What are rapists thinking?

No seriously, I want to know. A coworker and I spent some time earlier this week talking about sexual assault and the NISVS study that claims 1 in 5 women in the US is raped (inclusive definition). If that is true, and I'm not willing to debate that, read my previous post if you want to argue about methods, but if that is true, and 90% of rapes are committed by an acquaintance and not by strangers, then what is going on in the minds of rapists?

We ended up discussing three kinds of acquaintance rape, which feel the most common based on our experiences. They are:

1. Sexual Assault from an acquaintance, who has some kind of power over you: supervisor, professor, etc. The relationship pre-rape may be a good one, friendly, but this person is not in fact your friend. There is a power dynamic at play. 
2. Friend of a friend. This is someone you hang out with regularly, or maybe not. Friends with people you trust and respect. Someone in your class or workplace, but not someone you have a close relationship with, more than to say hi or small talk for a bit. As far as power dynamics go, you're on a more equal footing. 
3. Close friend/lover. This is someone you trust. I think this one is pretty self explanatory. This one is kind of broken into two parts: friend and lover. 

In no way am I prioritizing these or saying one is worse than another or that these all the possibilities or implying one of these is somehow more or less violent. These were merely the one's we discussed. And these were the most common given the informal polling of loved ones.

Our discussion centered around understanding what a rapist is thinking. So in an example from option 1, the rapist felt no remorse, and felt that he had done nothing wrong. How does someone lack any empathy for another person? But what about friends/lovers? If the victim doesn't breakdown crying or fight back, but instead has reaction of shock, but does not consent, when does the rapist become aware of the assault? And when if ever does he (or she) feel remorse?

After this conversation earlier this week, Jezebel posted about a Reddit thread about sexual assault. Below are excerpts from Jezebel's article. I couldn't read enough of the original post to pull from it. Some of it was just to offensive and triggering.

Yesterday, a Redditor solicited stories of sexual assault from assailants. "Reddit's had a few threads about sexual assault victims, but are there any redditors from the other side of the story?" he asked. "What were your motivations? Do you regret it?"

So why'd they do it? What were they thinking? Here are some of the reasons why rapists said they raped or almost raped from the original thread.

(What they perceive as) mixed messages:

She ran to my bed and didn't want me to touch her. I didn't understand what had happened. This hypersexual person who had offered to give me head suddenly didn't want to touch me.

Or:

I was a freshman and hooking up with this girl who got naked in bed with me, then said no. I think she just wanted to do oral. I was extremely horny and already close to doing it, so I ignored her and did it. She realized what was happening and tried to clamp her legs shut, but it was too late and I was much stronger than her.

Or:

Sue had always been quite flirty, she was a cop's daughter and I feel that lead to her being a bit rebellious. I remember instances from years ago (possibly 8th grade or freshman year) where she would make jokes about different bras or thongs she was wearing, and was always freely talking about sexual desires and experiences. She just had this unusually sexual way of carrying herself, I don't know if anyone knows what I'm talking about, but she'd kind of leave her mouth hanging open/bend over quite a bit/almost unreal-porn star like.

Remember though, this was all happening in my high school library during study hall. Not a whole let ever happened more than some dry groping. I wanted to take it further though, she had really begun to turn me on...

Or:

I can't remember how it happened, but me and the girl (she was maybe 17) ended up play wrestling with me pinning her down. We were all laughing, but we when made eye contact...it was "that" look we exchanged. The.."I'd fuck you" look.

Now, I remember exactly what I was thinking at the time. This girl gave me "the look" earlier, she invited me into her bed. What teenage girl would pass up the oppertunity to be with a 22 year old guy? She MUST want it. I tried again, and slid my hands over her body.

Peer Pressure:

I got peer pressured in to hooking up with this girl. I kept saying I didn't want to and my friends kept saying I had to lose my virginity. They say this for about a week and finally new years come so I figured might as well. We are both completely wasted and go to a room. I was to drunk to get it up so I fingered her and ate her out but she wasn't really into it. So I stopped and then threw up all over her and I passed out. I guess she ran out and told them I raped her. She never said stop or anything but I could see how she could have froze up in fear. I don't doubt she feels molested and I feel like an awful person but it wasn't rape as SnugglesWithRuggles pointed out it was rape.

Women are objects for the taking:

Ended up happening again after a party. She was a good friend. I was drunk and super horny. I looked at her and knew I could never be with her. She had already hooked up with my friend. It was that feeling of never being able to do something, or have something. I looked at her and just saw something I would regret not trying for. So I thought if I could feel her I would know what it was to be with her. I grabbed her boob, over the shirt. I touched her lip and she moved her head. I stop dead thinking I woke her up, but she relaxed again. I started going upstairs but felt a sudden urge to lift her skirt. I ran my hand across her ass and between her legs. I was so drunk I turned on the light to get a better look, then quickly realized that it would wake her up and turned the light off.

