An act born out of frustration can well be impulsive. Dare I say it, Paralus, we're agreeing.
This thread is so active and multifarious that the post I am answering below is quite a few back at this point; Amyntoros and I were talking about rape and the camp followers.
That they did also have sexual desires and the need for the company of women is surely uncontested, however their Macedonian wives (if they had them) were far away.
But the need for the company of women is not the same as the urge to rape. Obviously I need more cites.
http://media.www.utcecho.com/media/stor ... 0177.shtml
"The research clearly indicates that stranger rapists are highly situational," Eigenberg said. "That is, they tend to randomly select women who just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Does anyone select who they're sexually attracted to randomly? Of course not.
This next paragraph not for the faint of heart... Grandmothers get raped. Babies get raped. Ugly women get raped as much as beautiful ones. Boys and other men get raped by men who are heterosexual -- sexually attracted only to women. The stats have shown this.
http://www.ndvsac.org/pages/The%20Myths ... lities.pdf
Myth: Only attractive, young women are raped.
Reality: ANYONE can be raped regardless of age, gender, physical attractiveness or mental/physical capabilities. 1 in 33 U.S. men have experienced an attempted or completed rape as a child and/or an adult. (NVAW, “Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women,” November 1998) “More than 60,000 rapes of women older than 50 years of age are reported annually.” (Ramin, Satin, Stone, Wendel, “Sexual Assault in Postmenopausal Women,” Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1992)
Myth: Rapists are men who suffer from sexual deprivation and cannot control their sexual desires when they encounter a woman.
Reality: Rape is not a sexual desire; it is an act committed to humiliate and degrade the victim using sex as the weapon. Rapists frequently have ongoing sexual relationships with spouses or girlfriends; they rape to fulfill other needs. (US Department of Justice, “Preventing Violence Against Women,” June 1995)
Perhaps I can put it this way. When you are truly sexually attracted to a person, is not part of the attraction the desire to give them pleasure, too? The urge to rape... must be the exact opposite. Here's a guy talking about both (excerpted from
The Gender Of Desire: Essays On Male Sexuality by Michael S. Kimmel):
Let's say I see a woman and she looks really pretty and really clean and sexy, and she's giving off very feminine, sexy vibes. I think, "Wow, I would love to make love to her," but I know she's not interested. It's a tease. A lot of times a woman knows that she's looking really good and she'll use that and flaunt it, and it makes me feel like she's laughing at me and I feel degraded... If I were actually desperate enough to rape somebody, it would be from wanting the person, but also it would be a very spiteful thing, just being able to say "I have power over you and I can do anything I want with you," because really I feel they have power over me just by their presence. Just the fact that they can come up to me and just melt me and make me feel like a dummy makes me want revenge. They have power over me so I want power over them.
So is his urge to rape caused by his desire? No. Its true root is anger... arising from his belief that due to his insecurity problem (her being beautiful makes him feel like a dummy, for the Gods' sakes) he has the right to have sex with her regardless of her choice, and therefore her lack of interest is a crime against him, her choice to say yes or no is "power over him." He admits it's "spiteful" -- and the message he would be sending her by raping her is not how beautiful she is and how much he desires her sexually -- but how powerful he is and how helpless she is. He's actually making the distinction quite clear.
Amyntoros wrote:I had said that Alexander "needed his army to be happy and his army desired women" and your quote above calls them a traditional reward to the army for its work in attaining the victory – part of the spoils. They wouldn't have been a reward or considered spoils if they weren't desirable in some sense and that was my meaning.
If you read again carefully you'll see that I was not talking about the women themselves as the reward, but the act of rape itself. I repeat: "The reward is not the pleasure of sex: it's the pleasure of the power trip of destruction."
But if we want to talk about the women in their persons as spoils, the desirability of a camp follower, for a man who likes to take regular power-trips, might be nothing more than her helplessness to stop him from raping her over and over and over, for years. Not to mention her usefulness for doing work for free, which is an economically-measurable reward.
