by Jackson Katz
Music journalists and scholars of American culture have addressed the general question about white fascination with, and co-optation of, hip-hop culture. Many contemporary writers have attempted to update Norman Mailer’s controversial and widely discussed 1957 essay “The White Negro,” where he argues that in a conformist white society, the image of the “Negro” is subversive and countercultural, and hence enormously appealing. But the typical focus of these writers is on the process whereby black ghetto style has been commodified to meet white suburban consumers’ need to act cool by parroting the speech and styles of the “niggaz” in the ’hood. In a 1996 essay, Robin D. G. Kelley argues that for many white, middle-class male teenagers, gangsta rap provides an “imaginary alternative to suburban boredom,” and the ghetto is a place of “adventure, unbridled violence, and erotic fantasy which these young men consume vicariously and voyeuristically.” But however insightful, these sorts of essays rarely discuss the reasons why brutally sexist gender politics appeal to white boys and men. More than thirty years after the modern women’s movement transformed the social landscape, increasing opportunities for millions of girls and women and catalyzing momentous changes in men’s lives, why do so many white suburban males relate to the retrograde sexism in much of contemporary rap? Why do so many of them gleefully sing along to lyrics about worthless “bitches” whose sole purpose in life is to manipulate unsuspecting men? Why can they identify with male narrators who seem to derive perverse pleasure from having sex with women and then tossing them aside like pieces of meat? They do seem to be caught in a trap. In order to maintain the hard poses that earn the respect of other gangstas, men have to affect a cool distance and never acknowledge vulnerable emotions like caring, affection, and tenderness. They can certainly never acknowledge their longing for sexual intimacy with women. That is sissy stuff. As the wildly popular rapper 50 Cent raps in his hit song “In Da Club,” “I’m into having sex/I ain’t into makin’ love.”
But I suspect that one reason why some men’s anger toward women is expressed as sexual degradation is that they feel women possess a fundamental power over men—the power to reject them sexually. Women have long possessed this power, but the explosion in porn culture over the past generation has caused a fundamental change. In today’s ubiquitous porn culture, heterosexual boys/men have unprecedented access to girls’/women’s bodies. But those bodies are often on a video or computer screen, and those boys/men have to pay for them. Young guys want real girls/women to desire them sexually, and they also long for emotional and physical intimacy.
Because of widespread homophobia, they can rarely get this type of intimacy from other boys/men, and so many of them—young and old—seek to achieve it through sex with women. They also seek from girls a means to validate their heterosexual manhood. When boys/men cannot achieve this intimacy and validation, their unrequited desire can often turn into hostility. (I want you/I hate you for not wanting me.) Putting women down sexually with a catchy back beat is yet another way to hurt them as payback for this and other perceived slights.
It is convenient for white conservatives and others to blame our cultural decline on the sinister influence of black artists (Janet Jackson!). But as bell hooks argued in a 1994 essay entitled “Misogyny, Gangsta Rap, and The Piano,” young black male rappers alone should not be forced to take the heat for encouraging the hatred of and violence against women that is a central feature of our male-dominated society. Responsibility for these problems needs to be much more widely shared by men—including powerful white men. In fact, it is quite plausible that the widespread acceptance of misogyny in rap is yet another measure of the virulence of the ongoing societal backlash against feminism, particularly against women’s organized efforts to achieve equality with men in the economic, social, and political spheres.
BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE
It should be clear that discussions about men’s violence against women in contemporary U.S. society must take into account the complexities of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. This recognition of diversity is particularly important in the design of prevention efforts, as they need to be tailored—whenever possible—to meet the needs of specific communities. Furthermore, it is critical to recognize the racialized dimensions of gender-violence issues in white communities, because without this recognition it is much easier for white people—especially white men in power—to deny these are problems in their communities. But it is also important to acknowledge that the United States is an amazingly heterogeneous society and that racial and ethnic differences far transcend the black-white color line.
We know that men who harass, abuse, and assault women and children frequently have rigid and traditional beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women. This is as true for white men as for any other men. Still, there is a great deal of cultural variation in the expectations of men’s and women’s behaviors—and in the preferred strategy for responding to abuse. Thus, it is not useful to create “one-size-fits-all” prevention strategies, because what works in one community might not necessarily be appropriate for another. For example, as Fernando Mederos explains, in mainstream European American culture there is a “covert or surreptitious system of male supremacy” that underlies batterers’ behavior, whereas in Latino communities the male supremacy might be more overt. This does not mean that Latinos are more violent, only that European Americans might be more invested in concealing their controlling and violent behaviors. Or you might say the violence takes different forms. Unless policy makers, service providers, and educators understand these sorts of dynamics, they will not be in a position to design effective prevention strategies.
