Alexnader said:
Well with regards to the power imbalance, it's one method of analysing the concept of rape. http://www.brissc.org.au/resources/for/for_12.html
That imbalance can also be one of the reasons for PTSD and other longer term negative effects on the victim. Additionally how torturous the experience was could also amplify the long term effects of rape/torture.
Something I've often heard in these discussions and was indeed brought up by Jim was that once you're dead, it's over, while the victim of torture or rape relives that experience regularly. With this in mind domination and power imbalance are very relevant to the discussion.
Furthermore the article I linked seems to infer that rape can and often has a purpose beyond selfish sexual satisfaction and that purpose is often linked with systematic oppression or the assertion of superiority. It seems unlikely to me, for example, that the Syrian black forces who murdered and raped women and children were not doing it out of selfish desire. Their actions were designed to oppress the populace and the rebellion and thus to protect their government. It's raping in self-defense on a nation-wide level.
Just to state my perspective on the issue, I feel rape and torture are still less horrible than the act of pre-meditated murder for selfish means. They may well provoke a stronger emotional response and thus they may well be more horrifying, however from a rational perspective there can be nothing worse than the willful denial of another person's right to life. (This is not the same as abortion because a collection of unconscious cells are not a person).
I feel that both you and Jim have taken far too narrow a view of rape and murder, viewing rape as something that is solely a mechanism for the rapist to get off and seeing murder only in terms of the video game context of war or self-defence. Murder can easily sink to far blacker depths.
That link introduces some interesting ideas, but there is a bit too much speculation. Like how it says women and children are raped more often because they are less powerful. Could not simply be that rapist are more sexually attracted to women and children because they tend to have less body hair and generally less masculinised features. And other things, like suggesting rape is learned... Rather that everyone learns not to inflict wanton harm on other people, so they learn not to rape from that. When babies and toddler play they hurt each other till they learn not to be mean.
I don't think it healthy to focus too much on the power aspect of rape as the worst part, as it kind of says any power imbalance is as bad as rape. Like being arrested by the police, to spite having every good reason to to arrest you they take a huge position of dominance: handcuffing you (possibly after already forcing you to the ground), and bodily searching you, ordering you around, taking away all your possessions, then effectively kidnapping you. But this isn't anything like rape, this is necessary for enforcing the law and preventing you from harming the officer while conducting the arrest.
Put it this way, if someone puts a knife to me and threatens me with rape or death, I do NOT want to die, and the huge majority of people attacked by rapists who threaten to kill them, they are forced to make the same choice.
The systematic oppression is in a system that ALLOWS rape. So the individual rapist scum have the same motivation, but for example a prison warden will allow rapes to happen as in some sense they think it makes their job easier. I think the Syrian oppression forces were raping for selfish desire, I think they definitely got something out of it, I have no doubt they liked it. But it was the commanders, the system, that merely allowed it. To put it crudly, you can't just tell a guy to get an erection. But what a commander can say is "you can do WHATEVER you like to this woman". But the design was in the system, not the individual rapists' motivation.
"It's raping in self-defense on a nation-wide level."
No. Self defence is justified, and this isn't.
I do not want to get into (and I don't think jim wanted to get into either) the broad er definitions of rape like coercion or age of consent or informed consent. I think it was purely unambiguously forceful sex.