Naturally, it’s not possible to prove that these increased rates of violence in particular communities are a direct result of society’s positioning women of color as impure. But a society that portrays them as such absolutely contributes to a culture of violence against them—women who transgress purity norms are punished, and women of color transgress simply by not being white.
Again, all women who suffer under the purity myth are at risk—and the victim-blaming trend is extending far beyond only physical assaults. Women who are harassed—at work, on the street, or even online—are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted. Just by virtue of being out in public, we’re overstepping certain boundaries. (Consider how often a harassed woman is faulted for being on the wrong street at the wrong time of night, or told that she was too flirtatious in the office.)
But it makes sense; this is what the purity myth is all about. Pure women aren’t out at bars or on the street; they’re not in public life—they’re home, where women should be.
While street and work harassment have been talked about for as long as feminists have fought back against them, disdain for women in public spaces has taken a new turn in today’s tech-savvy world. The Internet is the new public space, and a similar trend is emerging there: Women who dare to transgress are being punished.
When women are harassed online—as they often arecs—the excuse is frequently of the “if you can’t take the heat . . . ” variety. When death and rape threats lodged against technology blogger Kathy Sierra came to light, for example, Daily Kos founder, progressive blogger Markos Moulitsas, said, “If they can’t handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work.”26
But women shouldn’t have to, because the Internet is the new town square—it’s a public place in the same way a street or a restaurant is, and harassment and violent threats there are just as damaging, maybe even more so. As I once wrote in an article about online misogyny for the Guardian, if someone calls you a slut on the street, it stings, but you can move on; if someone calls you a slut online, there’s a public record of it for as long as the site exists.
When I was doing research for that article, feminist blogger Jill Filipovic told me, “There’s a tendency to put the blame on the victims of stalking, harassment, or even sexual violence when the victim is a woman—and especially when she’s a woman who has made herself public. . . . Public space has traditionally been reserved for men, and women are supposed to be quiet.”
Indeed, something as simple as posting a photo online is enough to spark harassment and blame. For young women—many of whom have a public web profile, be it through a blog, MySpace, Facebook, or a Flickr page—this is a daily reality.
When Filipovic complained about harassment she endured from members of the law school forumct AutoAdmit, the site responded, “For a woman who has made 4,000 pictures of herself publicly available on Flickr, and who is a self-proclaimed feminist author of a widely disseminated blog, she has gotten pretty shy about overexposure.”27
The mere act of having a presence—simply existing!—was enough for people to throw blame Filipovic’s way. And with more than four in ten young Americans utilizing social-networking sites, and 86 percent using the Internet, Filipovic is hardly in the minority.28
A WORLD WITHOUT RAPE?
This intersection of women, violence, and purity has resulted in more than victim blaming and the idolization of predators like GGW—the purity myth is significantly changing the cultural and political landscape as it relates to violence and women. Women have always been blamed for sexual violence done to them; that’s nothing new. But in an allegedly postfeminist world, where rape and domestic violence are supposed to be universally reviled, arguments that overtly (or stealthily) blame women, or dismiss violence against them, have that much more power. Because who in this day and age would say that rape is a good thing? Or that a woman just got what was coming to her? No one; instead, today’s rape apologism comes wrapped in the rhetoric of equality—that’s what makes it different, and so dangerous.
In a 2008 Los Angeles Times article, for example, reporter Heather Mac Donald wrote that there simply is no rape problem on college campuses. In response to a Harvard woman’s story about being raped while she was drunk, Mac Donald wrote that to hold her “without responsibility requires stripping women of volition and moral agency.”
Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it’s highly unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.29
This insidious argument about “responsibility” is having an acute effect on the way all women talk about rape. The very notion of what rape is is being debated—and not in a progressive or useful way.
Take Cosmopolitan magazine, which ran an article about a “new kind of date rape,” written by none other than chastity pusher Laura Sessions Stepp (discussed in Chapter 2). What Sessions Stepp dubbed “gray rape” in her article is really just plain old terrible rape, laced with the same confusion and guilt that often accompanies an assault by someone the victim knows. But instead of taking it seriously and treating the issue with the gravitas it deserves, Sessions Stepp decided to water it down by naming it this sorta-rape:It refers to sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what . . . . And it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 5 college women will be raped at some point during a five-year college career; that about 9 out of 10 times, the victim will know her assailant; and that half of all victims will not call what happened rape.30
Of course, many women don’t call their assaults rape, for myriad reasons—perhaps because of the shame and stigma attached to sexual assault, or maybe they shy away from the word because they don’t want to admit something so awful happened to them. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the reality of what happened—it doesn’t change the fact that someone raped them.
As dangerous as Sessions Stepp’s claim that there is such a thing as “gray rape” is her insinuation that some women are too empowered to be victims. In the above-mentioned Cosmo article, she writes, “Even today, she is reluctant to call it rape because she thinks of herself as a strong and sexually independent woman, not a victim.”31
Claims like these, and playing with language without regard for women’s experiences, have real-life consequences. A young woman at Lewis & Clark College who was raped by a fellow student, for example, told a local reporter that she “calls what happened to her something akin to ‘gray rape,’ a term she learned from an article in Cosmopolitan.”32
She relayed how she was “hooking up” with her eventual attacker when he forced her to perform oral sex on him.
“I’m sitting up against the wall on his mattress, and he’s standing over me,” she said. “It started happening, and then he, like, twisted his fingers around my hair and started pulling it and being just kind of violent. I started choking because he was just, like, pushing my head. I started gagging and choking, and I couldn’t really breathe . . . . And he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, choke on it.’”33
There is nothing gray about this. There is nothing gray about being violent. There is nothing gray about “choke on it.”
But because this young woman read this one article—which was widely reported on by other large media outlets eager to glom on to a trend that says rape isn’t really rape—her ability to name what happened to her was diminished. That’s no small thing.
The language we use to talk about violence is quite literally being taken away from us. In 2004, a Nebraska judge barred the word “rape” from the trial of a man accused of . . . well, rape. The judge ruled that the language would be too prejudicial. T
he victim instead would have to use words like “intercourse” and “sex” to describe her attack.cu34 When this story first broke, Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick rightly wondered, “Is the word ‘rape’ truly more inflammatory to a jury than the word ‘robbery’?”
The biggest indication of this regressive turn is the fact that the same people who are working so hard to blame women for their assaults, or to dismiss the fact that violence against women exists altogether, are also doing their best to fight against feminism.
Take Naomi Schaefer Riley, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote that Imette St. Guillen “should have known better.” She not only blamed young women for their rapes, she also blamed feminism. In fact, her article’s subhead was “How feminism wages war on common sense.” Riley argued that feminism makes women think that they are equal to men (the horror) in all things, including drinking. She cited Barrett Seaman, author of Binge, who said that the college women he spoke to “saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar.”
“Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous,” Riley wrote. “But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion—that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.”35
Riley isn’t the only one scapegoating feminists, of course. Mac Donald and Roiphe took similar swipes, and it’s quickly become a calling card in rape coverage. It’s also at the heart of the larger conservative agenda. Conservative women’s organizations like the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), for example, are quick to use the language of empowerment to enforce purity and dismiss rape, and thereby point the finger at feminism as “exaggerating” rape statistics or painting women as victims.
I’ve thought often about why—why?!—anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I’ve come up with—and I think it makes sense—is fear of becoming that “impure” woman. Women who rail against feminism, like those at IWF, work hard to present themselves as “pure,” whether it’s through promoting abstinence-only education and decrying hookup culture or kowtowing to conservative men’s agenda for women. It’s a survival technique: If they can paint other women as “impure,” then they’re safe from criticism. It’s a lot easier to attack other women, after all, than it is to attack a sexist society. Unfortunately, antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women’s behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solve any larger problems.
I truly believe that the drift toward blaming feminism is the most telling shift in this national dialogue. Blaming feminism, blaming women’s equality, for rape reveals the crux of the issue. Because it’s not concern that’s driving media coverage of women’s drinking too much—it’s sexism. If it weren’t, we’d be seeing dozens of news stories about the epidemic of young men binge drinking, blacking out, getting into fights, and raping women. But in our supposedly gender-equal world, pointing out these inconsistencies and double standards means ruining the utopian image Americans are so attached to. You’re just whining—things are fine! Look how far women have come!
This is a lot to take in, I know: the idea that most of us—simply by living our lives, by being who we are—are at risk of being held accountable for violence against us. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s one we have to face head-on. The continual punishment and blame being heaped on women are unacceptable, and we can’t sit silent as these patterns escalate.
CHAPTER 8
beyond manliness
“The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.”
GERMAINE GREER
IN A COMMERCIAL FOR Milwaukee’s Best beer, a group of friends is shown digging a hole in a nondescript back yard;cv when a bee begins to buzz around them, one of the men starts waving his hands in fear and squeals in a high-pitched voice. As his friends look on in horror at this oh-so-unmanly display, a giant can of Milwaukee’s Best beer falls from the sky and crushes the fearful man. A deep-voiced narrator says, “Men should act like men.”
Other commercials in the beer company’s “manly” campaign show men being crushed by cans for crying at the movies, talking baby talk to a girlfriend, and using a napkin to soak up grease from a slice of pizza. Milwaukee’s Best’s website features a similar “Act Like a Man” challenge: Once again, users are crushed by giant beer cans if they dance (the screen mockingly says, “That’s some fancy footwork there, miss”) or cry out in pain while getting a tattoo.
A Snickers commercial takes a slightly different approach (emphasis on “slightly”). An “effeminate” man who is speed walking—with a close-up on his shaking derriere—is quickly taught a lesson when ’80s TV action star Mr. T comes busting out from behind a row of houses in a pickup truck, shooting Snickers bars out of a machine gun at him. All the time he’s screaming, “You’re a disgrace to the man race.” The tagline? “Snickers: Get some nuts.”
The message is clear: In order to be a man, one must avoid being feminine at all costs. In fact, the best way to be a man is to simply not be a woman. This oppositional definition of masculinity isn’t limited to commercials, of course—it’s everywhere. It’s present in American politics: Male candidates pose in hunting pictures and denigrate their opponents as “girlie men.” It’s in pop culture: Television, movies, music, and, yes, commercials feature “real” men as those who shun femininity, and humiliating males is as simple as putting them in a dress or calling them Bambi. And, perhaps most of all, it’s embedded in the myth of sexual purity, which is based on traditional gender roles in which men are “men,” women are chaste, and a gender-based hierarchy is essential.
The fear of being feminine—something Stephen J. Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, calls “femiphobia”—is fundamental to America’s current understanding of masculinity.
For many men, masculinity is a hard-won, yet precarious and brittle psychological achievement that must be constantly proven and defended. While the external factors may appear to be that which is most threatening . . . the actual threat that many men experience is an unconscious, internal one: the sense that they are not “real” men.1
Ducat, who is also a psychotherapist, credits femiphobia and male anxiety about being appropriately “manly” to both our masculinized political climate and to some men’s inability to sustain intimate relationships, and their preoccupation with dominance therein.
“The problem is the psychological cost of developing a male identity in a culture that disparages the feminine and insists that the boundaries between masculine and feminine remain unambiguous and impermeable,” Ducat writes.2
It’s this psychological fear that makes so many men eager to bash the feminine—whether that means making fun of feminine gay men, working hard to prove their manliness, or simply bashing women themselves.
Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, noted that this disdain for the feminine—which, she says, is “regularly assigned negative connotations and meanings in our society”—is far-reaching and deeply embedded in Americans’ understanding of gender.
An example of this is the way that being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions is regularly derided in our society. While this trait has virtually nothing to do with one’s ability to reason or thinking logically, in the public mind, being “emotional” has become synonymous with being “irrational.” Another example is that certain pursuits and interests that are considered feminine, such as gossiping or decorating, are often characterized as “frivolous,” while masculine preoccupations—even those that serve solely recreational functions, such as sports—generally escape such trivialization.3
In fact, women and femininit
y are so derided in American culture that it’s not uncommon to see men punished via feminization. A prison in South Carolina, for example, disciplines sexually active inmates by dressing them in pink. Another Arizona prison mandates that all inmates wear pink underwear.4 This shaming technique, however, isn’t limited to convicts: A preschool in central Florida came under fire in 2004 when parents discovered that teachers were reprimanding unruly boys by forcing them to wear dresses, and in 2001, a teen sued his former school for forcing him to cross-dress (complete with wig and bra).5 Itseems that as far as punishment goes, nothing is worse than being a woman.cw
And it’s really women who end up being penalized because of these negative practices. This fear of women, this fear of being like women—even just a little bit—is at the heart of most misogyny in the United States. By fostering a culture that sees femininity and women as not just less than men, but also less than human, femiphobia is at the heart of enabling social sexism like the sexual double standard, political sexism that relies on paternalism in policy, and even violence against women.
MEN HURTING, HURTING MEN
In 2008, University of Connecticut student Melissa Bruen was sexually assaulted on campus while a group of male onlookers cheered. Even more troubling is that the assault was retribution for her fighting back against a man who had attacked her prior to her assault.
Bruen, who wrote about her ordeal in a campus newspaper, was walking home along a campus trailcx when a strange man picked her up by her shoulders, pinned her up against a nearby pole, and started “dry humping” her. At first Bruen thought perhaps he was playing a joke on her—until she heard him moaning.
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