The Motivations Behind Sexual Assault

There is no singular motivation that must be present behind every violent action--or friendly one, for that matter.  Even if everyone did have the same motivations, it would still be logically possible for people to have had diverse motivations, just as it would be possible for a new generation of people to not share the same motivations as those before them.  Thus, it is always idiotic to think that there is only one possible set of motivating factors that everyone inevitably faces.  This has ramifications for everything from understanding why someone might form a particular worldview to why someone might carry out the act of rape or other sexual assaults.

When liberals sometimes say that a desire to express power is behind sexual assault rather than sexual desires, they are making assumptions based on the fact that it is possible for something other than sexual feelings to motivate sexual assault.  When conservatives say that sexual assault is normally an expression of "overwhelming" sexual feelings that they falsely attribute to men in particular, they, too, are making pathetic assumptions based upon the fact that it is possible for some rapists (or people who commit lesser sexual assault) to perform the act for something other than the hope of expressing sheer, general power.  Neither of these stances is rooted in reason.  At most, they both mildly start to acknowledge what follows from genuine logical possibilities.

As is almost invariably the case, both major political approaches, despite being two of the most popular, are utterly false because sexual assault does not have to be motivated by anything in particular--a nature it shares in common with other harmful acts like murder or purely physical abuse.  Some rapists might feel like they cannot control sexual attraction to specific people or like they deserve to just have their own sexual feelings sated regardless of who the victim is.  Rape is, after all, a sexual act, even when it is not done strictly to appease sexual desires of some kind.  The error arises when someone thinks that because rape could be enacted for a different reason, it is therefore always enacted for another reason.

Indeed, if not for the fact that sexual assault is not always about acting on sexual desires, no one would ever sexually assault another person to display alleged social dominance or humiliate someone as a supposed act of "justice."  It is obvious to anyone who rationalistically contemplates the issue that it is possible for people guilty of sexual assault to have differing motivations and that there are examples of people who report having different motivations for such a thing.  To believe or say that sexual assault is always (or mostly) about sexual desires or always (or mostly) about reinforcing social power is just reductionistic nonsense.

It is neither truthful nor helpful to anyone to believe anything fallacious, and with something like sexual assault, the philosophical and personal stakes are even higher than they are with plenty of other errors.  There is never any benefit other than personal delusion from fallacies to begin with, but a set of acts as harmful as sexual assault call for special care when describing possible motivations.  What fool would think that murder or kidnapping is always about one intention or another?  One does not even need to be thoroughly rational in all areas to realize that murder could have far more motivations than one.  So, too, can sexual assault of any form.  It takes a genuine fool, and likely a conservative or liberal at that, to believe otherwise.