‘Sex exceptionalism’: The very perverse idea behind those downplaying Hamas’s mass rapes
Timothy P. Carney
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Among the most evil things Hamas did in its Oct. 7 invasion was the serial rape of many Israeli women and girls. The stories and images of rape are one reason it is so obscene when American or European leftists defend or minimize Hamas’s brutality as “resistance” or “decolonization.”
Yet for some feminist scholars, the current concern is that people will be too angry about the rapes.
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The post by a Canadian academic is stupid and foul in many ways, but that phrase “sex exceptionalism,” which would be easy to dismiss as meaningless academic jargon, caught my eye because it echoed all sorts of ideas and linguistic quirks I’ve heard in recent years. The implication is that treating sex as something exceptional is a matter of cultural conditioning that causes harm.
Professor Matthews later expounded a bit on the term.
After noting that “hyperfocus on conflict-related sexual violence” has been bad, Matthews writes, “‘Sex exceptionalism’ is ‘the idea that sex and sexualities are inherently different from all other human activities and topics of study.’”
Thanks to this idea, “we treat sexual offences different than other crimes…. In wartime, sex exceptionalism provides a vehicle through which sexual violence allegations are used to inflame public opinion….”
One of the feminist scholars Matthews cites is Aya Gruber and her April 2023 paper, “Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law.”
This paper sums up “sex exceptionalism” as holding the following beliefs: “Sex crimes are the worst crimes. People generally believe that sexual assault is graver than nonsexual assault, uninvited sexual compliments are worse than nonsexual insults, and sex work is different from work.”
The author writes, “Sex exceptionalism, however, is neither natural nor neutral, and its political history should give us pause.”
That is, it is not natural, Gruber argues, to put sex in a different category from other things. It is only cultural conditioning that makes us put rape in a different moral category from libel or a gunshot; it is only our prejudices that make us assume sexual relations are different in kind from other relations.
We have historically treated rape as exceptionally evil, she says, out of an effort to “preserve female chastity, marital morality, and racial supremacy.” The paper is aimed at “denaturalizing sex exceptionalism.”
In other words, this particular subculture of feminist scholarship is dedicated to treating sex as no different from other activities.
This fits perfectly into the intellectual crusades of the 21st century, which aim to flatten human life and reduce it to bland, colorless, flavorless elements — in the name of an all-consuming conception of equality.
Last year, noting the tendency of journalists and academics to refer to their “spouse” or “partner” and otherwise adapt neutered, less precise, less-alive language, I wrote:
“To satisfy the gods of equity and inclusion, we must take up the scalpel and neuter our language. Teachers or principals become ‘educators.’ Reporters and editors become ‘media workers.’ Long ago, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines became the impossibly grim ‘servicemen and women.’”
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Academics and journalists adopt this neutered language and way of thinking: Sex work is just work; sex is just a physical act; sex crimes are in the same category as other assaults.
It’s inhuman, and for that reason, no normal people think this way. These academics need to construct all sorts of complex logical systems to try and overcome what absolutely everyone knows: sex actually is exceptional. Having sex is not like doing other things. Sexual relations are different in kind, not merely degree, from other relations. And sexual assault really is a uniquely horrific crime that belongs in a more serious category than any other crime.