I’ve long suspected that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society’s socially constructed ideas about them, but it’s very taboo to talk about—it’s a very dangerous opinion to have—and I’ve almost never told people I think this. Thanks for saying it for me.
I had sexual trauma as a child that didn’t even involve any actual sexual event. Rather, I had and wrote down a quasi-sexual fantasy about a playmate from the playground (I was 8) and my mom found it and confronted me about it, thinking that I had been molested or something because why else would “a child!!” be thinking of such things. I felt disgusting afterward, for years, like I must be evil for thinking this way about another kid, and throughout my teenage years I would occasionally have almost panic attack like ptsd feelings when I would think about sexuality in certain contexts that reminded me of that experience.
So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have—not from being violated, itself. And what constitutes a violation is to some extent socially constructed. Sometimes, because of this, as in my case, you can feel violated when nothing has even happened to you.
I agree with your point and you give a very convincing example. Still, I object quite strongly to the phrasing “[...] that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society’s socially constructed ideas about them.”
Why “almost entirely”?
Here some ingredients to my view:
There are vast individual differences in neuroticism and ability to process potentially-traumatic events.
Just like some phobias develop more commonly than others, some experiences are more likely to elicit trauma than others.
On trauma reactions, there might be biological priors that make people more afraid of “bad agents” than “bad environment,” just like there are priors that children are less likely to learn to become scared of outlets/power stations and more likely to learn fear of snakes. (And maybe it’s not a “prior” per se but rather a logical fact that agents are less predictable than the environment and it makes logical sense to be more scared of unpredictable things.)
Society’s take on what’s dangerous/scary/bad isn’t entirely random; instead, there’s often a wisdom it.
Now, looking at the example in the OP with the above background assumptions, I form the following view.
The example has some features that make it more conducive to eliciting trauma than other experiences (i.e., there are good reasons why society has a different attitude to the experience in the OP compared to “being forced to look at the color orange as a child.”)
If I had to describe exactly why, I think it’s about powerlessness in being forced to a secluded room and touched against your will by a person who could beat you up or otherwise take revenge, and the combination with “this sort of thing may elicit shame in shame-prone people.” (We might be shame-prone around sexuality for biological reasons or for the sort of reasons why people are more likely to evolve fear of snakes than other phobias – it may not be entirely “hardcoded,” but there could still be “structural reasons” related to emotions around sex and the types of dynamics around it that typically emerge in societies.) Then, with trauma risk from “bad agent” often being worse than trauma risk from (just) “bad environment,” it seems natural that some people at least will find it scary to process an experience where they firsthand learn that there are others who lack concern for people and will do bad things to you if they catch you and think they can get away with it. This is an uncomfortable thought in itself, people like that shouldn’t exist in a just and safe world. (With the example “forced to see the color orange in a society where this is judged to be really bad” – my bet is that people in that society would be a lot less traumatized if they encountered an orange bird in the forest vs. if someone forcibly takes them inside a secluded room and puts a sheet of orange wallpaper in front of them!) Lastly, issues with disgust and disgust sensitivity probably play a role – being touched by someone who creeps you out or grosses you out can feel horrible for the same reason it doesn’t feel good if someone spits in your face – has very little to do with societal conventions because most cultures don’t condone spitting into someone’s face. Touch/contact, especially involving bodily fluids, is inherently more disgust-evoking than other potential disgust triggers.)
To conclude, I find myself roughly equally alienated by “all forms of sexually inappropriate touch are inherently trauma-causing” and “inappropriate sexual touch is primarily traumatic because of societal expectations.” Both lack important nuance. I might agree that sexually inappropriate touch is less likely to traumatize people than societal discourse would suggest (depending on what sort of discourse we have in mind), which means that the discourse might be doing some harm here while also having the benefit of making these experiences less likely to happen – so it seems complicated.
(Unrelated to the rest of my comment, but relevant to the topic: this video about an account of being molested by a priest.)
You don’t have the data to make this conclusion (or a similar one). You haven’t explored how traumatizing it would be to be raped, and so merely observing that being treated as if you had been traumatized traumatized you isn’t enough to conclude that if you were raped and then treated as if you were traumatized, most of the trauma (or even a significant part) would come from the latter.
