The casual way in which we deal with rape may begin and end with television and movies where we are inundated with images of sexual and domestic violence. Can you think of a dramatic television series that has not incorporated some kind of rape story line? There was a time when these story lines had a certain educational element to them, à la “A Very Special Episode.” I remember, for example, the episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Kelly Taylor, surrounded tearfully by her closest friends, discussed being date-raped at a slumber party. For many young women, that episode created a space where they could have a conversation about rape as something that did not happen only with strangers. Later in the series, when the show was on its last legs, Kelly would be raped again, this time by a stranger. We watched the familiar trajectory of violation, trauma, disillusion, and finally vindication, seemingly forgetting that we had sort of seen this story before.
Half the movies aired on Lifetime or Lifetime Movie Network feature some kind of violence against women. The violence is graphic and gratuitous while still being strangely antiseptic: the actual act is more implied than shown. We consume these representations of violence eagerly. There is comfort, I suppose, in consuming violence in 90-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bangs.
While rape as entertainment fodder may have included an element of the didactic at one time, such is no longer the case. Rape, these days, is good for ratings. Private Practice, a medical drama on ABC, recently aired a story arc where Dr. Charlotte King, iron-willed, independent, and sexually adventurous, was brutally raped. This happened, of course, just as February sweeps were beginning. The depiction of the assault was as graphic as you might expect from prime-time network television. For several episodes we saw the attack and its aftermath, how the once vibrant Charlotte became a shell of herself, how she became sexually frigid, how her body bore witness to the physical damage of rape. Another character on the show, Dr. Violet Turner, bravely confessed that she too had been raped. The show was widely applauded for its sensitive treatment of a difficult subject.
The soap opera General Hospital is currently airing a rape story line whose story arc peaked, yes, during sweeps. Like most soap operas, General Hospital incorporates a rape story line every five years or so when they need an uptick in viewers. Before the current rape, Emily Quartermaine was raped, and before Emily, Elizabeth Webber was raped, and long before Elizabeth Webber, Laura of Luke and Laura was raped by Luke but that rape was okay because Laura ended up marrying Luke so her rape doesn’t really count. Every woman, General Hospital wants us to believe, loves her rapist. The current rape story line has a twist. This time the victim is a man, Michael Corinthos, Jr., son of Port Charles mob boss Sonny Corinthos, himself no stranger to violence against women. While it is commendable to see the show’s producers trying to address the issue of male rape and prison rape, the subject matter is still handled carelessly, is still a source of titillation, and is still packaged neatly between commercials for cleaning products and baby diapers.
Of course, if we are going to talk about rape and how we are inundated by representations of rape and how, perhaps, we’ve become numb to rape, we have to discuss Law & Order: SVU, which deals, primarily, in sexual assault—all manner of sexual assault, against women, children, and once in a great while, men. Each week the violation is more elaborate, more lurid, more unspeakable. When the show first aired, Rosie O’Donnell objected quite vocally when one of the stars appeared on her show. O’Donnell said she didn’t understand why such a show was needed. People dismissed her objections and the incident was quickly forgotten. The series is in its 12th season and shows no signs of ending anytime soon. When O’Donnell objected to SVU’s premise, when she dared to suggest that perhaps a show dealing so explicitly with sexual assault was unnecessary, was too much, people treated her as if she was the crazy one, the prude censor. I watch SVU religiously, have actually seen every single episode. I am not sure what that says about me.
It is rather ironic that only a couple weeks ago the Times ran an editorial about the War on Women. This topic is, obviously, one that matters to me. I recently wrote an essay about how, as a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that to write is a political act—whether I intend it to be or not, because we live in a culture where McKinley’s article is permissible and publishable. I am troubled by how we have allowed intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape but we don’t talk about rape, not carefully.
We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the “newspaper of record” can write an article that comes off as sympathetic to 18 rapists while encouraging victim blaming. Have we forgotten what an 11-year-old is? An 11-year-old is very, very young, and that amplifies the atrocity, at least for me. I also think that people perhaps do not understand the trauma of gang rape. While there’s no benefit to creating a hierarchy of rape where one kind of rape is worse than another, because all rape is despicable, there is something particularly insidious about gang rape, about a pack of men feeding on each other’s frenzy, individually and collectively acting on a belief that it is their right to violate a woman’s body in such an unspeakable manner.
