique I found was that it was "carceral feminism" which focuses on putting individuals in jail instead of addressing systemic issues like lack of social services.
I was going to make the point about SVU frequently featuring rape mysteries. Glad others had the same thought.
I suspect a lot of the critiques from the left are due to the world view embodied in the show. The perps are bad and choose to do bad things. It’s not like they’d be not bad if they had more social workers.
Yeah, I think if one were to watch the show from a left wing perspective, one could say that on one hand, it does a pretty good job of answering the, "why didn't you call the police?" question. It depicts rape victims / survivors who have a wide range of reasons for being reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement. On the other hand, it's told from the perspective of law enforcement, and so it's basically premised on the idea that law enforcement has an important role to play in providing justice for perpetrators and closure for victims (though I don't know how you would tell these stories without that being one of the premises). The show doesn't pretend that there aren't attitudes within police departments that hinder their effectiveness with respect to these goals, but it also presents them as personal character flaws and shortcomings that can be easily fixed by the individual becoming kinder and more understanding. One could argue that the show is critical of the more toxic elements of second-wave / girl boss feminism because of the way it depicts some of the corporate "glass ceiling breakers" type characters.
Granted, some have also argued that it creates the impression that the NYPD is more effective than it actually is, simply on account of the fact that they pretty much always solve the crime. But that's sort of incidental to the genre.
Isn’t like all that female smut-lit basically rape fantasies.
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?
Sympathy for murder victims extends to everyone who knew the victim and is generally public, but I've never heard of anyone sending flowers to rape victims' family, friends, and co-workers, let alone the victim herself.
And I don't think sympathy or empathy is infinite. It is indeed a limited resource. As Stalin may or may not have said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. I don't feel sad for every single dead soldier anywhere near as much as for a single dead soldier I knew. If my friends started dropping like flies, at some point the sympathy and empathy diminishes. It takes its toll and can't be kept up.
You make some good points, Bianca. Especially: hwhat's the point of wasting sympathy on corpses?
As for sympathy being infinite, I've heard some describe empathy (which is kinda like sympathy right?) like a "muscle": we have a limited capacity in the short run, but with sustained, conscious effort, we can build up more in the long-run.
I myself, for example, care a lot about starving children in Africa, but I do not care so much for homeless drug addicts in Canada. When it comes up in conversation, my response is usually something along the lines of: "Well, I only have so many fucks to give!"
I suppose I could "work out" my empathy muscles, but homeless drug addicts are hardly motivation to go to the empathy gym.
Protecting women and children is not arbitrary. They are generally less able to defend themselves so historically *needed* to be protected. Also, women are the bottleneck for reproduction. Men are much more expendable in this sense when considering the long-term maintenance or growth of a clan or country.
Dr Caplan, I'm surprised that you, of all people, haven't considered SDB in this discussion.
I think most people, if they had to choose would choose rape over death. Hence why living rape victims exist! But, perhaps people feel social pressure to SAY that rape is worse than death.
Uh, I really think this jumps to conclusions. First, fiction is often illogical. Yes, rape is treated as worse than killing, but so is mutilation and torture. No hero ever commits rape true, but only the darkest grey antiheroes ever torture anyone, even beating a bad guy up to make them reveal the location of a bomb would make a work VERY controversial, more so than killing a villain in cold blood.
Second, there can sometimes be humanely understandable reasons for murder even if the law doesn't (and can't really if we are going to maintain a rule by law society) agree, such as revenge. In fiction and sometimes even in real life we can sympathize with that. What would ever be a defensible reason for rape? Outside of some incredibly contrieved scenario I can't think of any.
Exactly. And a lot of murder mysteries do have sadistic murderers who may rape & torture as well. Depends what kind you read...
I disagree with you about murder almost always being much worse than rape.
I'm a man who was raped by a woman, and if I could choose to have been murdered at any point in my life before I was raped, I would without a doubt choose to have been murdered. Nothing good that I experienced in the passed or expect to experience in the future would make up for the rape, and the debilitating anxiety and depression, loss of friends and family, loss of career, etc. that followed.
I would of course have lost friends, family, and career if I had been murdered too, but I wouldn't have been around to experience the trauma of that and the people previously in my life would have remembered me more positively. People don't tend to accuse murdered victims of making it up or enjoying being murdered.
Before I was raped, I would definitely have thought rape would be much less bad than murder. I wasn't able to predict how bad being raped would be. I think most people who have not been raped underestimate how bad it is.
I'm also a male victim of a female rapist and while it was the worst thing I ever experienced, I still think being murdered would still be infinitely worse. I'm not the same person as before and definitely suffer from a lot of mental health issues, but I didn't lose friends and family or my job. Probably because I never told anyone. Have you considered that it's not just the rape, but the rape in combination with the sexism you were exposed to as a male victim of a female rapist that made it a fate worse than death?
No, even just the rape by itself was worse than death. I guess if I could remove all memories and other consequences of it, then that would be preferable to being dead. However, no amount of sympathy or support could do that.
While I'm sure a lot of the hostility I faced was due to sexism, I don't think all of it was. While I definitely think it's worse for men on average, women also often face similar hostility.
I'm curious about how a woman can rape a man, given the conventional understanding of rape being a one way thing.
Did the woman overpower you and use an object to penetrate you?
There are a bunch of good evolutionary reasons for men to publicly declare that rape would be worse than murder. This shows that they’d never do it AND never tolerate anyone else doing it to their mate - likely they’d seek revenge if it’s ever committed. For women there are also good reasons to profess the belief that rape would be worse - for one it shows they’d go to great lengths to protect themselves from it, so their mate doesn’t need to worry as much. For men, if their mate is secretly raped it’s evolutionarily worse than if their mate is secretly murdered.