It’s entirely possible that the more progressive parts of the society aren’t mistaken, and that rape is so traumatizing that your experience of being treated as traumatized wouldn’t be anywhere close to making a meaningful contribution to the entirety of the trauma.
I think OP is painting with a broad brush. However, he probably has a point that social attitudes end up shaping the experience itself. Similar to the above poster talking about age gaps or miscarriages.
A problem in your objection, as well as any rebuttal to it, is how would we separate social contagion from the data? It seems that if OP is right, we wouldn’t have the data to say he’s right or wrong. If he’s wrong, the data wouldn’t really show that or not either. Embedded social attitudes are a matter of the fish not knowing the water in which it swims.
If indeed, that water is so think that OP (as well as several others who have responded) feels it is even taboo to admit their own experience was not traumatizing, then such a deep social fact is also likely to permeate all the data.
Now, in defense of the taboo (like all taboos), sexual molestation is basically such a bad thing in some sense that we don’t want to allow any talk that would make this bad thing potentially happen more. The taboo is like a field around a Schelling fence that is trying to innoculate everyone against walking even within 200m of that fence. For whatever reason, the taboo also has some utility that should not be dismissed until it is also understood carefully.
In other words, it is taboo specifically because his talking about it risks pushing us deep into nuances that are risky. In fact, even assuming OPs position in a broad and hard form is fully correct, then it wouldn’t undo the damage that people felt from being molested, and talking about it could hurt more. So, the entire topic is likely to be an infohazard, actually regardless of the truth value of OP’s comment.
The Marind people in New Guinea are subjected frequently to sodomy by their elders because they think that absorbing sperm from the anus will make them grow strong and they don’t seem to develop any traumas at all. So yes, I agree 100% that what constitutes a violation is socially constructed.
I (maybe) agree directionally but I’m again irritated by the lack of nuance here (“100%”).
There are good reasons to think that an experience is worse when it’s not socially condoned. People aren’t just afraid and disturbed about “what happened” – they’re also afraid about “what could’ve happened.” Traumatic experiences are often from near-misses (you didn’t die, but something went wrong and you better avoid it in the future!). If the experience is contextualized as “elders do this by tradition; it’s meant to benefit you” – that seems less concerning than if you have something done to you by someone who is blatantly ignoring your personhood (and engaging in criminal behavior). In the latter instance, you don’t know what comes next – the person doing it to you has demonstrated that they don’t don’t feel the same way about other people (this is disturbing in itself, possibly for hardcoded evolutionary reasons around fear/apprehension of bad agents; it also has implications like “since they have no concern for you, nor for the law, they might murder you if they suspect you could tell someone”).
Just because something’s considered normal doesn’t mean it can’t traumatize some people. (For instance, it’s common among rationalists to express the view that school can be traumatizing – “small t trauma,” admittedly.) And activities do differ in their risk-to-traumatize. (See my other comments on this post.)
Researching this is hampered by the fact that most work done on it is in old books that aren’t fully online, but the little I have found makes me dubious of your conclusion.
From what I can piece together, that society was, unsurprisingly, ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, granuloma inguinale...) and resulting infertility (the former inflames the female pelvic region and uterus, making intercourse very painful, and scars your fallopian tubes, leading to ectopic pregnancies, which are fatal; the latter causes worsening painful sores that don’t heal, which can progress to the degree where your penis autoamputates). As a consequence of the infertility problem, they ritualised that brides, during the marriage ceremony, were systematically raped by every single male relative of the groom, which often led to the gang rape festivities lasting over a day, in an attempt to “up fertility”. They would also repeat this after the woman had given birth; if you have ever seen a vagina immediately after giving birth, you can imagine the level of pain that would have implied. And the men began giving themselves bloody diarrhoea on purpose in an attempt to mimic menstruation, in the belief that this would somehow help pregnancies now that severely sick women weren’t menstruating. Which made the STI induced fertility problem worse, of course. So they also began kidnapping young fertile people from other tribes, headhunting members of other communities to transfer the mana from the severed heads to their few (STI-infected) newborns in an attempt to fix their perceived mana deficiency while eating the remains, and eating young girls who had reached sexual maturity—yep, large scale cannibalism, on an island chain that is known for epidemic outbreaks of Kuru, a prion disease that gives you essentially a novel take on mad cow disease.
