I’d love to dismiss this as the reactionary claptrap it is, but in the wake of Stepp’s article and her casual-sex-will-damage-you-emotionally book
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Fail at Both,
the concept has attracted the attention of criminal justice scholars, prosecutors, and sexual assault experts; news outlets from
The New York Times
to
Slate
to PBS’s
To the Contrary;
college journalists; and countless bloggers, feminist and otherwise. And don’t forget the other books that couch their disdain for sexual women in faux-concerned terms and urge us all to stifle our nasty urges in order to better society and/or preserve our chances of finding the love of a good man: Wendy Shalit’s recent
Girls Gone Mild
(and its predecessor, the 1999 call to high collars
A Return to Modesty
), Dawn Eden’s 2006
The Thrill of the Chaste,
and Miriam Grossman’s
Unprotected
in 2007. When mixed with the still-far-too-influential sentiments articulated by rape apologists like Camille “Woman’s flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man’s approach must take the form of rape” Paglia and Katie “If 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped, wouldn’t I know it?” Roiphe, it’s a potent cocktail indeed.
Cosmo’s
sensationalistic headline declaration notwithstanding, everything about so-called gray rape seems awfully familiar: The experience is confusing, makes victims feel guilty and ashamed, and leaves them thinking they could and should have done something differently to prevent the attack. One of
Cosmo’
s sources, Alicia, says she “ha[d] this dirty feeling of not knowing what to do or who to tell or whether it was my fault. . . . Maybe I wasn’t forceful enough in saying I didn’t want it.” Women also don’t want to name their experience as rape because of the stigma of victimhood and the fear of not being believed: “While it felt like rape to her,” writes Stepp of Alicia, “she was not sure if that’s what anyone else would call it. . . . Even today, she is reluctant to call it rape because she thinks of herself as a strong and sexually independent woman, not a victim.”
Having some déjà vu? That’s because any therapist, sexual assault counselor, rape survivor, or close friend or family member of a rape survivor knows that feelings of guilt, shame, self-blame, and denial are common almost to the point of inevitability, no matter what the circumstances of the crime. People raped by strangers are going to torture themselves with thoughts of why they didn’t know better and take a “safer” route home; people raped by dates, so-called friends, or the hot guy at the other end of the bar are going to torture themselves with thoughts of how they might have brought it on themselves by flirting, kissing, having that one last cocktail, fill in the blank with any detail a mind can seize upon in the wake of trauma. Rape survivors tend to echo one another in their comments, things like “I thought it was my fault. I felt humiliated and ashamed,” and “I was too ashamed and confused to tell anyone what had happened. I tried to forget about it.”
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Survivors of any attack that doesn’t fit the most extreme stranger-in-the-bushes-with-a-knife paradigm are very often reluctant to name their experience as rape. When the culture teaches you that lack of consent is measured only in active, physical resistance, when
your
actions are questioned if your date refuses to respect “no,” you’re going to have a hard time calling rape by its real name. This is one of the reasons why feminists had to (and continue to) battle so hard for date rape to be taken seriously in the first place, and the reason why the title of the first major book examining the phenomenon, published in 1988, is
I Never Called It Rape.
It’s a vicious cycle: Stigma and fear fuel guilt, shame, and denial, which our culture uses to shore up stigmas and fear. You can see the cycle at work in Alicia’s experience above, in her desire to preserve her self-image as strong and sexually independent, as if someone else’s actions were the key to those qualities in herself. You can see it in the way she worries that others might not agree that she was raped—and how she depends on their opinions to shape her own knowledge. You can see it in what Jezebel blogger Moe writes about her own assault, twisting herself like a verbal and emotional gymnast to cast her experience—with a “smarmy hair-product using type from [her] ex-boyfriend’s frat” who, after being told repeatedly that she didn’t want to have sex, waited until she slipped into a beery sleep before “sticking it in”—not as rape but as “one drunken regrettable night” and noting with something like approval that “
Cosmo
has come up with a new name for this kind of nonviolent collegiate date-rape sort of happening.”
This is how the language of “gray rape” accelerates the victim-blaming cycle. The very concept the phrase relies on—that a supposed gray area of communication or intoxication means that you cannot trust your own memories, instincts, or experiences—is designed to exploit the stigma and fear that fuel the guilt, shame, and denial. But make no mistake—it is not a new concept, it’s simply a new tactic. Gray rape and date rape are the same thing: a sexual assault in which the victim knows the attacker and may have consented to some kind of sexual activity with hir. Survivors of such attacks have always been reluctant to name their experience “rape.” Despite gray rape proponents’ eagerness to use this phenomenon to shift responsibility from rapists to victims, the fact remains that the reluctance in question is a symptom of the very social disease—sexism, misogyny, men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, and the idea that sexual interaction involves women’s guarding the gates to the land of the sexy goodies as men try to cajole, manipulate, and force their way in—that enables rape in the first place.
And that social disease is evolving as fast as we can keep up. Weakness is no longer the prized quality of womanhood it once was, and despite the long, hard efforts of survivors and advocates to make clear that being a victim of rape says nothing about you and everything about your attacker (as Melissa McEwan of the blog Shakespeare’s Sister puts it, “To be a survivor of rape does not have to mean shame and brokenness and guilt . . . it is brave, not weak, to say, plainly: ‘I was raped’”), too many people still equate victimhood with frailty. Plus, though sexual expression for women has become destigmatized in some ways, culturally praised and accepted sexual expression (think
Girls Gone Wild,
pole-dancing classes, porn chic, and the Pussycat Dolls) tends to be more about display for a (presumably male) audience than about any kind of subjective pleasure. Women are now encouraged to look sexy for other people, but not to be sexual for ourselves. These messages about sexuality as culturally overdetermined sexiness have intensified over the last decade or so, keeping pace with supposed cultural acceptance of women’s sexual activity in general—but they make it harder than ever for women to center our own authentic sexuality. When you’re steeped in messages about looking hot at the expense of (or as a substitute for) feeling aroused or having sexual desire, it becomes all the easier for you to question your own judgment about what happened to you and believe the cultural forces telling you that your assault was just miscommunication and bad sex.