Gang rape is a difficult experience to survive physically and emotionally. There is the exposure to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, vaginal and anal tearing, fistulas and vaginal scar tissue. The reproductive system is often irreparably damaged. Victims of gang rape, in particular, have a higher chance of miscarrying a pregnancy. Psychologically, there are any number of effects including PTSD, anxiety, fear, coping with the social stigma, coping with shame, and on and on. The actual rape ends but the aftermath can reach very far and be even more devastating than the rape itself. We rarely discuss these things, though. Instead, we are careless. We allow ourselves to believe that rape can be washed away as neatly as it is on TV and in the movies, where the trajectory of victimhood is neatly defined.
What I know about gang rape is that the experience is wholly consuming and a never-ending nightmare. There is little point in pretending otherwise. Perhaps James McKinley, Jr. is, like so many people today, anesthetized or somehow willfully distanced from such brutal realities. Perhaps despite this inundation of rape imagery, our immersion in a rape culture, not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. Perhaps the right stories are not being told or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape. Perhaps we are writing too many stories about rape.
I approach this topic somewhat selfishly. I write about sexual violence a great deal in my fiction. I don’t believe the why of this writerly obsession matters, but still, people often want to know what drives me to write these dark stories over and over. The why seems plainly obvious. I am trying to rewrite my own, difficult history as much as I try to write my way toward understanding how these things can happen, why they happen, why nothing changes. Perhaps it is simply that writing is cheaper than therapy or drugs. When I read articles such as McKinley’s, I start to wonder about my responsibility as a writer. I’m just finishing my novel, the story of a brutal kidnapping in Haiti, part of which involves a gang rape. Having to write that kind of story requires going to a dark place. At times, I have made myself nauseous with what I’m writing and what I am capable of writing and imagining, my ability to go there.
As I write stories about sexual violence, I wonder if I am being gratuitous. I want to get it right. How do you get this sort of thing right? How do you write violence authentically without making it exploitative? There are times when I worry I am contributing to the kind of cultural numbness that would allow an article like the one in the Times to be written and published, that allows rape to be such rich fodder for popular culture and entertainment. No matter how hard we try, we cannot separate
violence in fiction from violence in the world. As Laura Tanner notes in her book Intimate Violence, “The act of reading a representation of violence is defined by the reader’s suspension between the semiotic and the real, between a representation and the material dynamics of violence which it evokes, reflects, or transforms.” She continues, “The distance and detachment of a reader who must leave his or her body behind in order to enter imaginatively into the scene of violence make it possible for representations of violence to obscure the material dynamics of bodily violation, erasing not only the victim’s body but his or her pain.” The way we currently represent rape, in books, in newspapers, on television, on the silver screen, often allows us to ignore the material realities of rape, the impact of rape, the meaning of rape.
While I have these concerns, I also feel committed to telling the truth, to saying these violences happen even if bearing such witness contributes to a spectacle of sexual violence. When we’re talking about race or religion or politics, it is often said we need to speak carefully. With these difficult topics we need to be vigilant not only in what we say but how we express ourselves. That same care, I would suggest, has to be extended to how we write about violence, and sexual violence in particular.
The Times article uses the phrase “sexual assault,” and includes the phrase “the girl had been forced to have sex with several men.” The word rape is only used twice and not within the context of the victim’s experience. This is not the careful use of language. In this instance, and far more often than makes sense, language is used to buffer our sensibilities from the brutality of rape, from the extraordinary nature of such a crime.
Feminist scholars have long called for a rereading of rape. Higgins and Silver note that “the act of rereading rape involves more than listening to silences; it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence—the physical, sexual violation.” I would suggest we need to find new ways, whether in fiction or creative nonfiction or journalism, not only to reread rape but to rewrite rape as well—ways of rewriting that restore the actual violence to these crimes, that make it impossible for men to be excused for committing these atrocities, that make it impossible for articles like McKinley’s to be written, to be published, to be considered acceptable.
An 11-year-old girl was raped by 18 men. The suspects ranged in age from middle-schoolers to a 27-year-old. There are pictures and videos. Her life will never be the same. The New York Times, however, would like you to worry about those boys, who will have to live with this for the rest of their lives. This is not simply the careless language of violence. It is the criminal language of violence.
Men Who “Buy Sex” Commit More Crimes: Newsweek, Trafficking, and the Lie of Fabricated Sex Studies
Thomas Roche
An old-school radical antiporn, antiprostitution activist known for criminal antics is in the news again, portraying a heavily biased anti–sex work survey1 as science, when in fact it’s the same message Melissa Farley has been screaming her entire career. Sadly, press outlets like Newsweek,2 Reuters,3 Jezebel,4 and the Sydney Morning Herald5 are taking the bait, ignoring the fact that their information comes from a dubious report by a biased organization putting out a press release on PR Newswire6—a for-pay distribution service that features relatively little other than self-promoting garbage.