- Like, I am not doubting at all that social framing has a pronounced impact on perception, but I am dubious of the idea that culturally telling each other that they were making great choices here somehow shielded them from all the traumatic consequences. Being raped when your ass is infected must bloody—literally—hurt, and having someone insert a dick covered in sores into you when you have seen where and when these sores break out and what they build to does not sound an empowering experience. Being told something is actually healthy for you doesn’t simply make it so. Being told something is good does not make it so. The nazis went to extensive trouble to tell their people that killing Jews was not just okay, but a positive and absolutely necessary good, through indoctrination starting in childhood and working daily to affirm and stabilise this course, and yet they had to devise gas chambers because making people shoot the Jews by hand was causing severe problems—propaganda or no, the vast majority of those directly involved in the murders showed signs of extreme stress, and many people would be flooded by guilt, have mental health breaks, some even commit suicide, even though everyone was telling them they were doing a good and normal thing.
I was really hoping to find in depth interviews on how the Marind-Anim individually framed the whole ritualised rape thing when not under elder supervision, as well as mental health scores, physical health scores, scores on behavioural abnormalities. Like, if you went through this, you must be under massive psychological pressure to tell yourself it serves a crucial function that made it worth it, and that everyone else has to go through the same so your sacrifice was not in vain, you’d be super defensive of it, because admitting you were wrong and went through this or perpetrated it for no rational reason would utterly crush you. But would your behaviour be consistent with your claimed beliefs that this was awesome? Would you be gladly seeking out the rape each night on order to achieve peak manliness, or rather systematically avoiding the contexts in which you get raped, by making the perpetrator drunk or working late? How far would the indoctrination reach, and how would it change in response to being hit over the head with reality? Like, if you haven’t been raped, but told if how great it is for you, I assume you will be very eager to get started, and devastated if someone prevents it. How does that hold up after the actual ass-penetration has started? How is it changed by whether you are attracted to the perpetrator, how old you are, how gentle they are, what stimuli it is associated with? How does it hold up after the first time you are doing badly and do not acutely want it and yet it happens regardless? How does it hold up once significant pain and disease transmission get added to the mix? Would they be showing the same physical and mental trauma signs we observed in the West, such as dissociating, depression and anger or self-harm and psychosomatic pain, or different ones? How do they talk about it—is it taboo, spoken of loudly, reverently, casually, with humour? What is the long-term relationship with the perpetrator, do we see traumatic bonding? What changes when a different culture tells them this is fucked up—do they get worse, or better, do they double down? I’ve read in depth reports of how suffering crimes that are not framed by society as such impacts people, but never on this scale. Like, are the cannibalistic murders a separate phenomenon, or a consequence of severe anger issues? Were the gang rapes of wives just a response to rising infertility from STIs, or a circle of rape thing where the boys that had been raped now also got to rape to re-establish their hierarchy?
But it looks like the anthropologists at the time went either “oh my God no oh God Jesus no what the flying fuck stop raping her with your sore covered dick and please don’t eat the infected corpse just no” or “well, wow, moral standards are really totally relative, aren’t they, I guess everything is constructed, I’m going to use Foucault to analyse this penis jewellery”, while I would have loved to see more in depth empirical data. It would have given us fascinating insights into the limits of cultural construction of nonviolence.
If anyone digs up more concrete data, I would love it if you could share it. If you are interested in epistemic injustice, such a scenario is a massive treasure find.
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.
The sexologist Joan Nelson had a similar experience with her mother’s reaction to learning of an incestuous relationship she was involved in when she was eight. “When I was a child I experienced an ongoing incestuous relationship that seemed to me to be caring and beneficial in nature. There were love and healthy self-actualization in what I perceived to be a safe environment. I remember it as perhaps the happiest period of my life. Suddenly one day I discerned from playground talk at school that what I was doing might be ‘bad.’ Fearing that I might, indeed, be a ‘bad’ person, I went to my mother for reassurance. The ensuing traumatic incidents of that day inaugurated a 30-year period of psychological and emotional dysfunction that reduced family communication to mere utilitarian process and established severe limits on my subsequent developmental journey.” She related this by way of full disclosure in the introduction to her paper “The Impact of Incest: Factors in Self-Evaluation.”
So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have—not from being violated, itself
I’ve long suspected that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society’s socially constructed ideas about them, but it’s very taboo to talk about—it’s a very dangerous opinion to have—and I’ve almost never told people I think this. Thanks for saying it for me.
