@TheCobbler,
Dude, you need to provide some context for that very incendiary quote.
It was in an essay Sanders wrote as a freelance journalist. The point he was making was that men and women's sexual roles and identities get damaged by societal pressures. In context, it doesn't sound quite as deranged.
The essay by the Vermont senator isn't long — only a page. The bit about rape comes at the very beginning, as does some not-totally-safe-for-work language:
A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.
A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.
The man and woman get dressed up on Sunday — and go to Church, or maybe to their 'revolutionary' political meeting.
Have you ever looked at the Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like 'Girl 12 raped by 14 men' sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?
Sanders Sanders then goes on to explain his ideas about gender roles and eventually gets at a sharper point — that traditional gender roles help create troubling dynamics in men's and women's sex lives.
"Many women seem to be walking a tightrope," he writes, as their "qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism."
One way to read the essay is that Sanders was doing (in a supremely ham-handed way) what journalists do every day: draw the reader in with an attention-getting lede, then get to the meat of the article in the middle.
http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-essay/
