This is actually not an uncommon take, but empirical data points in the other direction. I’ve worked on the topic.
There is a concept called “epistemic injustice”, which describes a scenario where you are in a society where something that is happening to you that is objectively wrong is not framed by the society as a crime, specifically not named as such. There are many examples of this, like the idea that a woman cannot be raped by her husband. It is particularly frequent when a new crime develops and we as a society don’t immediately recognise it, such as sexual harassment at the work place where women used to be absent. Miranda Fricker, who began the field, collected some empirical accounts, and a lot more work has been done since.
If your idea was correct, the implication would be that a woman, not having been told that rape in a marriage is bad, would accordingly feel perfectly fine, because only the societal framing makes it bad.
But they generally aren’t. They tend to do badly in ways that are strange. They don’t have the words to express what is wrong, or the social backing that validates them, and tend to develop mental, physical and behavioural abnormalities as a result. This isn’t universally true—the woman in question may be kinky and getting off on it, or dislike it, but not find it severely traumatic. But in general, society not framing things this way doesn’t make it okay, it just makes it far more difficult to openly discuss. The framing does change perception, it can dim or exaggerate pain, make it easier or harder to conceptualise, allow complex experiences or box them into narrow ones. But it doesn’t create the problem out of thin air.
Furthermore, these cultural framings come from somewhere—namely from people articulating that a thing is wrong, and other people agreeing with them, coining terms for it, laws against it, values related to it, as a way to express a problem they identify. If there was no objective problem, you’d wonder where the categorisations come from, why the first self-help groups and protests and analysing books even happen. Yes, these narratives can become so powerful they get a dynamic of their own, to the point where they shape experiences, and can even box an experience wrongly, but their core does lie in a common, shared understanding. If we assume that all violence is just constructed, we have to ask why it is constructed in a particular manner, why there are similarities in its construction across groups, why those groups are so reluctant to accept alternate constructions.
As in many things, I think a good rule of thumb is to recognise that it can get people severely hurt, but whether and how much you hurt and what to do about it is something you are an expert on for you, while you should be respectful and empathic of people having different experiences.
I never actually said that all these notions are constructed and fake, only that some are. Clearly some aren’t. There are false positives and false negatives. I feel as if you’re arguing against a straw man here.
I think the critical difference is that while marital rape might not be a legal crime, and might not be seen as wrong by people who aren’t subjected to it, it’s obviously wrong for the person suffering it, and obviously identifiable as coercive and abusive even to the perpetrator.
The spectrum then becomes (recognized as wrong x feels wrong) → (not recognized as wrong → feels wrong) → (recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong) → (not recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong).
I think people are only talking about quadrant 3 when saying “sexual abuse attitudes could be [bad].” And that is, like you point out, something that people experience differently, and depends on the specifics of the case rather than the category. It’s a near certainty that some of the cases described in this comment are in fact nonconsensual and traumatic, for example. But if someone who did not experience trauma from that practice emigrated to the West and was told over and over again that something deeply traumatic happened to them, this seems like an instance where the problem could be “created out of thin air” as you put it.
Overall, though, the question is whether quadrant 2 or quadrant 3 is bigger, and I think it’s very likely that quadrant 3, while existent, is not as large as quadrant 2. Thanks for pointing this out.
This is actually not an uncommon take, but empirical data points in the other direction. I’ve worked on the topic.
There is a concept called “epistemic injustice”, which describes a scenario where you are in a society where something that is happening to you that is objectively wrong is not framed by the society as a crime, specifically not named as such. There are many examples of this, like the idea that a woman cannot be raped by her husband. It is particularly frequent when a new crime develops and we as a society don’t immediately recognise it, such as sexual harassment at the work place where women used to be absent. Miranda Fricker, who began the field, collected some empirical accounts, and a lot more work has been done since.
If your idea was correct, the implication would be that a woman, not having been told that rape in a marriage is bad, would accordingly feel perfectly fine, because only the societal framing makes it bad.
But they generally aren’t. They tend to do badly in ways that are strange. They don’t have the words to express what is wrong, or the social backing that validates them, and tend to develop mental, physical and behavioural abnormalities as a result. This isn’t universally true—the woman in question may be kinky and getting off on it, or dislike it, but not find it severely traumatic. But in general, society not framing things this way doesn’t make it okay, it just makes it far more difficult to openly discuss. The framing does change perception, it can dim or exaggerate pain, make it easier or harder to conceptualise, allow complex experiences or box them into narrow ones. But it doesn’t create the problem out of thin air.
Furthermore, these cultural framings come from somewhere—namely from people articulating that a thing is wrong, and other people agreeing with them, coining terms for it, laws against it, values related to it, as a way to express a problem they identify. If there was no objective problem, you’d wonder where the categorisations come from, why the first self-help groups and protests and analysing books even happen. Yes, these narratives can become so powerful they get a dynamic of their own, to the point where they shape experiences, and can even box an experience wrongly, but their core does lie in a common, shared understanding. If we assume that all violence is just constructed, we have to ask why it is constructed in a particular manner, why there are similarities in its construction across groups, why those groups are so reluctant to accept alternate constructions.
As in many things, I think a good rule of thumb is to recognise that it can get people severely hurt, but whether and how much you hurt and what to do about it is something you are an expert on for you, while you should be respectful and empathic of people having different experiences.
I never actually said that all these notions are constructed and fake, only that some are. Clearly some aren’t. There are false positives and false negatives. I feel as if you’re arguing against a straw man here.
I think the critical difference is that while marital rape might not be a legal crime, and might not be seen as wrong by people who aren’t subjected to it, it’s obviously wrong for the person suffering it, and obviously identifiable as coercive and abusive even to the perpetrator.
The spectrum then becomes (recognized as wrong x feels wrong) → (not recognized as wrong → feels wrong) → (recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong) → (not recognized as wrong x doesn’t feel wrong).
I think people are only talking about quadrant 3 when saying “sexual abuse attitudes could be [bad].” And that is, like you point out, something that people experience differently, and depends on the specifics of the case rather than the category. It’s a near certainty that some of the cases described in this comment are in fact nonconsensual and traumatic, for example. But if someone who did not experience trauma from that practice emigrated to the West and was told over and over again that something deeply traumatic happened to them, this seems like an instance where the problem could be “created out of thin air” as you put it.
Overall, though, the question is whether quadrant 2 or quadrant 3 is bigger, and I think it’s very likely that quadrant 3, while existent, is not as large as quadrant 2. Thanks for pointing this out.