The next day at school, he followed me through the halls, wherever I went: “I popped your cherry.” At my locker he whispered in my ear, leaning close: “Slut.” When I told him to stop he called me a bitch. Pushed me up against the locker, hands on my throat until his friend saw. We’re just goofing around. This was my friend, a boy I trusted, but also, I see now, an obsessive, controlling seventeen-year-old with duck feet and spiked hair held up with Elmer’s white glue.
With all the irony that high school can muster, that was also the year I took Dr. Porter’s gender studies class, which included a unit on rape, assault, and violence against women. And so, just a few weeks after my own rape, I sat in class, suddenly panicking as Dr. Porter was trying hard to break through our teenage apathy. “These are serious issues,” he boomed. Though he was an older man with a proclivity for turtlenecks, his lecturing method was vigorously cinematic. Often, when he wanted to make a point, he’d pace the rows between our desks like a drill sergeant, first wrenching off his oversized glasses and then using them to jab and gesture wildly.
He did so that day, on cue, as he shared the new-to-me statistic that one in six North American women past age fourteen have been raped or have had someone try to rape them. “Look to your left! Look to your right!” he shouted, glasses pointing. “Look around you! There is a chance that someone in this room—someone you know—could be that woman.” As over-gelled and hair-sprayed heads turned left and right, my eyes dropped to my open binder. The rapist’s campaign of shame had worked. I hadn’t told anyone what happened, not even my best friend, Jen, sitting beside me.
I wanted to whisper to her, “It’s true. That’s me. It happened to me.” But I couldn’t. I may as well have been playing Chubby Bunny, that camp game we liked as kids, the one where you stuffed marshmallow after marshmallow into your mouth until you couldn’t speak anymore and you lost. I was filled with shame, silent and sweaty, rooted to my seat, bargaining internally with any deity that might listen. Don’t cry, I pleaded with my brain, as if it were a switchboard separate from my body, which, ever since my rape, was exactly how I felt. I could only think that if I cried now people would notice. I wasn’t ready for my rape to stop being a secret.
As Porter droned on, saying who knows what, my mortification ebbed. I could only identify the feeling years later, after surgery for a badly broken leg. It felt like it did when an intravenous line was hooked into the crook of my elbow, the first pump of saline and morphine that turned from a pinpoint drip to a full-body flush as it moved like a current through my veins. It felt like that, but in reverse, drawn out instead of in—like what happens on those survival shows, when musclemen suck poison out of snakebites. Maybe it was like that. Out went shame and in came a slowly brewing rage. One in six? One in six?! Over and over. I was just a kid; I had no idea the number was so high. If you’d asked me before, I would have estimated the statistic closer to one in six hundred, maybe more. For those past weeks, I’d been convinced I was the only person in the entire school whose crush had done what mine had done. Certainly, I told myself, I didn’t know anybody who’d been raped. But one in six? I started tallying all the women I knew on a blank page. I suddenly didn’t feel so alone. It wasn’t a relief.
After the rape my nighttime prayers and dreams turned to death. I wanted to die. It took a long time not to feel that way.
Whenever I watch or read news stories of high school rape now, I think I was lucky. Lucky to have been raped before the internet or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. Lucky that my story didn’t go viral. Lucky I didn’t have to play out the “it’s-your-fault-you-slut” or the “she’s-making-it-up-for-attention” or the “but-he-is-such-a-niceguy” narrative in front of the whole school, city, country. There’s never been a good time for a woman to be raped (what a stupidly obvious sentence), but I didn’t believe fifteen years ago that it could get worse. That my own fears—Was it rape if it was my friend? Was it my fault? Would anyone believe me?—would become mainstream conversation, as if they were plucked from my chest and thrown up on the world’s largest jumbotron. I couldn’t have guessed that a culture that told my sixteen-year-old self I was right to be afraid would drown out decades of anti-rape activism.
So hush, now. Don’t tell.
