Kansas City Serial Rapist

This morning, a link regarding a local scumbag rapist raised a few bigger questions for TKC.

First, the nasty, newsy story:

Police are searching for the victims of a man who says he raped or tried to rape more than 32 women in the Kansas City area.

Here's the method used by the dude:

Gary L. Jackman, 56 told police that he found the women by looking into windows during three- to four-hour outings. He said he would make sure the woman was alone, then get in through a door or window after the lights were off.

"It was who was at home at the time and the easiest way to get in," he said. "People would lock their doors but leave the window next to it open, and you could reach in."

After raping a woman, he would make her bath or shower to destroy forensic evidence.

And here's where it gets weird:

He said he preferred to find his victims sleeping and didn't try to rush them or overpower them in a doorway.

"Anytime anyone yelled or fought back, I'd take off," he said. "I was doing this because I enjoyed it and I wanted them to enjoy it, and that's basically the way I thought of it."

Obviously, you'd have to take him at his word (I don't) to believe that garbage but the flimsy excuse does represent a rather old school/old world conception of sexuality and politics best described by thoughts related to a painting by Peter Paul Rubens entitled "Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus."

One art historian draws the conclusion that Rubens is celebrating the triumph of natural impulse over conventional inhibition: "The battle of the sexes is a necessity of nature. With Rubens it is a primal impulse of life, a fight for unification.....In being raped Pheobe discovers her destiny as a woman. Her rape reveals and enhances her nature." In claiming something like a truth value for Rubens's celebratory depiction of this rape, this scholar mystifies it in terms of a misguided notion of what is natural in human sexuality. My point is that we must consider Rubens's painting not as a revelation of primal human nature but as a phenomenon of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century European culture. In particular we may view Rubens's painting as issuing from a tradition that emerged among princely patrons at the time, of incorporating large-scale mythological rape scenes into their palace decorations. With fundamental shifts in political thinking and experience in early sixteenth-century Europe, princes came to appreciate the particular luster rape scenes could give to their own claims to absolute sovereignty....

Just like racism, the inherent righteousness of the upper class (i.e. Justification of the JoCo SUV and mini-mansion) or any of the archaic ideas which still linger in this town; it's important to note that ideology plays a bigger role than many would appreciate in our daily lives . . . Even in the form of excuses from a scumbag rapist.

And again while I was researching this post and wanted to illustrate it with something more substantial than the usual cheesecake or joke photos, I stumbled upon the painting from the early 1600's by Reubens referencing ancient myth . . . It got me thinking about the decline of Western Civilization given that most discourse about the deplorable subject of rape comes from either rant-y feminist screeds which all try (and fail) to live up to the body of work of Andrea Dworkin and dumbass joke t-shirts. It's kind of depressing, nearly 400 years ago the image featured above reveals how "old world masters" (heh) tried to address (justify) rape and now most conversation about the subject amounts to little more than unthinking gut reactions that are tantamount to ideological burping.