F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  More recently, in Canada, we’ve seen some gleeful anti-feminist pile-ons in response to headline-making cases. On March 24, 2016, CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi was found not guilty of five charges against him, including four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking. These were just the cases involving three women that Crown prosecutors brought to trial; once the first allegations about Ghomeshi emerged (allegations that did not result in criminal charges), many more women, and a few men, came forward with their own stories of sexual violence at Ghomeshi’s hands.

  Justice William Horkins gave the anti-feminists plenty of fuel in a decision in which he slammed the three women accusers for inconsistencies in their recollections and for their supposedly too-friendly behavior to Ghomeshi after their alleged assaults. He seemed to find Lucy DeCoutere’s media interviews particularly distasteful, noting more than once the number she had given: nineteen. She received, he said, “massive attention for her role in the case.” Oh, hello, attention-seeking trope—nice of you to stop by! As one news outlet wrote, the resulting verdict sent Twitter into a “frenzy”; even before the verdict, newspapers in Toronto noted, “every detail and every opinion” played out over social media. Many of those tweets supported Ghomeshi’s accusers, especially under the hashtag #IBelieveSurvivors. But many more did not.

  Long before the acquittal, people were calling the women deceitful on Twitter. Anti-feminist Diana Davison became especially popular on social media during this time for calling the case against Ghomeshi a “hoax,” making videos on her YouTube channel, Feminism LOL, that argued in depth that the three women accusers made up everything. (Davison is equally adamant that Trump has never sexually assaulted anyone, despite his recorded boasts.) At the one-year mark of the verdicts, anti-feminists and their fans tweeted once more, promoting the narratives of lying, railroading women and the spotlight-loving victim mentality. Presumably they had forgotten about Kathryn Borel. Her charges against Ghomeshi—namely three documented incidents of unwanted physical touching, including one where he simulated intercourse against her backside—were settled with a peace bond. He did not admit guilt but he did apologize to her, stating only that he did not show the respect he should have to Borel, a former producer of his popular radio show, and that his conduct was “sexually inappropriate.” But it’s always her strong, chilling statement that’s stuck with me; it read, in part: “Every day, over the course of a three-year period, Mr. Ghomeshi made it clear to me that he could do what he wanted to me and my body. He made it clear that he could humiliate me repeatedly and walk away with impunity.”

  Then there’s Mandi Gray. A few months after Ghomeshi was found not guilty in a Toronto courthouse, anti-rape advocates still reeling from the decision were given something to celebrate. Ontario Court Justice Marvin Zuker found Gray’s rapist, Mustafa Ururyar, who was like Gray a doctoral student at York University, guilty of sexual assault. “Gray was very credible and trustworthy. I accept her evidence,” Zuker told the courtroom, which burst into applause at the decision. He went on to eviscerate many of our lingering rape myths, saying, “No one asks to be raped,” and ordered Ururyar to pay Gray $8,000 toward her legal fees. Even though “these statements don’t un-rape me,” as Gray herself put it, the guilty verdict was seen as a righting of the criminal system ship—proof that survivors could win. But Ururyar appealed and, immediately, critics claimed those who were unhappy with the Ghomeshi verdict had used him as a scapegoat. Davison again called the accuser, Gray, a liar and she again rose to Twitter and YouTube fame. In the appeal hearing (from which, as of the press date of this book, a decision has yet to be released), Superior Court Justice Michael Dambrot called Zuker lazy, a show-off, and unmoored. The court system did not use outdated stereotypes, he insisted. “Of course it is important to dispel myths, but you do that by deciding cases correctly and appropriately, not by using your podium of reasons for judgment as a place for your own manifesto.”