I had sexual trauma as a child that didn’t even involve any actual sexual event. Rather, I had and wrote down a quasi-sexual fantasy about a playmate from the playground (I was 8) and my mom found it and confronted me about it, thinking that I had been molested or something because why else would “a child!!” be thinking of such things. I felt disgusting afterward, for years, like I must be evil for thinking this way about another kid, and throughout my teenage years I would occasionally have almost panic attack like ptsd feelings when I would think about sexuality in certain contexts that reminded me of that experience.
So it seems to me that the trauma comes from believing that you have been violated, because authority figures or parents or society tell you that you have—not from being violated, itself. And what constitutes a violation is to some extent socially constructed. Sometimes, because of this, as in my case, you can feel violated when nothing has even happened to you.
I agree with your point and you give a very convincing example. Still, I object quite strongly to the phrasing “[...] that things like this are almost entirely made traumatic by society’s socially constructed ideas about them.”
Why “almost entirely”?
Here some ingredients to my view:
There are vast individual differences in neuroticism and ability to process potentially-traumatic events.
Just like some phobias develop more commonly than others, some experiences are more likely to elicit trauma than others.
On trauma reactions, there might be biological priors that make people more afraid of “bad agents” than “bad environment,” just like there are priors that children are less likely to learn to become scared of outlets/power stations and more likely to learn fear of snakes. (And maybe it’s not a “prior” per se but rather a logical fact that agents are less predictable than the environment and it makes logical sense to be more scared of unpredictable things.)
Society’s take on what’s dangerous/scary/bad isn’t entirely random; instead, there’s often a wisdom it.
Now, looking at the example in the OP with the above background assumptions, I form the following view.
The example has some features that make it more conducive to eliciting trauma than other experiences (i.e., there are good reasons why society has a different attitude to the experience in the OP compared to “being forced to look at the color orange as a child.”)
If I had to describe exactly why, I think it’s about powerlessness in being forced to a secluded room and touched against your will by a person who could beat you up or otherwise take revenge, and the combination with “this sort of thing may elicit shame in shame-prone people.” (We might be shame-prone around sexuality for biological reasons or for the sort of reasons why people are more likely to evolve fear of snakes than other phobias – it may not be entirely “hardcoded,” but there could still be “structural reasons” related to emotions around sex and the types of dynamics around it that typically emerge in societies.) Then, with trauma risk from “bad agent” often being worse than trauma risk from (just) “bad environment,” it seems natural that some people at least will find it scary to process an experience where they firsthand learn that there are others who lack concern for people and will do bad things to you if they catch you and think they can get away with it. This is an uncomfortable thought in itself, people like that shouldn’t exist in a just and safe world. (With the example “forced to see the color orange in a society where this is judged to be really bad” – my bet is that people in that society would be a lot less traumatized if they encountered an orange bird in the forest vs. if someone forcibly takes them inside a secluded room and puts a sheet of orange wallpaper in front of them!) Lastly, issues with disgust and disgust sensitivity probably play a role – being touched by someone who creeps you out or grosses you out can feel horrible for the same reason it doesn’t feel good if someone spits in your face – has very little to do with societal conventions because most cultures don’t condone spitting into someone’s face. Touch/contact, especially involving bodily fluids, is inherently more disgust-evoking than other potential disgust triggers.)
To conclude, I find myself roughly equally alienated by “all forms of sexually inappropriate touch are inherently trauma-causing” and “inappropriate sexual touch is primarily traumatic because of societal expectations.” Both lack important nuance. I might agree that sexually inappropriate touch is less likely to traumatize people than societal discourse would suggest (depending on what sort of discourse we have in mind), which means that the discourse might be doing some harm here while also having the benefit of making these experiences less likely to happen – so it seems complicated.
(Unrelated to the rest of my comment, but relevant to the topic: this video about an account of being molested by a priest.)
You’re right. I shouldn’t have used that wording. It was stupid of me.
You don’t have the data to make this conclusion (or a similar one). You haven’t explored how traumatizing it would be to be raped, and so merely observing that being treated as if you had been traumatized traumatized you isn’t enough to conclude that if you were raped and then treated as if you were traumatized, most of the trauma (or even a significant part) would come from the latter.