It is also not accurate or fair to assume that every subcultural group in our diverse society places the same value on such things as family preservation, or women’s sexual freedom. For example, in some Asian American communities, both men and women place a high value on preserving marriages—in some cases even when the husband is abusive. This is also true in parts of the white majority culture. Women who are in abusive marriages in these circumstances want the violence to stop, but they often do not have much support from family or friends for leaving the relationship. Abusive men know this, and can use it as a tool to manipulate and control their wives.
I was introduced to an entirely new (to me) set of cultural issues in 2004 when I went to Hawaii to do a gender violence prevention training in conjunction with Girlfest Hawaii, a racially and ethnically diverse arts/film/cultural happening whose goal is to end violence against women and girls through education and entertainment. Hawaii is a complex society where the indigenous cultures have seen their customs eroded and their land expropriated by the awesome colonial power of the United States, which retains an enormous military presence there, and where patterns of immigration from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands have created a unique cultural mix. In preparation for my training, I had several conversations with women organizers in Hawaii as I tried to understand some of the issues I would confront when I got there. I asked about some of the important issues I should be aware of. The women made it clear to me that as a “Haole” man from the mainland who was going to be talking about the relationship between cultural definitions of “manhood” and the pandemic of men’s violence against women, it would be important for me to have at least some brief background on Hawaiian culture and politics, as well as the sensitivities involved in having a white man come over and “teach” the locals a new way “to be a man.”
For example, if I was going to critique the hypermasculine posturing and violence of not only white men, but indigenous men and other men of color, would I also acknowledge that their masculine identities were formed in part in self-defense, as a response to colonial exploitation and the decimation of native Hawaiian culture? Would I accept some responsibility as a representative of the dominant white culture, and not simply point to problems in how men from other cultures treat their women? The Girlfest organizers never once tr
ied to make excuses for abusive men of color; they were clear that colonized men benefited from sexism even as they suffered from racism. Nor did they ask me to mute my anti-violence message. They did give me a lot to think about, including questions about my own cultural biases and filters. Men who do gender-violence prevention in the twenty-first century—especially white men—have an obligation to approach issues of race, ethnicity, and social change from a more nuanced and culturally sophisticated vantage point than our predecessors. This is sometimes uncomfortable, but it is all part of the social change process. And like previous generations of antiracist, anti-sexist white men, people of color and feminists are often not only our allies in this work, but also our mentors and guides.
CHAPTER NINE
It Takes a Village to Rape a Woman
“[Ours] is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex are so common that they should be considered normal. Not normal in the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.”
—Robert Jensen
Feminists developed the concept of a “rape culture” decades ago to describe how men who rape are not simply a handful of “sick” or deviant individuals. They are instead the products of a culture that glorifies and sexualizes male power and dominance, and at the same time glorifies and sexualizes female subservience and submission. Rape must be understood not as an aberration in such a cultural environment but as simply the extreme end on a continuum of behaviors. The controversial aspect of this seemingly commonsense argument is that it implicates tens of millions of men who are not rapists. Most men would rather not think about how they participate in a culture that actively promotes—or at the very least tolerates—sexual violence. Many find offensive the mere suggestion of any sense of shared responsibility.
As a result, the mythic image of the rapist as a masked man who hides in the bushes and waits to leap out and attack women continues to resonate powerfully, because while this image strikes fear in the hearts of millions of women and girls every day, it is also oddly reassuring—for both women and men. For women, it means that if they are smart and take the necessary precautions, they will drastically reduce their chances of being assaulted. For men, the image of the crazed rapist diverts the critical spotlight away from them. If the male population is divided into two distinct categories—“good guys” and “rapists”—then men who do not rape can easily distance themselves from the problem. But the reality of sexual violence is much more complex than the mythology. Stranger rapes occur with alarming frequency, and can terrorize an entire populace—especially women. But they constitute only about 20 percent of cases. Most sexual violence happens between people who know each other. On college campuses 90 percent of rape victims know their assailants. The perpetrators can be family members or friends of their victims. They are often “nice guys” whom no one would suspect.
Even more troubling is the fact that rape is an act of sexual aggression that can sometimes bear a remarkable similarity to what may be considered “normal” sexual behavior for men—either in heterosexual or homosexual relations. One study showed that one in twelve men admitted to committing acts that met the legal definition of rape. One study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that 43 percent of college-aged men conceded to using coercive behavior to have sex (including ignoring a woman’s protest, using physical aggression, and forcing intercourse). Thus for men—especially heterosexual men—to acknowledge the depths of the problem would require an unprecedented level of introspection. In a sense they would have to question the entire process by which they had been socialized as men.