But evo explanations aside, rape seems much harder to commit than murder. You can kill a person almost by accident - we can imagine murder as what grandma would do in the heat of the moment if someone cuts her off in traffic on a bad day. But we can’t imagine grandma raping someone (forced restrained rape not the grey zone kind). It’s less a crime of passion and more a crime of total depravity. Yes, murder is objectively worse, but putting yourself in the mind of the rapist feels like a much darker and more evil place than trying to imagine murder.
How would you define 'grey zone'....?
One of the things I like about economists is that they have always been willing to ask these kind of questions. Many years ago, an econ prof said (something like this)"Economists are the sort that ask questions such as 'How high does the price of fuel have to go, before we throw granny on the fire?' " (at least among their economists colleagues). I am so old that I remember when the phrase "human capital" was frowned upon by non-economists. Good article, Bryan but I suspect you will get many who do willfully misinterpret what you said.
I suspect you are correct, Chuck. The uninformed (or worse) will read this post as rape apology, which it is not.
This has not turned out to go as badly as I thought it would... So I will take the risk and weigh in with some more thoughts:
As I stated before, I don't believe that most people think rape is worse than death.
Upon further reflection, I don't even think most people think we're supposed to even SAY that rape is worse than death most of the time.
We're supposed to always "believe the victim" so if the victim says that, we're not supposed to disagree. But the whole always "believe the victim" thing is a whole other can of worms for another day.
But could you imagine anyone telling a rape survivor: "OMG! I'm so sorry that happened to you! That's so awful! He should have just killed you!" NO! Of course not!
The examples you gave were mainly about shame from the perpetrator's perspective. And the comparable homicide examples you gave both involved circumstances that can be seen as attenuating from the perspective of the perpetrator.
To make it a true apples-to-apples comparison, you should compare rape (which, as others have pointed out,never has attenuating circumstances, as far as we know) to a purely selfish murder. No likeable person ever publicly confesses to rape, but no likeable person ever publicly confesses to killing someone to steal their Bentley either!
My sense around rape seeming worse than murder is that the act of violent rape seems worse because it implies the rapist is taking pleasure in explicitly hurting someone else. Murder can happen for “clean” reasons that don’t imply psychological or otherwise inhuman nature of the offender, but violent rape is a very strong signal that the perpetrator is aroused by very wrong things, or otherwise a monster. The repellent nature of the act is thus amplified.
How much of the difference between rape and murder, as a victim, lies in knowing you'd have to live with the memory the rest of your life? Yes, the trauma can heel, and does; but the memory remains. Worse, the anticipation of living with the memory of rape, or even assault in general, is something impossible with living with the memory of being murdered. Murder is final; rape and assault in general are not.
Perhaps rape would be better compared to assault which leads to an amputated leg or other permanent disability.
It’s interesting that you bring up prison rape as an example, because it really does show how differently people view men who are raped compared to women. Prison rape jokes are very common… but only made about men. A few weeks ago, the Idaho quadruple killer was sentenced, and one of the victim impact statements was like “You got A’s in school, now I hope you get big D’s in prison.” I have never heard people make jokes about women being raped in prison.
I wonder what the answer would be if you asked men whether they’d be raped or murdered.
Yes, I've heard people say murderers deserve to get raped in prison. It chilled me to the core. One of the biggest examples of the empathy gap.
No matter who, it should NEVER be acceptable to say someone deserves to be raped
Not even Ted Bundy, for example? I can see why people would see poetic justice in such circumstances.
No. No one should be raped, no matter how bad. Besides, like the death penalty - what if you caught an innocent person & helped them?
I mean, hurt them
Spoilers: people hate criminals
One reason prison rape jokes are only about men is because only men can rape, and in sex-segregated prisons, only men can be raped.
(Anyone who brings guard rape, transgender rape, or broom rape into the picture is a pedant.)
“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.”
I think this post was fine, up until this point.
This seems like question-begging to me. If helping women is more moral than men, then we should allocate more sympathy to them. Pointing at the fact that we do this doesn’t seem like good evidence that it’s not the right thing to do.
I had a similar issue with these lines. Suddenly the concept of "more morally important" is introduced. Arguably, morality should be based on what is socially functional to bring about good outcomes for society. And this "women and children first, men to sacrifice themselves as necessary" morality is clearly driven by what is more valuable for the tribe/society.
Another thing worth considering when we're trying to figure out why rape is so shameful for a perpetrator to admit...
Consider how many celebrities openly talk about doing drugs vs. how many openly talk about hiring prostitutes. Hiring a prostitute is shameful cause it's a sign of desperation: You're somehow not good enough to convince a girl to have sex with you for free.
Likewise, confessing to rape is shameful cause it's desperate: You're not able to get a girl to have sex with you, unless you force her.
A killer might be seen (at least by themselves) as strong and even "heroic" (again, in their own eyes, depending on the reason for the homicide). But a rapist will always be seen by others and themselves as "desperate" and "weak".
Hence, why sometimes people will publicly confess to murder, but, so far, nobody publicly confesses to rape.
In stories and media, physical violence is usually a metaphor for social defeat. We are very blase about James Bond casually shooting dozens of foreign guards. It's barely PG-13.
But there's another class of bad things in media which are just bad things, and we have a reaction closer to reality when we think about them.
There are rare death/violence/torture scenes in media that snap out of this and truly do seem awful and high stakes. But very rare.
I do think men are perceived as not just disposable, but intrinsically bad. In media there is often a small number of good men mass murdering bad men. James Bond above, Star Wars, crime series, pretty much anything with action in it. This seems to suggest that male disposability is an appealing narrative to lots of men.