Society’s attitudes toward rape haven’t changed much in the past, oh, thousand years or so. Imagine a young unmarried woman of modest means in the 1200s. She lives with her parents and siblings on the outskirts of London, population eighteen thousand. Let’s call her Alice. So here’s Alice, minding her own business, strolling down the street, or milking cows, or thinking about that delightfully handsome assistant at the baker’s shop—what have you. Alice is a wearing a fluted lapis-colored hat and a sack-like robe tied around her waist with rope. It isn’t revealing by any standards, if that matters, which it does seem to for every lawmaker from Alice’s time to ours. And then, in the darkest of dark moments, Alice is raped. Let’s not dwell on the details; we know it was horrible.
Back then, Alice didn’t have much recourse. If she were raped in the early 1200s and was a virgin, the rapist had to pay her father some cash and then marry her. If she were ten or younger, Alice would benefit from a small blessing: the concept of statutory rape existed and applied to very small children. Alice would not be helped any time after her eleventh birthday, however; any female over that age, the men in charge of making the law reasoned, should be able to fight off her attacker. Laws changed for the (slightly) better in the mid to late 1200s. A raped virgin like Alice could charge her rapist. She also had to tell everyone in her hometown, plus the surrounding towns, that she was raped and show them “the blood and her clothing stained with blood, and the torn garments” immediately after her rape; otherwise, it didn’t count. If her rapist maintained his innocence, four women would examine Alice; they could, apparently, read her vagina like tea leaves to tell if she’d lied. Pity her if they decided she was: her rapist would be released, but Alice would be taken into custody.
If her rapist were found guilty, he would be dismembered. Alice could choose to save him, if she wished, by marrying him. If Alice was not a virgin, her rapist’s punishment was far less severe. The law decreed rape was not equally detrimental to all women. Rape wasn’t viewed as an assault on women and their bodies so much as an assault on their worth as sexual property. Raping a virgin was akin to ruining a Beverly Hills mansion. Raping a “known prostitute” was equated to breaking a window in an already dumpy cottage. If a woman didn’t struggle adequately or became pregnant, it wasn’t considered rape, an idea that has persisted through the centuries, surfacing again and again in rape trials.
Let’s jump to today. These attitudes have only cemented over time, urged on by the internet, Hollywood, pop culture, sports, and, basically, every modern thing. Yet things aren’t totally bleak, thanks largely to feminists who have fought back. In 1975, Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape became what the author later called an instant “rape classic.” When it debuted, Time magazine decreed (kind of grossly) the feminist journalist “the first rape celebrity who is neither rapist nor rapee” and later named her one of its twelve “Women of the Year.” Against Our Will is widely credited for bringing the feminist fight against both rape and regressive sexual assault legislation into the spotlight, helping to shape the passing of the first marital rape laws in the US. The book’s central thesis also sparked a shift in the perception of rape as a crime of lust to one of power. Another essential shift: the push to believe survivors, not demonize and ridicule them. But as great as Brownmiller’s book was for advancing the feminist anti-rape cause, some prominent feminists criticized it, rightly, for promoting racist views of both men and women of color, and we must pause here to acknowledge that these frankly shitty stereotypes still linger in many discussions of rape and rape culture today. Brownmiller also told People magazine that it was a “biological impossibility” for a woman to rape a man, which is blatantly untrue and does a disservice
to male survivors of sexual assault and childhood molestation. Still, it’s undeniable that Against Our Will was a game changer at the time and one the feminist movement sorely needed.
As Against Our Will hit bookstores (eventually in more than a dozen countries), other feminists were working to open the first sexual assault crisis centers and hotlines in Canada and the US. In 1972, the DC Rape Crisis Center in Washington opened, one of the first in the US, and issued a pamphlet, “How to Start a Rape Crisis Center,” that helped other groups establish their own in other cities. In Canada, Johanna Den Hertog, Janet Torge, and Teresa Moore founded the Vancouver Rape Relief Society in 1973 and shortly after opened the country’s first rape crisis center and 24-hour hotline, run out of one of their basements. Other provinces followed suit. After a Philadelphia woman was murdered in 1975 while walking home, feminists in both countries started to hold Take Back the Night marches to protest sexual assault and, more generally, widespread, randomized violence against women.