I'm sure sometimes these relationships turned into something more like friendship or even love; I think much more often, for the women, they were something to be endured so as to survive, even after marriage... like many marriages are, in societies where women are not legally permitted to be independent.
Whatever the point of rape at the end of a battle, the situation that arose was that Alexander allowed his Macedonian army to take these captive women along with them. They didn't rape and then leave them behind because at the end of the campaign after Alexander offered them payment, around 10,000 of them actually married the women. Which means that once those women were attached to the train of camp followers then it was about sexual desire and/or female companionship.
This goes back to people getting rape and sex mixed up. They did back then, and they do now -- it's why it was fairly standard for psychoanalysts to think that women genuinely desired to be raped until not all that many years ago... why rape in marriage was perfectly legal until not all that long ago... why rapists got acquitted because their victims were dressed "provocatively." It's only research in the last thirty or so years that's put the lie to all this.
In my opinion, the more militarized a society, i.e. the more it believes might makes right, the more people have sex and rape confused. Part of war-training is losing your empathy in general, making you less likely to notice another person's pain. Is it possible for a man's normal sexual desire to become perverted into rape desire, so that he knows no other kind of gratification? Sure, if he's taught to inextricably associate sex with power.
We've talked often about how sex in those days was about rank, not orientation. When sex is about rank, there's always a "top" and a "bottom," there is always an element of humiliation as one is superior and the other inferior, and there can't really be free consent because of the difference in power, whatever it is -- in other words, it's a ritualized rape. So how is a boy raised to think this way ever going to know what genuine loving sex, between two people who both really want each other and choose totally freely, is? How will he ever know that pleasure is possible without the humiliation part? Unless he lucks out somehow (which I actually think Alexander did, with Hephaistion, being of similar age)........ he won't.
Is it possible for the woman to think that rape is sex, too? Sure, if, again, she has never known anything else.
He can enjoy it, and she endure it, on those terms, for years.
The residues of the confusion in our own culture -- which is moderately militarized and used to be more so -- persist in language and thought today, else we wouldn't have expressions like "sexual conquests" (applied to men only of course) or the idea that a woman who has sex with many men is somehow degraded, as if she's lost power, while a man who has sex with many women is somehow enhanced, as if he's gained it. The confusion is very deep and very pervasive, to the point that many people simply cannot imagine sex without that element of aggression on the part of the man and degradation on the part of the woman.
So I can't agree with that last sentence. How could a man fall genuinely in love with, or even have a friendship with, a woman he's raped without bitterly regretting it? Did they all somehow come to terms with this? I doubt that somehow (though I imagine some of them did). It would have been more about possessing and being possessed than true companionship, and in a culture where women were legally property (or an attempted fusion of two cultures in
both of which women were legally property) that could extend right into marriage.
There's been some argument on previous threads that (some of) these women might have gone willingly. The point that I was making was that these "relationships" began with rape and that is a fact that is usually ignored on the forum.
Well, even if it's a tiny minority who went willingly, that's some. I can't imagine that some such pairings weren't due to prostitutes who originally attached themselves to the army for business reasons but got involved with one particular man (in fact we have an recorded example in Thais), women somehow rendered unmarriageable in their home towns seeking opportunities with the army, widows, or who knows what. If Philip's Illyrian wife Audata was any indication, among the Illyrians at least there might have been women warriors. There may even have been soldiers who claimed women captives but never raped them, nor had sex until marrying them, because they were either not interested in rape or averse due to earlier bad experiences of their own. I would imagine the majority started out with rape as you say, but we shouldn't erase the exceptions to that tendency entirely. (I might be speaking from the novelist's perspective here; exceptions always make for interesting subplots and throwaways...)
Warmly,
Karen
but when I first discovered him at the age of ten I assume I saw him as a real life fairytale prince, especially given the nature of the books which would have been available to me at the time. I can safely say that my thoughts about him have changed since then. 