It’s entirely possible that the more progressive parts of the society aren’t mistaken, and that rape is so traumatizing that your experience of being treated as traumatized wouldn’t be anywhere close to making a meaningful contribution to the entirety of the trauma.
I think OP is painting with a broad brush. However, he probably has a point that social attitudes end up shaping the experience itself. Similar to the above poster talking about age gaps or miscarriages.
A problem in your objection, as well as any rebuttal to it, is how would we separate social contagion from the data? It seems that if OP is right, we wouldn’t have the data to say he’s right or wrong. If he’s wrong, the data wouldn’t really show that or not either. Embedded social attitudes are a matter of the fish not knowing the water in which it swims.
If indeed, that water is so think that OP (as well as several others who have responded) feels it is even taboo to admit their own experience was not traumatizing, then such a deep social fact is also likely to permeate all the data.
Now, in defense of the taboo (like all taboos), sexual molestation is basically such a bad thing in some sense that we don’t want to allow any talk that would make this bad thing potentially happen more. The taboo is like a field around a Schelling fence that is trying to innoculate everyone against walking even within 200m of that fence. For whatever reason, the taboo also has some utility that should not be dismissed until it is also understood carefully.
In other words, it is taboo specifically because his talking about it risks pushing us deep into nuances that are risky. In fact, even assuming OPs position in a broad and hard form is fully correct, then it wouldn’t undo the damage that people felt from being molested, and talking about it could hurt more. So, the entire topic is likely to be an infohazard, actually regardless of the truth value of OP’s comment.
The Marind people in New Guinea are subjected frequently to sodomy by their elders because they think that absorbing sperm from the anus will make them grow strong and they don’t seem to develop any traumas at all. So yes, I agree 100% that what constitutes a violation is socially constructed.
I (maybe) agree directionally but I’m again irritated by the lack of nuance here (“100%”).
There are good reasons to think that an experience is worse when it’s not socially condoned. People aren’t just afraid and disturbed about “what happened” – they’re also afraid about “what could’ve happened.” Traumatic experiences are often from near-misses (you didn’t die, but something went wrong and you better avoid it in the future!). If the experience is contextualized as “elders do this by tradition; it’s meant to benefit you” – that seems less concerning than if you have something done to you by someone who is blatantly ignoring your personhood (and engaging in criminal behavior). In the latter instance, you don’t know what comes next – the person doing it to you has demonstrated that they don’t don’t feel the same way about other people (this is disturbing in itself, possibly for hardcoded evolutionary reasons around fear/apprehension of bad agents; it also has implications like “since they have no concern for you, nor for the law, they might murder you if they suspect you could tell someone”).
Just because something’s considered normal doesn’t mean it can’t traumatize some people. (For instance, it’s common among rationalists to express the view that school can be traumatizing – “small t trauma,” admittedly.) And activities do differ in their risk-to-traumatize. (See my other comments on this post.)
Those are good points and you are right about my lack of nuance. Thanks
Researching this is hampered by the fact that most work done on it is in old books that aren’t fully online, but the little I have found makes me dubious of your conclusion.
From what I can piece together, that society was, unsurprisingly, ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, granuloma inguinale...) and resulting infertility (the former inflames the female pelvic region and uterus, making intercourse very painful, and scars your fallopian tubes, leading to ectopic pregnancies, which are fatal; the latter causes worsening painful sores that don’t heal, which can progress to the degree where your penis autoamputates). As a consequence of the infertility problem, they ritualised that brides, during the marriage ceremony, were systematically raped by every single male relative of the groom, which often led to the gang rape festivities lasting over a day, in an attempt to “up fertility”. They would also repeat this after the woman had given birth; if you have ever seen a vagina immediately after giving birth, you can imagine the level of pain that would have implied. And the men began giving themselves bloody diarrhoea on purpose in an attempt to mimic menstruation, in the belief that this would somehow help pregnancies now that severely sick women weren’t menstruating. Which made the STI induced fertility problem worse, of course. So they also began kidnapping young fertile people from other tribes, headhunting members of other communities to transfer the mana from the severed heads to their few (STI-infected) newborns in an attempt to fix their perceived mana deficiency while eating the remains, and eating young girls who had reached sexual maturity—yep, large scale cannibalism, on an island chain that is known for epidemic outbreaks of Kuru, a prion disease that gives you essentially a novel take on mad cow disease.
