But building that model requires us to dismantle traditional notions of female sexuality and femininity itself. Doing that poses a direct threat to male power, and the female subordination it relies on.
A Culture of Fear
So why
do
some conservative extremists—and even some regular folks—want to maintain a culture that enables and promotes rape? Quite simply, because women pose a threat to entrenched power structures, and the constant threat of rape keeps both men and women in line.
The social construction of rape suffers from a marked disconnect from the reality of rape. Sexual assault is routinely depicted along the stranger-rape storyline, despite the fact that 73 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows.
16
Further, rape victims are almost always depicted as female, despite the fact that one in thirty-three men will survive sexual assault.
17
Prison populations are especially at risk, and especially invisible—while statistics are hard to come by, conservative estimates suggest more than three-hundred thousand men are sexually assaulted behind bars every year.
18
Assaults on male inmates are seen as somehow not as wrong as the stranger-rape of women, perhaps because we have little sympathy for convicted criminals (a significant proportion of whom are not violent, thanks to punitive drug laws), or because men of color make up a disproportionate percentage of prison populations and the experiences of incarcerated brown and black men are generally deemed unimportant. Men, then—even men who are likely to be assaulted—are left out of the narrative of fear that women live. The one aspect of the rape narrative that actually reflects reality is the fact that 99 percent of rapes are perpetrated by men.
19
Unlike other forms of assault or even murder, rape is both a crime and a tool of social control. The stranger-rape narrative is crucial in using the threat of sexual assault to keep women afraid, and to punish women who step out of the traditionally female private sphere and into the traditionally male-dominated public one. Portraying rape as something that happens outside of a woman’s home enforces the idea that women are safe in the domestic realm, and at risk if they go out.
There exists a long history of conflating female exodus from the home with female sexual availability—for quite a long time, the “public woman” was a prostitute. The defining feature of the “common woman” sex worker was “not the exchange of money, not even multiple sexual partners, but the public and indiscriminate availability of a woman’s body.”
20
Public and outspoken women today are still routinely called “whores” as a way of discrediting them. Street harassment remains a widespread method of reminding women that they have less of a right to move through public space than men do. And rape serves as the ultimate punishment for women who move through public space without patriarchal covering.
While the threat of rape has hardly kept women indoors, it does keep women fearful. If a woman is raped by a stranger, her decisions are immediately called into question—why was she walking alone, why was she in that neighborhood, why did she drink so much? If she is raped by someone she knows, her actions are similarly evaluated, and the question of whether it was “really” rape is inevitably raised—why did she go out with him if she didn’t want sex, why did she invite him up to her room, why did she go to a frat party, why did she drink wine at dinner, why did she consent to some sexual activity if she didn’t want to consent to all of it?
Men are 150 percent more likely to be the victims of violent crimes than women are.
21
Men are more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of crimes. Men are more likely to be assaulted, injured, or killed when alcohol is involved. Men are more likely to be victimized by a stranger (63 percent of violent victimizations), whereas women are more likely to be victimized by someone they know (62 percent of violent victimizations). Women are more likely to be victimized in their home or in the home of someone they know, whereas men are more likely to be victimized in public.
22
And yet it is women who are treated to “suggestions” about how to protect themselves from public stranger assaults: go out with a friend, don’t drink too much, don’t walk home alone, take a self-defense class. Well-meaning as they may be, such suggestions send the false message that women can prevent rape. Certainly, on an individual basis, self-defense and other trainings do help women to protect themselves. But while these trainings are invaluable for the women they assist, they place all of the responsibility on the individual women who use them—in other words, they are not the answer to dismantling rape culture.
The focus on the victim’s behavior, rather than the perpetrator’s, sends the message that a woman must be eternally on guard, lest she bring sexual assault onto herself. This message adds to a broader view of women as vulnerable, keeping women fearful and justifying paternalistic and sexist laws and customs. As media critic Laura Kipnis writes:
“Given the vast number of male prison rapes and the declining number of female nonprison rapes, it seems as though the larger social story about sexual vulnerability is due to be altered. It is, after all, a story upon which a good chunk of gender identity hinges, including a large part of what it
feels
like to be a woman: endangered.”
23
The “if only she had . . . ” response to rape serves the valuable psychological purpose of allowing other women to temporarily escape that sense of endangerment. If we convince ourselves that we would never have done what she did, that her choices opened her up to assault and we would have behaved differently, then we can feel safe.
But it’s a strategy that is bound to fail. The threat of rape holds women—all women—hostage. Obviously, women and men need to take common-sense measures to avoid all sorts of victimization, but the emphasis on rape as a pervasive and constant threat is crucial to maintaining female vulnerability and male power. That narrative, though, does more than just paralyze women—it privileges men. The benefits that stem from the simple ability to
not live in fear
are impossible to quantify. Certainly many, if not most, men have no desire to keep women afraid, but there are some whose goals necessitate a fearful and compliant female population. How else will they justify keeping women under their thumbs under the guise of “protection”?
Conservative “pro-family” activists envision a world in which men are in control, both in the public realm and at home. But the natural desire for freedom and autonomy exists in women, and has always been nearly impossible to smother with bribery (the carrot of the wedding and the family and the home) alone. The stick also has to come out, and that’s where the pervasive threat of rape (or otherwise losing one’s “virtue”) comes into play. Certainly, the threat of rape as a tool of social control was not created by anti-feminist conservatives; that threat, however, is an important weapon in the culture war they are waging against equality.
A Feminist Response to Sexual Assault
An improved response to rape requires a broad-based approach, and involves challenging the entire right-wing agenda: the wars on sex, on women’s bodies, on the poor, on people of color. Sexual assault simply cannot be removed from its broader context, and as long as powerful people continue to promote a worldview that requires women to be second-class citizens—and as long as that view is bolstered by policies that literally subjugate women’s bodies and by social codes that render women passive and men aggressive—women will not be safe.
A second crucial prong of anti-rape activism must simply be teaching men not to rape. Ridiculous and simplistic as it may sound—after all, criminals will commit crimes, and would anyone consider lowering the murder rate by “teaching men not to murder”?—sexual assault is more caught up in gender stereotypes and intimate relationships than most other violent crimes are. The “teach men not to rape” method will admittedly be entirely unsuccessful in combating stranger rape. It will certainly not eradicate acquaintance rape or intimate-partner rape, either, but it very well might decrease it.
Teaching men not to rape involves addressing the disconnect between men who commit sexual assault and men who self-identify as rapists. It is both a social and an institutional process that requires accurately representing the reality of sexual assault (dismantling the stranger-rape and the women-should-be-fearful narratives), developing positive masculinities, and teaching boys (in sex education classes and through legal standards) that forcing a woman to have sex with you
is rape.
If we are to bridge the divide between how women experience rape and how some men define it—and how they define it as something apart from sexual activities that may be ordinary parts of manhood—we need to eliminate the idea that rape must involve extreme violence. Instead, we need to recognize that rape is unique because it takes a natural and usually pleasurable act and turns it into an act of violence. Context, as much as the act itself, matters.
We must also take broader steps toward gender equality. As feminism has seen greater and greater success, the sexual assault rate has decreased. Sexual assault is not only a crime of violence and power, but also one of entitlement. So long as men feel entitled to dominate and control women’s bodies, sexual assault will continue. While issues like reproductive justice may initially seem unrelated to sexual assault, they are a crucial aspect of women’s bodily autonomy and integrity—legally forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy for nine months and give birth against her will and without her consent, or coercing certain kinds of “unfit” women into not reproducing, are deeply troubling uses of women’s bodies to serve the needs, ideologies, and desires of others. Allowing women a full range of reproductive freedoms affirms the fact that women’s bodies are private property, and that their sexual and reproductive choices should not be forced or coerced.
We must work with women, too, but not in the traditional way of warning women away from moving through public space and engaging in normal social behaviors like drinking or going to bars and parties. Rather, we must emphasize a pleasure-affirming vision of female sexuality, wherein saying yes and no are equally valid moral decisions in many sexual contexts—and wherein women not only are answering the question, but also feel equally entitled to ask for and initiate sex when they want it and their partner agrees.
We need to situate sexual assault within the greater cultural battles over women’s bodies, and recognize that anti-rape activism cannot be separated from action for reproductive freedom, anti-racism, LGBT rights, and broader gender equality; and that the opponents of those movements are the same people who have an interest in maintaining rape culture.
Eradicating rape may very well be impossible. But as long as we continue to view it as a crime committed by an individual against another individual, absent of any social context, we will have little success in combating it. Women must feel fully entitled to public engagement and consensual sex—and if conservative and anti-feminist men continue to argue that women’s very public presence enables men to assault them, then perhaps they’re the ones who should be pressured to stay home.
If you want to read more about MEDIA MATTERS, try:
• A Woman’s Worth BY JAVACIA N. HARRIS
• How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman? BY KATE HARDING
• The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t) BY STACEY MAY FOWLES
If you want to read more about THE RIGHT IS WRONG, try:
• Toward a Performance Model of Sex BY THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
• Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture BY JESSICA VALENTI
2
Toward a Performance Model of Sex
BY THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
Sally has a problem. Sally is a music slut. She plays with everyone. She has two regular bands, and some sidemen she jams with. When parties get late and loud, she will pull out her instrument and play with people she just met, people she hardly knows, people whose names she cannot remember—or never knew! She plays for money, she plays for beer, sometimes she even plays just to get an audience, because she likes the attention.
THIS PARAGRAPH MAKES no sense, at least not when taken literally, but the adoption of the concept of “slut” is so clear that the paragraph is, on even the most casual read, a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. The reason it makes no literal sense is that playing music does not share essential characteristics with the way Western culture models sex.