News outlets are treating the information as if it’s from a scientist, or a social sciences organization, or an objective source, or as if it’s based on anything like a real study. It’s not any of those things.
The “report” is really a series of prejudicial interpretations of a prejudiced in-person survey made by an openly biased researcher who has spent her entire career pushing this same point: summarizing “research” funded by an organization that has no earthly purpose other than to eliminate prostitution by any means possible.
Melissa Farley, the first author on the “report,” which was presented on July 15, 2011, at a meeting of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, is probably most famous for claiming that call girls are no less damaged than street prostitutes by their experiences of sex work. Farley was arrested 13 times in the 80s for defacing bookstore copies of Penthouse; her account of that crusade appeared in an article titled “Fighting Femicide in the United States: The Rampage Against Penthouse.”
Farley’s latest bit of activism is a “report” of a survey—incorrectly called a “study”—that recruited 202 men to answer questions in person. About half of the men “buy sex” and the rest do not. In Farley’s parlance, “buying sex” means frequenting prostitutes. The use of the term buying is insulting. It’s a transparent attempt by Farley to conflate human trafficking with prostitution, and she’s been doing it her whole career.
But that equation is garbage; it’s meant to differentiate between nonsex services and sex, as a way of taking the agency out of women’s hands and placing it squarely in the hands of—whom? Farley? No, damn it—men. Not to get too 70s about it, but wasn’t that why I became a sensitive New Age guy to begin with? So the women I knew could stop having their power taken away?
For what I hope will be the last time but I know will not, let’s get it straight: If you can “buy” sex from a sex worker, then you can “buy” therapy from a clinical psychologist and “buy” accounting from an accountant.
Sex is not a thing, it is a behavior—or, rather, a series of behaviors, with an endless gray area between where one behavior ends and another begins. If you agree with me on only one point in this discussion, let it be that sex is not a thing.
Women are not notches that guys carve in their bedposts (or on the dashboards of their Chevelles). One does not “acquire” sex from a woman, and the suggestion that one does is equivalent to saying that a woman’s virtue is a finite quantity that can be taken away.
Farley knows this, but she also knows that you get better sound bites by claiming, explicitly, that slavery and prostitution are not just related, they are literally the same. Seriously. She claims that there is no difference, in the same way she has claimed that there is no difference between the experience of the streetwalker and the experience of the call girl or brothel worker. This concept is frankly insulting to anyone who’s ever been friends with a woman who walked the street.
But Farley feels a need to equate the trafficked juvenile in Thailand with the $500-an-hour call girl. In so doing, she’s engaging in the inexplicable cognitive disconnect that alienates so many otherwise right-thinking women in my generation from Feminism with a capital F; she’s convinced herself that by speaking of concrete social issues as if they were cultural abstractions, she can achieve an impossible social agenda, as Andrea Dworkin hoped to do by saying that “penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent.”7
Farley’s conclusions in the new “survey” should therefore surprise no one. According to her highly biased claims, men who “buy sex” have a greater predisposition to rape, less respect for women, and are more likely to have committed crimes than men who do not buy sex.
A survey, incidentally, is not the same as a study. A study is a formalized procedure for obtaining concrete and measurable data, with steps taken to ensure that compared data sets are equivalent. In my opinion, social sciences surveys are worth nothing at all. They’re like marketing focus groups. They show a fantastic tendency to display interviewer bias.
Good surveys are transparent about what questions are asked and how they are asked. They don’t come with foregone conclusions established by the bias of the lead author. They are not funded by organizations with a stated goal of eliminating the behavior they are asking questions about. And even good surveys are still just surveys. In the case of qualitative data—for instance, how well or sick chemotherapy patients are feeling—steps are taken to eliminate interviewer bias. There’s no indication that such steps have been taken in Farley’s survey; in fact, given Farley’s track record, it seems clear that they have not.
But still, plenty of news agenc
ies find some “interesting results” here—as if there were any results at all, other than Melissa Farley repeating the same histrionic, man-hating screed that she’s been howling since the 80s.
Nah, don’t worry about the fact that the results come from one of the most virulent anti–sex work, antiporn activists, one who displays a serious lack of transparency in her survey procedures. Why should you? Newsweek sure didn’t. Newsweek’s piece was originally titled “The Growing Demand for Prostitution,” but apparently somebody objected so they changed the title to “The John Next Door.” Smart move, since their smokescreen of terror is based on a report that does not address whether there is in fact a rising incidence of prostitution.
The following quote is from the Newsweek article “The John Next Door”:The men who buy sex are your neighbors and colleagues. A new study reveals how the burgeoning demand for porn and prostitutes is warping personal relationships and endangering women and girls.
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