I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up.

In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common.

Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape.

Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it.

Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime.

A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim.

It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon.

I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.

However, rape (no matter what definition) is not evenly spread, some groups of women are more likely to become victims then others. Perpetrators pick their victims in a sort of rational way - some are more vulnerable.

So if you bias the group the right way, you can get large numbers.

No, it's actually commentary on the fact that women themselves often cannot clearly state "I was raped." The article in question was trying to show that lots more women have been raped than will admit to it or claim it. But you can also read it the other way: It casts light on how difficult it is to define rape.

Rape hinges on the detail of consent. Even women who have been fed alcohol until they were incapacitated and then taken to someone's room will go online and say things like "I had sex with a friend last night. I'm in a relationship. I know I need to drink less..." and get a chorus of people saying "Honey, that was rape."

People imagine rape to be some clear cut crime. In reality women are often very unclear in their own minds whether or not they were raped.

If the crime hinges on the detail of consent and the woman in question can't state clearly whether or not she wanted it, much less whether or not she consented, then you have bigger problems in determining data than in how surveyors ask their questions.

Sorry, no. It was an article I read a long time ago.

Rape stats are an inherently difficult thing to measure well. I could, in all earnestness, argue for either much higher or much lower figures than the reported figures.

That's a discussion I don't care to try to have on HN at all, much less on two hours sleep.

It's easy to believe that it's "in our nature" because of the dynamics which you describe being so common in the most dominant society, which is the only society most people have experience of. But, as another idiot with ideals, I believe we should not view this trend as a fatalistic inevitability, that it will always exist no matter how hard we work to change things.

Most people are in a state of near constant existential threat, due to their impoverishment in artificial scarcity (so much wealth in the world but must of us have access to nearly none of it). So most people don't have the luxury of being nice, even if it's the right thing to do. That and the fact that most of us are victims of many-generation-long cycles of inherited abuse that can be so hard to get out of. We have in many ways only ever been taught to be cruel to each other.

If we all play along with the idea of this inevitability, as in the top level commenter's claims of human nature, we only make it more true and harder to escape.

There are cultures where a woman cannot accuse her husband of rape. If she is married, he has unilateral right to have sex with her as he sees fit, no permission required.

Rape is a really complicated topic and the detail of consent has only grown thornier in my mind over time.

While I was homeless, men were happy to offer me money for sex because it was obvious to them that I was very poor. Meanwhile, I was routinely told on HN "Get a real job" and basically quit my bitching that I can't manage to make adequate income from my writing.

I have six years of college and cannot manage to come up with an adequate income from "honest labor" but men are happy to offer me money for sex under circumstances that can be interpreted as taking advantage of my vulnerability.

There are women who argue that all heterosexual acts of intercourse are essentially rape because of the generally poor status of women's rights. If putting up with intercourse with some man is the only means a woman has of establishing an adequate income and the world will literally let you starve and say "Not my problem" if you aren't married well, dating him in specific, etc, is it really genuinely consenting to agree to sex to stave off starvation?

This is not a theoretical question for me. This is lived experience as an educated American woman still reeling with shock at how amazingly hard it is to get taken seriously as a person in need of an earned income and willing to work for pay while no one wants to pay me. They will take freebies from me, so they think what I do has merit, but when push comes to shove it doesn't lead to an adequate income for me.

It's not a thing I expect anyone here to understand or care about. I've been here long enough to know that commenting on it doesn't get me sympathy. It just pisses people off who would like to think of themselves as nicer than that, so pointing this out isn't going to be met with people going "Oh. I didn't realize that. Let's fix that. That's wrong."

It will be met with a chorus of "You are just doing it wrong." and no rebuttal on my part will ever be sufficient to have the issue taken seriously. I know because I've tried for years to put this issue into words and that's how it goes every time, without fail.

So if I were to cave and finally sleep with a man for his money after a decade or more of dire financial problems and failing to find any other remedy, is that really, truly consenting sex?

I don't think it is. It's not the kind of sex I'm interested in ever having.

I've had better. I know what better looks and feels like.

But my words fall on deaf ears and make no difference. So I have grown more sympathetic to strident feminist views, though I don't fundamentally agree with them and don't even self-identify as a feminist.