- Like, I am not doubting at all that social framing has a pronounced impact on perception, but I am dubious of the idea that culturally telling each other that they were making great choices here somehow shielded them from all the traumatic consequences. Being raped when your ass is infected must bloody—literally—hurt, and having someone insert a dick covered in sores into you when you have seen where and when these sores break out and what they build to does not sound an empowering experience. Being told something is actually healthy for you doesn’t simply make it so. Being told something is good does not make it so. The nazis went to extensive trouble to tell their people that killing Jews was not just okay, but a positive and absolutely necessary good, through indoctrination starting in childhood and working daily to affirm and stabilise this course, and yet they had to devise gas chambers because making people shoot the Jews by hand was causing severe problems—propaganda or no, the vast majority of those directly involved in the murders showed signs of extreme stress, and many people would be flooded by guilt, have mental health breaks, some even commit suicide, even though everyone was telling them they were doing a good and normal thing.
I was really hoping to find in depth interviews on how the Marind-Anim individually framed the whole ritualised rape thing when not under elder supervision, as well as mental health scores, physical health scores, scores on behavioural abnormalities. Like, if you went through this, you must be under massive psychological pressure to tell yourself it serves a crucial function that made it worth it, and that everyone else has to go through the same so your sacrifice was not in vain, you’d be super defensive of it, because admitting you were wrong and went through this or perpetrated it for no rational reason would utterly crush you. But would your behaviour be consistent with your claimed beliefs that this was awesome? Would you be gladly seeking out the rape each night on order to achieve peak manliness, or rather systematically avoiding the contexts in which you get raped, by making the perpetrator drunk or working late? How far would the indoctrination reach, and how would it change in response to being hit over the head with reality? Like, if you haven’t been raped, but told if how great it is for you, I assume you will be very eager to get started, and devastated if someone prevents it. How does that hold up after the actual ass-penetration has started? How is it changed by whether you are attracted to the perpetrator, how old you are, how gentle they are, what stimuli it is associated with? How does it hold up after the first time you are doing badly and do not acutely want it and yet it happens regardless? How does it hold up once significant pain and disease transmission get added to the mix? Would they be showing the same physical and mental trauma signs we observed in the West, such as dissociating, depression and anger or self-harm and psychosomatic pain, or different ones? How do they talk about it—is it taboo, spoken of loudly, reverently, casually, with humour? What is the long-term relationship with the perpetrator, do we see traumatic bonding? What changes when a different culture tells them this is fucked up—do they get worse, or better, do they double down? I’ve read in depth reports of how suffering crimes that are not framed by society as such impacts people, but never on this scale. Like, are the cannibalistic murders a separate phenomenon, or a consequence of severe anger issues? Were the gang rapes of wives just a response to rising infertility from STIs, or a circle of rape thing where the boys that had been raped now also got to rape to re-establish their hierarchy?
But it looks like the anthropologists at the time went either “oh my God no oh God Jesus no what the flying fuck stop raping her with your sore covered dick and please don’t eat the infected corpse just no” or “well, wow, moral standards are really totally relative, aren’t they, I guess everything is constructed, I’m going to use Foucault to analyse this penis jewellery”, while I would have loved to see more in depth empirical data. It would have given us fascinating insights into the limits of cultural construction of nonviolence.
If anyone digs up more concrete data, I would love it if you could share it. If you are interested in epistemic injustice, such a scenario is a massive treasure find.
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.
The sexologist Joan Nelson had a similar experience with her mother’s reaction to learning of an incestuous relationship she was involved in when she was eight. “When I was a child I experienced an ongoing incestuous relationship that seemed to me to be caring and beneficial in nature. There were love and healthy self-actualization in what I perceived to be a safe environment. I remember it as perhaps the happiest period of my life. Suddenly one day I discerned from playground talk at school that what I was doing might be ‘bad.’ Fearing that I might, indeed, be a ‘bad’ person, I went to my mother for reassurance. The ensuing traumatic incidents of that day inaugurated a 30-year period of psychological and emotional dysfunction that reduced family communication to mere utilitarian process and established severe limits on my subsequent developmental journey.” She related this by way of full disclosure in the introduction to her paper “The Impact of Incest: Factors in Self-Evaluation.”
There’s loads and loads of similar stories I’ve heard or seen that people have compiled over the years. Good example.
need to think about this more, gee