The work of forward-thinking feminists in the 1970s also ushered in the US’s first rape shield laws; the 1994 Violence Against Women Act made the laws federal, ensuring (in theory) that no woman’s sexual history could be used against her in trial. Canada passed its own rape shield laws in the early 1980s, to combat what the Supreme Court called the “twin myths” that a woman who’s sexually experienced is less credible and is also more likely to have consented to the sexual act in question. These myths result in judges who declare things like: “Women who say no do not always mean no. It is not just a question of saying no, it is a question of how she says it, how she shows and makes it clear. If she doesn’t want it, she only has to keep her legs shut and she would not get it,” and “Unless you have no worldly experience at all, you’ll agree that women occasionally resist at first but later give in to either persuasion or their own instincts.” Though the laws were challenged in Canada, and struck down in 1991, the federal government cemented a reworded version of the legislation shortly after.
Combined, these early initiatives formed the foundation for survivor support and today’s anti-slut-shaming and anti-victim-blaming movements, both of which are core tenets of modern feminist work. That’s not to say feminists have won. Would Alice, transplanted nearly a millennium, feel on firmer legal ground if she were raped today? Would she be able to tell the difference in setting and time? The answer is not as easy, or as optimistic, as women would hope. Both Canada and the US abound with modern-day medieval thinkers. The idea that you cannot “thread a moving needle”—a phrase uttered in the nineteenth century—persists. Rape crisis centers remain underfunded and under attack, mostly by conservatives and anti-feminists. Rape shield laws do not always protect survivors from invasive, traumatic questioning on the witness stand. Archaic attitudes persist.
In 2011, for instance, Toronto feminists launched the inaugural SlutWalk after reports that a police officer told York University students participating in a safety forum: “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” The march means to reclaim and redefine the word “slut” and also emphasize that rape is never the victim’s fault, no matter what she is (or isn’t) wearing. Though SlutWalk has also been criticized, in some cases fairly, for its whiteness, its cis-gender focus, and its sometimes loose political message, I think using fishnets and nipple tassels to reclaim your body, your space, and your right to exist freely and fearlessly is powerful and amazing. Feminism can be fun! The SlutWalk movement is now worldwide, speaking both to feminists’ furious action and the global, ubiquitous potency of slut shaming and victim blaming.
Even the FBI preferred to rather euphemistically call rape “indecent assault” until 1929, when it finally decided rape was rape. Less happily, it still stuck with a medieval definition—“the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will”—effectively removing statutory rape, drugged rape, and rape committed against men from the list. It didn’t update its definition until 2012: post– Mickey Mouse, the Empire State Building, Woodstock, Spongebob, Y2K, roofies, and the introduction of the term “date rape.” Before we let Alice breathe a sigh of relief, and think that men who make and enforce law have finally understood, let’s consider the ways in which anti-rape attitudes, legislation, and protection are yet again under attack.
As University of Alberta professors Lise Gotell and Emily Dutton noted in their academic paper “Sexual Violence in the ‘Manosphere,’” anti-feminists have recently intensified their counterclaims to anti-rape feminism. Much of this takes the form of declaring girls and women “sluts” and rape culture a feminist-invented myth. Anti-feminists seek to undermine women through assertions that false allegations of sexual assault against men run rampant, as Janice Fiamengo expressed in chapter three. Such ideas, argued Gotell and Dutton, “exploit” young men’s anxieties around shifting sexual and gender norms and changing consent standards—like “yes means yes.” In that exploitation, the anti-feminist movement provides simpler, more appealing answers to the complex discourse around consent and rape, namely that it’s not usually men’s fault, and women also bear some responsibility. “There is a real danger,” wrote the authors, “that this highly visible MRA mobilization around sexual violence could foreshadow the erosion of feminist influence.”
We’re seeing the effects of some of this influence already. Back in 1913, a doctor explained, “The mere crossing of the knees absolutely prevents penetration . . . A man must struggle desperately to penetrate the vagina of a vigorous, virtue-protecting girl.” (And if a woman was impregnated during her rape, it also wasn’t rape because “without a woman’s consent, she could not conceive.”) A century later, Republican congress member Todd Akin, in attempting to counterarguments that the government should fund abortions in “forcible” rape cases, inadvertently coined the term “legitimate rape.” If a rape really happened, he said, a woman wouldn’t get pregnant because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.”