  In response, National Post columnist Christie Blatchford echoed prevailing anti-feminist and MRA sentiment in a piece that chastised an exhausted Gray, who, facing the prospect of having to redo everything at a new trial, told reporters, “It’s not worth it.” Blatchford mused on Gray’s hesitancy to retake the stand: “It would also feed into the emerging modern sexual violence complainant as a creature of curious delicacy who can talk to the media at length about her suffering, . . . campaign politically on social media, organize consciousness-raising events and behave as a social justice activist—and yet who can’t face a normal cross-examination . . . without being grossly traumatized.” Twitter was full of similar icky stuff directed at Gray, like, “I think I’ll just make a false accusation like you did instead #liar,” and “Every time I hear Mandi speak, I vomit a little. Is that normal?”

  Often, especially when I see stuff like this, spending a mere hour on Twitter makes me want to write an open letter: Dear Internet, thank you for reinforcing thousands of years of patriarchy and also the fears of women and girls everywhere. But could we call a truce? It will be a lot easier for everyone to thrive if you stop convincing them they are all liars and that their ultimate, personal validation as women is to be supremely fuckable. Sincerely, Lauren.

  This shut-up-and-take-it, victim-blaming, slut-shaming internet culture has bled the lines into vicious cyberbullying and is responsible for the deaths of several teens, most infamously Nova Scotian teen Rehtaeh Parsons. In November 2011, Parsons, then just fifteen, went to a house party where two teenage boys raped her (they maintain it was consensual and that everyone was in the “groove”). Very drunk, after about eight vodka shots, according to the boys themselves, Parsons didn’t see one of the boys take a photo of the other, giving a thumb’s up as he penetrated her from behind, as she was vomiting out the window. But soon she couldn’t escape it. The boy in the photo texted it to two (female) friends. Soon, that photo was shared around town and in school and soon Parsons, like me, was called a slut, except it wasn’t just her rapists taunting her. She faced an onslaught everywhere she turned from both classmates and strangers. Men demanded sex from her.

  According to our modern culture, her assault didn’t make her a victim or a survivor, but a slut. Together, the internet and her real-life peers obliterated her personhood, rendering her not only into a girl who could be callously objectified and used but one who supposedly both liked and wanted it. In April 2013, Parsons died after she was taken off life support following a suicide attempt. Later, the boy in the photo, who did not receive jail time, said he felt remorse but didn’t believe he was responsible, even a little bit, for Parsons’s suicide: “This has had a huge negative impact on me. Humans make mistakes. I will not live with the guilt of someone passing away, but I will live with the guilt of the photo.” He added, “I have [pleaded] guilty to distributing child pornography, not a sexual assault,” stressing (perhaps a bit delusionally), “I never played a part in the bullying [of Rehtaeh], nor would I.”

  Like, WTF. Rape, right now, is being remodeled into so many things it’s difficult to keep up with the latest obscuration. It’s a mistake wayward boys make in adolescence, like smoking or drinking one too many beers; it’s something that ruins rapists’ lives, so let’s please feel sorry for them; it’s a joke, something we can laugh at as we sing about it during frosh week, as many universities did in recent years to the acronym YOUNG (“Y-O-U-N-G! We like ’em young! Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is grab that ass!”—or in some versions, more accurately, “go to jail!”). It’s a fun thing frat boys write on banners in quippy jests like “Our couches pull out, but we don’t.” In other words, rape is anything but what it really is: a life-shattering violation of a woman’s body—and both women and men are buying into the lie.

  This devastating culture permeates university, college, and high school campuses, and efforts to combat rape culture are centered on these places. School campuses are a battleground of both feminist
and anti-feminist action, making them collectively a useful lens for examining prevailing attitudes on sexual assault. The attitudes are the same from when I was sixteen—from when fictional Alice was sixteen—but today’s technology has propelled the whispered jabs beyond school hallways and city streets and into poisonous ubiquity. In recognition of this, the US government and college administrations wrote an open letter titled “Dear Colleague” to boost awareness and focus on rape through Title IX, a piece of legislation originally crafted in 1972 to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal funding.” With some success, it’s tried to create new women-empowering sexual assault rules, rape crisis centers, and venues for recourse without necessarily calling the police, leaving the punishment decisions to faculty and student tribunals. Even so, the effort to boost women’s safety on campus is, to date, controversial.

