Rape is an act of war against women, one that can be committed only because of an entire culture of support, which makes most rapes permissible. Not all of the structures of rape support are about sexual culture: racism, classism, and the prison-industrial complex, as just a few examples, create circumstances under which some women can be and are raped with impunity. So simply changing the cultural model for sex will not undermine the social support for all kinds of rape. But many rapists acquire what is sometimes called a “social license to operate”
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from the model of sex as a commodity (which constructs consent as the “absence of no”) and from its close corollary, the social construct of “slut.”
Without the notion of the slut, many rapists lose their license to operate—the notion exists only within a model of sex that analogizes it to property or, more specifically, to a commodity. The “commodity model” should be displaced by a model of sex as performance, which sits better with the notions of enthusiastic participation (or the “presence of yes,” as distinct from the “absence of no”) that many feminists argue for.
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We live in a culture where sex is not so much an act as a thing: a substance that can be given, bought, sold, or stolen, that has a value and a supply-and-demand curve. In this “commodity model,” sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it. Women may give it away or may trade it for something valuable, but either way it’s a transaction. This puts women in the position of not only seller, but also guardian or gatekeeper—of what Zuzu of Shakesville, a feminist blog,
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refers to as the “pussy oversoul”: Women are guardians of the tickets; men apply for access to them. This model pervades casual conversation about sex: Women “give it up,” men “get some.”
The commodity model is shared by both the libertines and the prudes of our patriarchy. To the libertine, guys want to maximize their take of tickets. The prudes want women to keep the tickets to buy something really “important”: the spouse, provider, protector.
The Abstinence Movement: Protecting the Asset
Purity balls and the chastity movement have provided countless opportunities for feminist mockery and outrage. This movement, most popular among Protestant evangelicals, has for several years found its way into our public school curricula through federally funded “abstinence-only education.” Much of this movement can be summarized by the familiar old saying that men will not buy the cow when they can get the milk for free. That also summarizes the analysis: Women are livestock, valued for what they provide, not as partners. Their produce is milk, which is taken, bottled, and sold. Milk is fungible. When we drink milk, we care about its quality, but not about the identity of the cow. We may appreciate the milk, but this does not extend to appreciation of the cow.
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The chastity movement is a practical set of principles, a set of investor’s guidelines for maximizing the benefit of the commodity. Abstinence-only programs are quite blunt about this. One program advertised its 2007 conference with a logo of a diamond wrapped in a padlocked chain. The logo read, “Guard Your Diamond, Save Sex for Marriage for a Brighter Future!”
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The diamond is the hymen, but (with the explicit reference to marriage) also the engagement ring—and the program wants young women to preserve the commodity to make this optimal trade.
This view, not incidentally, makes sense only if the property is not a fully renewable resource. A cow keeps giving milk. But the abstinence proponents tell us that a woman’s commodity is not as valuable later as it will be when she first offers it: Like olive oil, the “extra virgin” is worth a lot more, and the stuff from the later pressings is of an inferior grade. One Peoria, Illinois, purity ball volunteer said, “Girls have a wonderful gift to give, and we don’t want them to give all of themselves away. What we want them to do is present themselves as a rose to their husband with no blemishes.”
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The abstinence proponents are quite explicit about this also. They have a model for sluthood: a woman whose commodity is used up and worn out, whose commodity nobody would want except as a cheap alternative at a low price. This model is often taught with an eye toward making the metaphor as disgusting as possible. One program uses a piece of tape covered with arm hair after being stuck to and torn off of several students’ forearms, and which is then thrown in the trash.
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Another has students pass an unwrapped Peppermint Patty around the entire class. A Nevada program actually aired a public service announcement that said girls would feel “dirty and cheap” after breaking up with a sex partner.
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The people who encourage young women to treat their virginity as precious property do not see themselves as anti-woman, though feminists generally do. They are so invested in the commodity framework that, from their perspective, trading the commodity for the best possible gain is the best outcome a woman could hope for. To that way of thinking, sex can only ever be transacted, and the transaction that is the most advantageous is the one that uses the highly valuable early product to maximum advantage, to secure the best possible marriage: a lifetime commitment to financial support, and hopefully even an attractive and chivalrous sex partner. If sex really were a commodity that degraded with repeated harvesting, that would be all that was possible. The abstinence proponents, at least those of them who genuinely buy their line, think they are telling women what is in their best interest, because a better world is beyond their grasp.
The Libertines: Acquiring the Commodity
On the spectrum of patriarchy, the religious conservatives of the abstinence movement stand at one end. At the other end are Joe Francis and his Girls Gone Wild empire, and all of the other cultural forces that see sex as property, but simply want women to permit men to exploit it more freely.
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This is clear from the internal dialogue among self-styled “pickup artists,” who attempt to procure sex partners using “game” techniques.
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One moderator at an online pickup artist forum wrote, “Really improved my game and what girls will do for me. If I can get them folding all my laundry a day after they met me, think what I’ll have them doing when they’ve been having a continuous orgasm for the past 15 minutes.”
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The writer makes it his goal to “get” the most out of women, in the form of either sex or labor.
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(That commenter made the transition from household labor to sexual services without apparent irony. If service and commodity are not exactly congruent, they are certainly close cousins.)