Consider also the letters of support Brock Turner’s friends and family wrote pleading leniency for the convicted rapist, the ex-Stanford swimmer whose case dominated headlines in summer 2016—especially after survivor Emily Doe’s powerful letter to Turner went viral. One of his high school girlfriends spent a whole lot of time praising his BF qualities, adding the prosecutor unfairly tried to “demote” Turner and that she prays every day “for only the best for my dear friend,” living in fear of the day he would go to jail. His mother wrote that he was telling the truth and lamented what had happened to him and their family: “My first thought upon wakening every morning is ‘This isn’t real, this can’t be real. Why him? Why HIM? WHY? WHY?’” His father complained that prison would be a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.” Devastatingly, but perhaps also unsurprisingly, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner not to the maximum of fourteen years, or even the minimum of two, but a mere six months, an act that jolted people into action, protesting the short sentence and the rape culture that underpins it. In the end, Turner served just three months. Despite a thunderous feminist outcry, cases like Turner’s and comments like Akin’s work to strengthen rape culture and chip away at women’s rights progress.
Alice can be forgiven for thinking these actions, and others, are strikingly reminiscent of those made in earlier decades and centuries. Because here’s the thing: if today’s remnants of medieval law are a depressing reminder that we haven’t made much progress when it comes to rape legislation and attitudes, the new rape culture, fueled by gleeful social media pile-ons and a vehement resurgence of tired, victim-blaming narratives, is a warning bell that we’re actually sliding backward.
I’d like to pause here to note that I don’t believe, not even for a second, that men can’t also be raped. I agree that feminists must do more to acknowledge men can be victims. In fact, numerous studies show a man is more likely to be raped than he is to be falsely accused of rape. In 2013, the US National Crime Victimization Survey determined that, across f
orty thousand homes, in 38 percent of the reported incidents of rape and sexual violence, the victims were men. This surprised Lara Stemple, a feminist and also the director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project. She went as far as to call to ensure the statistic was right. Stemple was already an advocate for shining the spotlight on male victims. A few years prior, she’d written a paper called “Male Rape and Human Rights,” arguing that “according to research, females are more likely to be victimized by rape than males,” but that “despite popular perception . . . however, males comprise a sizable minority of rape victims. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the lack of societal concern about male rape and the hesitancy of male victims to report, data about male rape is wanting.” Discovering that the victimization survey statistics were, in fact, correct cinched her belief that we don’t care enough about men who are raped, and we need to do better. She later released another study encouraging the challenge of old assumptions, telling journalist Hanna Rosin that awareness raising doesn’t need to come at women’s expense. “Compassion,” Stemple said in the interview, “is not a finite resource.” This opinion needs to be shouted from the rooftops.
What would my experience be like if I were raped today? The internet, still stuck on dial-up when I was a teen, is now a scary incubator of a culture in which rape is both ubiquitous and normalized, cool even. Take, for example, 2014’s sick viral happening, #jadapose: teenage boys and girls tweeted photos of themselves lying in the mock pose in which an unconscious sixteen-year-old Texas girl named Jada was filmed post-rape. Like the video of her rape, these photos went viral. That same year, Jessi Smiles, a star on Vine, the super-short-form video-sharing service, accused her handsome internet-famous ex-boyfriend, Curtis Lepore, of rape and, in return, received death threats from his adoring female fans. Lepore later took a plea bargain in 2014 and tweeted, “FAV this if you would willingly have sex with me.” It received thousands of “yesses” from women. A year earlier, people tweeted that the underage victims of New Zealand’s Roast Busters—a rape club—“deserved it” because they were drunk, and besides, some girls and women argued, the “busters” were pretty hot anyway. Around the same time, this tweet went viral: “Why are girls so scared of rape? Y’all should feel pride that a man risked his life in jail just to fuck you.”
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