In the end, it’s not all that surprising that someone would come up with an idea like “gray rape.” Date rape and the cultural phenomena connected to it are something feminist anti-violence activists have been fighting to respond to and eradicate since there have been feminist anti-violence activists; anti-feminists, rape apologists, and proponents of a return to the days when women were roundly punished for doing anything but pinching a penny between their ankles have been trying to discredit our side all along the way. Over the two decades since the idea of date rape entered the public imagination, we’ve been pretty successful in getting cultural and institutional recognition that it’s, um, wrong. Not that we’ve solved the problem or anything (if we had, this essay—and much of this book—wouldn’t need to be written). But we’ve changed some cultural attitudes and taught many young people of all genders that consenting to some sexual activity with a person, or having consented to sex with a person in the past, doesn’t mean you’ve consented to anything and everything with that person, or that you automatically consent to fuck that person again, and that a quiet “no,” even if it’s not accompanied by a knee to the groin or any other physical struggle, is still a valid “no.” In other words, we’ve been at least moderately successful in demonstrating that date rape is, in fact, rape.
But backlash is a devious little douchebag, and there are still people who think that women are ruining everything with our slutty, sexually aggressive, entitled-to-our-own-pleasure (gasp!) attitude; these folks are always in need of ammunition, both legal and conceptual. The fact that feminism’s battles are unfinished means that it’s all too easy to enlist flat-out lies—that consent to kissing means consent to more, or that one person’s drunkenness excuses another person’s criminal acts—in service of beating back new sexual mores, ones with the potential to free women from being punished just for wanting the full human experience of sexuality and sexual exploration. So they’ve gone and rebranded their old friend, dressing her in a new outfit in the hope of keeping women feeling good ’n’ guilty about our sexuality and our desires, scared to stand up for ourselves and demand accountability for violence against us, scared to insist on acceptance of our sexuality on equal terms with men’s.
Cosmo
shows its ass quite clearly here, making obvious an investment in threats of violence to keep women in line: “So how do you avoid being a victim without giving up the right to be sexually independent and assertive? Many psychologists feel that the first step is to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the free-and-easy hookup approach to dating and sex. ‘We all have vulnerabilities, and we all can be taken advantage of,’ says [psychotherapist Robi] Ludwig. ‘Though you’re successful at school, sports, whatever,
you must see yourself—as a woman—as vulnerable’
” (emphasis added). In the context of the article, this is not an encouragement of commonsense caution; it’s an attempt to enlist women in the project of our own subjugation. The message is clear: Your sexual desire is dangerous. You can stifle it or you can be a slut who lives in fear and gets what she deserves. These are the only two choices in the world of gray rape.
The cherry on top of this backlash sundae is that to the Laura Sessions Stepp/Wendy Shalit modesty-or-bust crowd, feminism is to blame for gray rape because feminism has promoted women’s sexual freedom and power—and if women weren’t feeling all empowered and happy about their sexuality, they wouldn’t go hitting on guys, making out with them, or having consensual hookups. But here’s the thing: Flirting and hookups do not cause rape. Rapists and the culture that creates them—with its mixed messages and double standards—cause rape. Feminism is working to dismantle that culture, but we’ve been only partly successful so far. Blaming feminism for the damage remaining when we’ve made insufficient change is just like exploiting a rape survivor’s totally normal feelings of confusion and shame, far from a new strategy. Feminism has been blamed by right-wing commentators for everything from drinking among teen girls (because we’ve encouraged them to do anything boys can) to women’s postdivorce poverty (because we’ve convinced women they can get along just fine without a man), when really those things have just as much to do with sexism as with anything else (in these cases, the need to relieve gendered social pressure toward perfectionism and a little thing called the wage gap, respectively). I’ll happily admit that feminism has helped pave the way for more sexual autonomy (not, it’s well worth noting, just for women but for people of both genders). The progress we’ve made toward integrating the virgin/whore split—that now women can want sex and still be good people (as long as their desire is bounded by love and commitment)—was driven by feminism. But the fucked-up attitude our culture has about consent, illustrated by the fact that too many people still think that “no” can be part of a coy seduction strategy, has nothing to do with feminism, except that it’s still our goal to change it. The attitude itself is clearly the fault of our old friend misogyny, and we must continue to be vigilant about keeping the blame for sexual assault squarely where it belongs.
If you want to read more about Is CONSENT COMPLICATED?, try:
• Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process BY RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
• Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty BY HAZEL
/
CEDAR TROOST
• An Immodest Proposal BY HEATHER CORINNA
If you want to read more about MEDIA MATTERS, try:
• Offensive Feminism: The Conservative Gender Norms That Perpetuate Rape Culture, and How Feminists Can Fight Back BY JILL FILIPOVIC
• The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t) BY STACEY MAY FOWLES
• In Defense of Going Wild or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Pleasure (and How You Can, Too) BY JACLYN FRIEDMAN
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Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty