Any student who feels she has been sexually victimized should be able to turn to campus counselors who are sensitive listeners and not crusaders. Students who have had a distressing sexual experience need supportive people to help them figure out their next steps. Maybe a potential criminal violation took place and the student needs an escort to the hospital, so that whatever her ultimate decision, crucial evidence is collected. Maybe it was simply a distressing encounter and counseling is the best path. The adults who help these young people should be able to recognize the difference between the two and not default to calling for the accused’s head.
The prohibition about discussing the connection between alcohol and sexual assault should be lifted. We don’t live in a perfect world, and while school administrators should do their best to provide safe environments, it is up to each individual to make wise decisions. Getting incapacitated has no upside for young men or women. Administrators ignore the role of alcohol in sexual assault at their peril, and at the peril of their students, men and women.
We also need to change the culture of discourse around sexual assault on campuses. To stand up for the rights of the accused is not to attack victims or women. Our colleges, like the rest of our society, must be places where you are innocent until proven guilty. The day after graduation, young men and women will be thrown into a world where there is no Gender-Based Misconduct Office. They will have to live by the rules of society at large. Higher education should ready our students for this reality, not shield them from it.
The New Republic
FINALIST—COLUMNS AND COMMENTARY
When they nominated Rebecca Traister’s work for The New Republic for the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, the Ellie judges used phrases like “thoughtful and wide ranging”; “fresh, often unexpected analysis”; and “desperately needed feminist perspective” to describe it. The topics here range from young women’s often complicated, sometimes dangerous friendships to the ugly, tangled history of sex and race in America. (Magazine journalism also takes it on the chin a couple of times.) Traister joined The New Republic in 2014 after working at Salon and the New York Observer. Founded in 1914 by leaders of the Progressive movement, The New Republic has been owned since 2012 by Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook.
Rebecca Traister
When Michael Dunn Compared Himself to a Rape Victim, He Was Following an Old, Racist Script and I Don’t Care If You Like It and The Slenderman Stabbing Shows Girls Will Be Girls, Too
When Michael Dunn Compared Himself to a Rape Victim, He Was Following an Old, Racist Script
In 2012, when Michael Dunn shot and killed a black seventeen-year-old who he thought was playing music too loud, the news was quickly situated in several ugly American storylines: about senseless gun culture, about racially motivated violence, about the impact of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.
On February 15, when a jury failed to convict Dunn of murdering Jordan Davis in a convenience store parking lot, Dunn became further entwined in an even older and possibly still more shameful American tale: the one in which white men are not forced to pay for the taking of black life.
And last Tuesday—when it was revealed that Dunn, a man who emptied ten rounds into a car full of unarmed teenagers, had compared his own situation to that of an imagined female rape victim—he became emblematic of a pathology that is even more particularly American, if less immediately discernible to modern news consumers: the summoning of the specter of black-on-white sexual assault as a justification for white-on-black violence.
“It’s not quite the same, but it made me think of the old TV shows and movies, how the police used to think when a chick got raped, ‘Oh, it’s her fault because of the way she dressed,’” Dunn laughingly told his girlfriend in a jailhouse phone call released last week. He would not play the rape victim, Dunn continued. And so he fought back.
In making this analogy, Dunn shed contemporary light on America’s perpetually warped racial psyche and tapped into some of its most chilling history.
It’s a history that stretches back deep into Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, when the increased civic and political power of formerly enslaved men, who could now vote and hold office, created a threat to exclusive white power. That increased public power got translated, in the white imagination, to a sexual threat.
Crystal Feimster, the Yale historian and author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, explained it this way by phone: “There’s a long narrative in which white men who feel threatened by black men, in terms of economic power, political power, or even feeling that they might be physically assaulted—whether that feeling is real or imagined—link that black male power to sexuality because black men have always been demonized as sexually bestialized figures.”
In the years following the Civil War, rumors of black sexual advances on white women spurred white mobs to destroy towns where African Americans had built up any sort of power. In 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a town in which African Americans were thriving in business and government, whispers about sexual assaults on white women were used to incite a riot, in which murderous white-supremacist insurgents burned down the black newspaper building and overthrew the legitimately elected multiracial city government, in this country’s only coup d’etat.
The protection of white bodies from black sexual advance often served as the excuse for lynchings, which were so common that, according to a 1933 volume cited the by historian Isabel Wilkerson, “someone was hanged or burned alive across the South every four days from 1889–1929.”
That rape was being used as a metaphor for other kinds of incursions on white dominance was not lost on antilynching activists, including Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, who would write (not quite accurately) that “in slaveholding times no one heard of any such crime [rape of a white woman] by a Negro,” and that “it is only since the Negro has become a citizen and a voter that this charge has been made.”
It was a charge that never stopped being made, with horrific repercussions. In 1923, Wilkerson has recalled, a white mob burned a black town in Florida after a white woman claimed to have been attacked by a black man; “anything that was black or looked black was killed,” one survivor said. In 1934, a twentythree-year-old black field hand accused of the rape and murder of a white woman was castrated, tortured, and hung from an oak tree. No one was ever charged in the man’s murder. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was beaten and killed in Mississippi after allegedly making a pass at a white woman; his killers were never convicted.
This is the history Michael Dunn summoned in drawing an apparently light-hearted comparison between his own reaction to the black boys he shot and the experience of a rape victim.
Dunn certainly isn’t the only contemporary white man to continue to lean on this rhetoric. We’ve been knee-deep in it ever since our first African American president took office in 2009. That’s the year Rush Limbaugh said “We are being told that we have to … bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.” In 2010, the actor Jon Voight went on Mike Huckabee’s FOX News show and read an anti-Obama letter in which he argued that with his “socialistic, Marxist teaching,” President Obama “rapes this nation.” Last year, Tea Party Nation president Judson Philips promoted a piece about the Affordable Care Act that included an extended rape metaphor and the argument that “the Obama Regime” has a simple message, “Lie back and quit fighting and eventually you will enjoy the experience.” Around the same time, a conservative group funded by the Koch brothers aired an anti-Obamacare ad depicting a masked Uncle Sam emerging from between the stirruped legs of a woman getting a pelvic exam. So popular is the image of Barack Obama as rapist that it’s possible to buy a variety of bumper stickers bearing slogans like, “Bend Over, Here Comes YOUR President.”
What’s revealed by these kinds of constructions is the degree to whic
h white America sees the sharing of space or power with nonsubservient African Americans—presidential, economic, political, social, even the sharing of a convenience-store parking lot—as a physical assault on a body, a national body, still presumed to be white.
Never mind the irony, that the history of forced physical incursion operates largely in reverse of the white-rape-victim narrative, that in fact, it was whites who forcibly moved black bodies to this country, who bought and sold and raped enslaved African Americans. Never mind that it was white mobs who lynched men and burnt towns and tortured and assaulted black women throughout the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or that it was white-run government agencies and economic institutions that physically cut off African Americans from civic and economic participation later in the twentieth century by redlining and building highways through black neighborhoods.
That history of white violence against blacks gets reversed—or at least imaginatively explained away—as soon as a man like Dunn redraws the picture, suggesting that it was he who was the victim, the white body in danger of sexual violation. Never mind that Dunn himself faced no physical violation, sexual or otherwise.
Because tangled in Dunn’s allusion is another, gendered inconsistency: the diminishment of the experience of rape as it experienced by actual people. It’s telling that the rape victim summoned by Dunn is fictional, a television character, that she’s not a woman, but a “chick,” and that even as he puts himself, imaginatively, in her position, he still leaves room to blame her for the crime committed against her. She is a “chick [who] got raped.” In his formulation, she is the actor in the situation, the one who “got” herself violated.
The minimizing of real assault against women in service of a narrative that explains white male violence also fits a larger historical pattern. While much of the Reconstruction and Progressive-era mob violence was committed in the name of protecting white women, the men committing the crimes had little respect for those women’s bodies. They used them as an excuse to sack black towns and kill and torture black men and women, but as Feimster points out, nineteenth-century law didn’t even treat rape as a “crime against a woman, but against her husband, her brother, the men whose property had been violated.”
The historian Martha Hodes has shown how often, the very women used as the excuse for retribution against blacks were themselves assaulted by the same mobs, especially if they were poor. She cites a Reconstruction-era case in Georgia in which a black man was castrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan for living with a white woman; Klansmen then “took the woman, laid her down on the ground, then cut a slit on each side of her orifice, put a large padlock in it, locked it up, and threw away the key.” Hodes also cites a more recent example of a similar phenomenon: in 1989, when sixteen-year-old African American Yusuf Hawkins was killed in New York City by a mob of white men who believed him to be dating a white woman, the young woman in question was denigrated by some neighbors with more ferocity than was directed at Hawkins’ killers.
This inconsistency—the use of and disregard for women in these formulations—finds its contemporary equivalent with the right-wingers who fight against Obamacare with an image of a predatory Uncle Sam and who fret over being anally violated by a black president and who are also enthusiastic about mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds. They’re the same guys who can’t seem to be convinced that the literal rape—of actual human beings, many of whom are women—is a serious crime, unless it can be proven to be “honest” “real, genuine” or “legitimate.”
Michael Dunn was not honestly, really, genuinely, legitimately raped by anyone. He was not assaulted by anyone or even threatened by anyone. He is the one who killed another human being.
And yet this country has given him a script. Not just the one he remembers from old television shows and movies, but one that has played out in real life again and again over centuries. It’s a script that tells him that his crimes are justified, will be forgiven and, yes, forgotten, if he can only successfully call forth the image of the “chick [who] got raped.”
I Don’t Care If You Like It
Last week, I got into a fight on Twitter with New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whose work I respect, and it wasn’t about anything that either of us had written; rather, we were tussling over the merits of a piece written by Tom Junod, for Esquire, about how today’s forty-two-year-old women are hotter than ever before.
There’s no need to linger over our differences: I thought the article was a piece of sexist tripe, celebrating a handful of Pilatestoned, famous, white-plus–Maya Rudolph women as having improved on the apparently dismal aesthetics of previous generations; my primary objections to the piece have been ably laid out by other critics. Chait tweeted that he viewed the piece as a “mostly laudable” sign of progress: a critique not of earlier iterations of forty-two-year-old womanhood, but rather of the old sexist beauty standards that did not celebrate those women; he saw it as an acknowledgment of maturing male attitudes toward women’s value.
The truth is, had Chait been correct about it being a thoughtful piece laying into the entrenched short-sightedness and sexist cruelty of male-controlled media, I might have hated it more. Then I would have felt obligated to feel grateful for it, grateful in the same way I’m supposed to feel grateful toward, say, Marvel Comics for making Thor a woman or toward Harry Reid for challenging Mitch McConnell on some typically boorish and inane statement how women have achieved workforce equality. In its actual form, I didn’t have to consider thinking Yay, thanks for some crumbs of enlightened thinking, for some slightly nuanced improvements in the daily, punishing business of publicly evaluating and then reevaluating women’s worth.
Instead, I’ve been thinking about an anecdote in Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Amy Poehler, then new to Saturday Night Live, was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. Just this week, the journalist Megan Carpentier wrote a piece about the evolving public appraisals of Hillary Clinton’s facial expressions that concluded with her suggestion that we get over the idea of 2014 being “the year of the strong female politician” and aim instead for “the year of the strong female politician who doesn’t give a fuck if you think she’s pretty.”
Carpentier doesn’t care if you like it. Neither does the Buzzfeed writer Arianna Rebolini, who wrote this week about the video for John Legend’s song “You and I,” about the diverse beauty of women. Rebolini dutifully yay-thanks-ed the fact that it’s “uplifting to see these women—of all ages, sizes, ethnicities—in the spotlight” before confessing her discomfort with how the song’s lyrics fall into the well-worn pop tradition of celebrating the beauty of women who don’t know they’re beautiful. “These songs, which presume to assure women that they are attractive (and, by extension, worthwhile),” Rebolini writes, “assume that the singer’s relationship to our bodies overrules our relationship with them.”
Arianna Rebolini doesn’t care if you like it. “Don’t tell us we don’t know we’re beautiful,” she concludes. “And certainly don’t tell us that our ignorance to this fact is our best quality. We’re good.”
I suspect that a lot of this irritation over the small stuff right now is directly related to the fact that we’re mired in a moment at which lots and lots of women are not good, for reasons far graver than anything having to do with Esquire, Jimmy Fallon, John Legend, or Hillary Clinton’s Bitchy Resting Face.
Stacia Brown recently wrote a lyrical, sad piece in Gawker that began with a description of some raucous young men outside her sleeping daughter’s window, speculating about whether a woman they knew had HIV. She described those boys as “negotiating [the woman’
s] worth to them.… It isn’t clear to me if they even know that it is moot to denigrate a woman for contracting a disease that she has likely gotten for a man.… [But] in 2014, only women are called ‘loose’ in voices that carry.” These days, Brown went on, “casting lots about a young girl’s sexual history, while walking in the summer night under the neighbors’ open windows, is practically innocuous.… At least they are not bragging about having roofied her.”
But Brown doesn’t emphasize her gratitude that these men were not doing something worse, largely because her essay is actually about Jada, the sixteen-year-old Houston girl who last week told the story of how she was drugged and sexually assaulted at a party; images of her naked, limp body were shared—and mocked—on social media.
Jada’s story recalls too many other recent headlines but happens to have come out at the same time as last weekend’s lengthy New York Times investigation of Hobart & William Smith’s handling of charges that football players sexually assaulted a freshman girl. The Times story was about a lot of things—differences between campus and police investigations, a heightened public awareness about the frequency of coerced or violent sexual encounters on college campuses. But at its heart, it was a story about how women are assessed: by disciplinary committees, police departments, their friends, the public, and by the people they identify as their assailants. It was about how female availability and consent and intoxication are appraised based on how women look, dance, dress, and act, even when those appraisals are at odds with medical evidence, eyewitness accounts, inconsistent stories from accused parties, and certainly with the woman’s own interpretation of her experience or intentions.
This comfort with group assessment of femininity in turn reminds me of the ease with which women’s choices regarding their bodies, futures, health, sex, and family life are up for public evaluation. Women are labeled as good or bad, as moral or immoral, by major religions and “closely held corporations,” whose rights to allow those estimations to dictate their corporate obligations are upheld over the rights of the women themselves by high courts.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 Page 13