Dr. Pauline Bart spoke to 43 women who had been raped. Many of their rapists denied what they were doing was raping. Here are some of the comments these men were saying as they were committing rape:
"I am not raping you, you are raping me."
"You entered this place of your own free will."
"There is no such thing as rape."
"You are going to enjoy this."
"I know you won't mind what I do to you."
"I don't want to rape you, I just want to screw."
"You know there is no such thing as a rape, a man is doing a woman a favor."
"You are going to feel good, I am going to penetrate you."
"You will feel better when I'm inside you."
Dr Pauline Bart maintained that one of the ways these men may have learned these things was through pornography. (1)
Here are some other comments:
"I went to a porno bookstore, put a quarter in a slot, and saw this porn movie. It was just a guy coming up from behind a girl and attacking her and raping her. That's when I started having rape fantasies. When I seen that movie, it was like somebody lit a fuse from my childhood on up. When that fuse got to the porn movie, I exploded. I just went for it, went out and raped. It was like a little voice saying, "It's all right, it's all right, go ahead and rape and get your revenge; you'll never get caught. Go out and rip off some girls. It's all right; they even make movies of it." The movie was just like a big picture stand with words on it saying go out and do it, everybody's doin' it, even the movies... I heard stories in the hospital of people saying society must condone it -- they have it on TV and movies. I know five or six guys who saw pictures of rape in a dirty book and believed it was all right to go out and rape; just still snapshots and that justified it to them. It said, go out and rape because it's in a dirty book; there's nothin' wrong with it. That goes for child molesting, too."
-- Rapist "Chuck", quoted in Men on Rape (1982). (2)
"Why do I want to rape women? Because I am basically, as a male, a predator and all women look to men like prey. I fantasize about the expression on a woman's face when I "capture" her and she realizes she cannot escape. It's like I won, I own her."
-- Male respondent, quoted in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, 1981. (3)
Here are a few quotes from some of the sex offenders who were interviewed by Robert Jensen:
"There was a lot of oral sex that I wanted her to perform on me. There were, like, ways that would entice it in the [pornographic] movies, and I tried to use that on her, and it wouldn't work. Sometimes I'd get frustrated, and that's when I started hitting her. ...I used a lot of force, a lot of direct demands, that in the movies women would just cooperate. And I would demand stuff from her. And if she didn't, I'd start slapping her around."
-- "Craig", sex offender.
"In fact, when I'd be abusing my daughter, I'd be thinking about some women I saw in a [pornographic] video. Because if I was to open my eyes and see my stepdaughter laying there while I was abusing her, you know, that wouldn't have been very exciting for me. You know, that would bring me back to the painful reality that I'm a child molester, where I'm in this reality of I'm making love or having intercourse with this beautiful woman from the video. The video didn't even come into my mind. It was just this beautiful person who had a beautiful body, and she was willing to do anything I asked"
-- "Larry", sex offender.
"When I was masturbating to these pornography things, I would think about certain girls I had seen on the bus or ones I had sold drugs to, and I would think as I was looking at these pictures in these books, what would it be like to have this girl or whoever doing this, what I'm thinking about. ... Just masturbating to the thought wasn't getting it for me anymore. I actually had to be a part of it, or actually had to do something about it. ... Like sometimes after I'd see like a certain load of kids would get off the bus, I'd pick out a couple and I'd watch them or stop and look at the mirror and stare at them and stuff like that. I would think, later on in the day, I'd masturbate to some pornography, I'd just use that picture kind of as a mental, it's kind of a scenery or whatever, and I'd put in my mind I'd put myself and whoever at the time I was thinking about, in that picture"
-- "Kevin", sex offender. (4)
Notes:
(1) Source: Testimony of Pauline Bart, "The Minneapolis Hearings, December 12-13, 1983", in Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin Eds, In Harm's Way: the Pornography Civil Rights Hearings; 1997.
(2) Excerpted from Timothy Beneke, Men on Rape: What they have to say about sexual violence; 1982.
(3) Male respondent, quoted in Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality; 1981.
(4) quotes from sex offenders, cited in Robert Jensen, "Using Pornography", in Gail Dines, Robert Jensen and Ann Russo, Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality; 1998.