Further, buying into the commodity model also means buying into its internal valuation method: that value derives from scarcity, so that any woman who expresses her sexuality by actually having sex partners is devalued. One poster wrote:
“Recently, as soon as I hook up with a girl, I start to resent her, because it was SO easy to seduce her. My skills have gotten pretty good, and I’ve seduced two girls this past week, and immediately after it happened, I wasn’t attracted to them anymore. I feel like, how can she be a high-value female if she was THAT easy to get in to bed.”
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A forum moderator responded, “Too bad she’s still a depreciating and often damaged asset.”
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These men openly adopt the commodity model as conducive to male privilege, because a better world is not in their perceived self-interest.
Nice Guys
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: Applying for Access to the Pussy Oversoul
The term “Nice Guys™” has evolved in the feminist blogosphere to refer to passive-aggressive hetero men who complain that they are refused sex in favor of other men when, apparently, they deem themselves deserving. Usually, their belief system involves the idea that other men, who treat women badly, are much more appealing to women, and that they themselves are disadvantaged in a sexual marketplace by their refusal to abuse or trick women in certain ways. Their entire worldview depends on the commodity model, and on a corollary view of their own entitlement: that there must be some “proper” way for them to act and “get” sex; that if they do all the “right” things, they will unlock the lock and get laid. By contrast, do musicians really think that if they just do the right things, someone must form a band with them?
The combination of passive-aggressiveness, entitlement, and the certainty that sex is a commodity leads the Nice Guy™ to argue, in all seriousness, that rape is caused because Nice Guys™ seek sex but are rejected, and rape is their reaction to unfair rejection. A paradigmatic example of this argument appeared in a mammoth discussion of rape in a thread entitled “Some Guys Are Assholes But It’s Still Your Fault If You Get Raped” at Alas! A Blog on June 15, 2005. Commenter Aegis posted this argument, which neatly encapsulates Nice Guy™ thinking:
“Rape. As far as I understand, some of the times a man rapes a woman, it is after she has already rebuffed his advances. Male confusion about how to seek sex will obviously contribute to those males being rebuffed. Hence, male confusion about how to seek sex contributes to situations where rape is more likely to happen. In short, imagine a situation in which a proto-rapist becomes an actual date rapist because he didn’t know how to induce the woman to be interested in having sex with him; if he had succeeded in doing so, she would have consented, and the situation where he decided to rape her would never have occurred.”
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Aegis thus conceives of rape as the result of a man’s frustration when he is refused something (the commodity) that he would be granted if he submitted a proper application for it. There is a term for something that is meant to be granted upon proper request: entitlement. To the Nice Guy™ way of thinking, the commodity is an entitlement: Women are gatekeepers to the Pussy Oversoul, and should grant access upon proper application; or, more crudely, women are pussy vending machines.
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If only the Nice Guy™ were unique in this sense of entitlement! Rather, the Nice Guy™ expresses clearly the undercurrent of entitlement that runs through the culture. Men generally are constructed as the pursuers of sex, and taught that their proper pursuit will be rewarded. What straight men really need to learn is that women are humans, too, who get to make their own decisions about whether and with whom to have sex; and that nobody owes anyone sex.
Aegis lays out an argument that this entitlement leads to rape, but the path from rejection and disappointment to rape does not depend on misunderstanding, as Aegis believed. Instead, entitled men who believe that sex is a commodity and that they have been denied it wrongfully see rape as repossession. It belongs to them, and they resentfully use any tactic necessary to get it. These men see themselves as being in the same position as a man who finds that his stolen car is in the custody of a garage: He may not know whether the garage stole it or found it, but it is his, and he is entitled to get it back. If they refuse to give it up after he asks the right way, he will lie to them, trick them, or threaten them if necessary to get it. He can write a check and stop payment; he can just get in and drive off. Because it is his car, it is his right. When these men apply that thinking to sex, it’s as if the woman standing between them and the pussy is an irrelevance, a hindrance.
The Problems of the Commodity Model
The commodity model has a number of problems. Principally, it reinforces patriarchal sex roles and constructs, and it allows for the construction of the concept of sluthood, which is key to at least one family of rape-supportive ideas.
The commodity model is inherently heteronormative and phallocentric. If two men have sex, who is the supplier and who is the demander? The commodity model requires one person to “give it up” and the other to want to “get some,” the “it” and “some” being the paradigmatic commodity: crudely, pussy. When nobody in the equation has an actual vagina, the model either imposes a notion of one or presupposes unlimited consumption. So, for example, thinking mired in this model may assume a “who’s the girl” conception that penetrative sex always occurs and that femininity should be imputed to the enveloping partner. Separately but not unrelated is the long-standing slur that gay men are inherently and compulsively promiscuous, there being no gatekeeper to restrict the supply of the commodity. The commodity model doesn’t deal any better with sex between two women—it simply imagines the economic problem in reverse, so that two gatekeepers reluctantly, if ever, “give it up.”
The commodity model also functions as all-purpose rape apology. The logical conclusion of this model is that rape is narrowly understood and consent is presumed. Under the commodity model, consent is not necessarily enthusiastic participation, or even necessarily an affirmative act. If someone tries to take something and the owner raises no objection, then that something is free for the taking. To this way of thinking, consent is the absence of “no.” It is therefore economically rational to someone with this commodity concept of sex that it can be taken; rape is a property crime in that view. In the past, the crime was against the male owner of women (let’s not sugarcoat it; until very recently, women were in a legal way very much male property, and still are in many places and ways). Even among more enlightened folks, if one takes a commodity view of sex, rape is still basically a property crime against the victim.