Not all rapes are the same. As Katharine Baker explains in a Harvard Law Review article about motivational evidence in rape law, rapes are not alike in the eyes of the men who commit them, and they are not alike in the eyes of the jurors and the public who judge them. “All rapes are, in part, about sex and masculinity and domination,” she writes. “But some…are predominantly about sex, some…are predominantly about masculinity, and some…are predominantly about domination.” Like domestic violence, there is no one-size-fits-all description of this crime. There are many different kinds of force, manipulation, coercion, and degrees of consent. Thus it is important to make distinctions between types of rape and rapists in order to successfully prosecute and prevent the crime. The college senior who gets a naïve firstyear student drunk and then pushes past her “no’s” to insert his penis in her might not fit the same criminal profile as a man who slips through the window into women’s bedrooms and rapes them at knifepoint in their own beds—but they are both rapists.
For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to focus on the majority of men who rape—not on the relatively small number of sociopathic or sadistic rapists. We do know something about most men who rape. For example, numerous studies have found that while they tend to be more emotionally constricted than nonagressive men, and are often angry and hostile to women, most of them are psychologically “normal.” The psychologist David Lisak points out that the old stereotype of the rapist was derived in part from extensive studies with incarcerated rapists, many of whom committed acts of grievous violence against their victims, who were often strangers. But according to Lisak, research over the past twenty years clearly demonstrates that the vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by what he calls “undetected rapists,” and they usually know their victims. Undetected rapists are men who typically behave in stereotypically masculine ways, see sex as conquest, and are hypersensitive to any perceived slight against their manhood. But they are not crazy, and they are not sociopaths. “There is simply no evidence, save the rape itself,” Katharine Baker writes in the Harvard Law Review, “suggesting that all or even most rapists are objectively depraved.” Chillingly, she goes on to say that given the social norms that encourage it, there is evidence that rape is “culturally dictated, not culturally deviant.”
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of media and entertainment culture in the transmission of what we might term “rapist values.” If large numbers of men who rape women are “normal” guys who perceive their behavior to be acceptable, it makes sense to examine the source of the social norms that feed those perceptions. Obviously social norms are rooted in a complex web of institutional forces. But one of the central insights of the relatively young discipline of cultural studies is that questions of identity (“Who am I?”) and ideology (“How does the world work and how do I fit into it?”) are intimately connected to the stories that circulate in a culture and give answers to these deeply human concerns. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains that we know ourselves when we see ourselves represented. Identity is in a sense a kind of recognition—we recognize ourselves biographically in the stories we tell about ourselves. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the mass media is the most significant institution of representation, and the most powerful teacher and transmitter of cultural values. Thus, if we are interested in the question not only of how thousands of average guys become rapists, but how millions of men (and women) develop rape-supportive attitudes, it is important to examine the media culture within which young people understand and construct their identities.
In discussions about the normalization of sexual violence, there are two critical aspects of media culture representation. The first is the image of modern Western femininity and how it has been connected with sexuality in contradictory and dangerous ways. Feminist scholars have shown how girls’ and women’s bodies have become a kind of “war zone” on which are played out all kinds of conflicts of identity. Our culture relentlessly assaults girls and women with the idea that femininity and sexuality are intertwined: that their bodies and their sexual behavior are the only things that are truly valued and desired by heterosexual men. Young girls especially can internalize this story and become obsess
ed with their appearance and (hetero)sexuality. Millions of them over the past few generations have responded to pressures to become sexual at younger and younger ages. Because they are socially validated largely through boys’ responses to their bodies, girls may find it logical to link “feminine” identity with men’s use of their bodies. A 2004 article in the New York Times Magazine reported on a new phenomenon in the sexual culture of American teenagers called “friends with benefits.” It refers to teenagers “hooking up” and having sex with no expectation of a romantic relationship. However, this is hardly an indication of a growing spirit of sexual freedom for both girls and boys. Many of these “hook ups” feature girls performing oral sex on boys, with no hint that the boys would reciprocate. One school counselor I spoke with in an affluent suburb of New York City told me that several girls were dumbfounded when she asked them if the boys performed oral sex on the girls. The possibility had not even occurred to them. And the double standard is still firmly in place, with girls running the risk of being derided as “sluts” if they misstep or hook-up with the wrong boy, while boys enjoy the status they derive from being a “player.” It is a disturbingly short step from this sort of non-egalitarian sexual relationship to outright sexual coercion and rape. As one young woman wrote to a colleague of mine: