Peg sez, "I don't agree that rape is only about power and not about sex." My impression is that rape is more about power than sex because it's sex by force – sex against the will of one of the participants.

But I agree with Peg that rape isn't only about power. It's also about the sexual gratification of the one(s) doing the overpowering. As Larry says, "the sexual objectification aspect adds an aspect of harm to the crime which goes beyond the harm of other assaults, in that it robs a part of [human] sexual identity and replaces it with a sexualized objectified identity."

I'm curious: in those cultures where "honor killing" is practiced, are raped (sodomized) boys also killed? I would suspect not, if the aim of "honor killing" is to subjugate women, not victims of rape.

To answer the question Larry posed at the end of his song, the rapist in the Bangladeshi Hindu culture does not hide his face because his culture tells him he doesn't have to. I'm not sure how one convinces people from other cultures that human rights as we interpret them are universal rights (without being viewed by those other cultures as infidels). Certainly it will take time... after all, it has taken several centuries for us to acknowledge that women have rights (and that people of all races have rights), and even now we meet resistance to those concepts within our own culture. We just have to be resolved to fighting that battle forever, and we have to keep speaking out and singing out until we're heard.