Biology (The "I can't help my dick!" argument):

Most girls don't really understand how horny guys are, how much stronger guys are, how guys will rationalize what they do. I see feminists and women on the Internet saying that no means no and women should be able to get as drunk as they want and not be sexually assaulted, and I couldn't agree me. But the reality of the situation is that women have to be careful because guys are one way when they're hanging out and another way when they're horny or worse drunk and horny. That doesn't make what happened okay, but it is what it is.

Bad influences:

I was an extremely isolated youth who came from a broken home. My escape was the internet. At about sixteen I was exposed to alot of PUA material, which (not having a father or mother really around) shaped my life up until I was about 20. Most of the material was very objectifying and sexually aggressive towards women.

Multiple men said that they didn't end up going as far as they had intended once they actually looked the woman they were with in the face:

I'm a good man. I have a wife and a couple of kids now and I'm a good father and husband. I'm a pretty moral guy. But I think the thing that has always stuck with me...is how close I came to actually doing it. If I hadn't looked up at her face and seen what she was feeling, I might have continued. In my mind, at the time, she wanted it. I can remember staring at the ceiling while on the couch thinking "in a couple of minutes she's going to come out here and get on top of me."

Or:

...It was then I looked at her face. She was petrified. I at that point pulled myself together, rolled off her and apologized. My hormones were RAGING. I asked her why she didn't want to. I told her what I thought above. She started to cry.

That's arguably the most disturbing takeaway from the thread: these guys are so disconnected from reality that they don't even feel the need to look women in the face to be sure they're interested.

It's very clear that many of these people didn't feel like what they were doing was wrong because they didn't (and/or still don't) think of themselves as rapists. Rapists are the scary strangers hiding in the bushes. Rapists don't feel remorse. Rapists prey on pure girls, not sluts who show cleavage and want to fool around. Some even say that straight up; "I didn't want to be the kind of guy who pressured girls, so I said it was fine [when she asked if she could stop performing oral sex]," says a man who had literally just pressured a girl who had "always been quite flirty" to go down on him.

Many stories end with Redditors expressing how horrible they feel about what happened:

I have never in my life felt as shitty and depressed as when she told me that she felt what happened was rape. The depression made me have to drop out of school and go live back home. My parents thought I was gonna try to kill myself so I started taking medication and going to therapy and it actually helped a little. I'm over my depression now but I never, and will never, feel as low as I did because of that night.

I still think about it sometimes, and I feel terrible. It took a very long time for me to get over her. Dated another girl immediately after for many months, wishing it was this first girl the whole time. Then I met someone who really helped me get past her. I've never done anything like that ever again, and never will. I just wish I hadn't learned that lesson in that way, and that she had to suffer for it.

It's not hard to see why some people would dismiss this thread as a circle jerk of rape apologists, especially because some quality Redditors assured the storytellers that "it's not your fault." (This is Reddit, after all.) And certainly this isn't light reading for everyone. But I think it's a mistake to write it off. Charlotte Shane put it well in a recent essay for The New Inquiry on moving past rape by being able to talk about it in non-victimizing terms:

...our culture is unable to address rape with the sobriety and clarity the topic deserves because we are still unable to address sex with the sobriety and clarity it deserves. The contention that rape should be regarded as an asexual act has done nothing to remedy this. Nor will it. As activist and writer Wendy McElroy points out, "there can be as many motives for rape as there are for murder and other violent crimes … Rape is every bit as complex." Insisting that no rape is ever "about" sex but is rather about an individual man acting on a patriarchal mandate to sow terror by exercising "power" does a disservice to us all.

This sorry state of affairs should foster honest conversation, not suppress it. We should not be so desperate to establish the seriousness of rape that we stigmatize intelligent discussion of it.

(Emphasis ours.)

I'm trying to be hopeful, that some of these men feel remorse, and have never done it again. However, I still don't feel comfortable about any of this. I want better answers. I want someone to say, "yes, I assaulted someone, and I feel awful about it. And this is why I did it." The responses still feel very much like "I did it, but you can't blame me because hormones, etc." For me the worst part of listening to survivors' experiences is the way they depict fear. I have a friend who is very clinical about her assault, so I can be just as clinical, but how do you look in someone's eyes and see nothing but fear and feel nothing or be unsure as to what is happening?

I want to understand how people are capable of heinous acts, because only by understanding can we address the motivations and then prevent rape.