  As an example, we can turn to Slate’s Emily Yoffe, who in 2013 and 2014 created an odd sort of victim-blaming brand for herself. Yoffe, kind of amazingly, almost single-handedly renewed the if-you’re-stupid-drunk-it’s-your-fault-stupid narrative with her October 2013 article “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk.” She acknowledged that sober men prey on very drunk women. She also said, “Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes.” She said she wasn’t victim blaming but trying to prevent more victims. Okay, fine. But she also admonished that matching men “drink for drink” is not a feminist issue. (And here I was thinking the feminist issue was combatting the perception that drunk women send out “rape me” invitations in fancy calligraphy.) “When you are dealing with intoxication and sex,” she added, “there are the built-in complications of incomplete memories and differing interpretations of intent and consent.” I wonder if Yoffe, despite her protestations, has looked up the dictionary definition of victim blaming. Probably not, considering that, in 2014, she also delved into the (apparent) epidemic of rampant false rape accusations in her article “The College Rape Overcorrection.”

  In this article, Yoffe took issue with what she saw as an overzealous approach to protecting women on campus, based on what she called shaky statistical research. “But the new rules—rules often put in place hastily and in response to the idea of a rape epidemic on campus—have left some young men saying they are the ones who have been victimized,” she wrote. I agree with Yoffe that it is worth examining whether colleges and universities are equipped to investigate and render decisions on campus rape and sexual assault cases. Feminists and lawyers both have raised legitimate concerns about these schools’ employment of due process and unfair treatment of the accused. But in Yoffe’s hands—and in the hands of many anti-feminists—campus rape adopts an “us vs. them” construct. It seems we can protect either accusers or the accused, but not both. She takes particular umbrage with “affirmative consent” regulations, arguing they should be struck because they “dictate how young adults in college make love, and that’s both ridiculous and quixotic.” Huh. Make love. The danger in such thinking, and such articles, is that promoting the idea that society (but mostly feminists) has gone “too far” in protecting women in turn prioritizes the status quo: protecting men.

  As a writer on the blog Feminist Philosophers put it: “It’s sobering to think that Yoffe’s article, which is focused on one-sided accounts from the perspective of the men involved in allegedly false accusations—accounts which are strongly contested by both the universities and the women involved—will probably not be subject to anything like the skepticism that is typically leveled at rape accusations.” Certainly, this appears to be the case. I can’t help but think we can find a better way. Surely, it shouldn’t be so hard to mitigate false accusations without simultaneously elevating them as a more urgent, widespread problem than actual rape. Is it so difficult to acknowledge rape culture exists both on and off campus and that it can destroy young women?

  Apparently it is. In recent years, dozens of groups have sprouted like weeds to combat the push for rape survivors’ rights, and they’re not losing. As one group, the superficially benign but sneakily named Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE) said, groups like it were urgently needed to “extricate their sons from this unimaginable nightmare” of false accusation. A lot of FACE’s arguments are summed up as “sexism.” As one father wrote in defense of his son: “Well, you can guess that it’s always the boy’s fault. Even though John reported to the student conduct office that the accuser had—after they’d decided to cool the sexual thing because it freaked her out—come into his room drunkenly and groped him in his sleep and demanded sex when John awoke, [they] waited two months to advise him that he might have a claim against her.” Falsely accused men, FACE maintains, experience psychological trauma similar to or worse than that of those who’ve been raped. They argue that feminists use Title IX to enforce gender bias against men and create the perfect revenge vehicle for scorned women. In other words: Those lying, crazy feminists blow things out of proportion. Or even more simply: But, men!

  Members of FACE and groups like it don’t deny that rape exists or that those who commit it deserve to be prosecuted; they do believe, however, that most of what women say is rape isn’t, that feminists are trying to “criminalize normal male sexual behavior.” It’s not enough for it to be unwanted: “If a man and a woman have any sexual contact whatsoever—a kiss, a hug, anything—and she subsequently claims this contact was ‘unwanted,’ ‘unwelcome’ or ‘coerced,’ then he is presumed guilty of sexual assault,” the group Save Our Sons (SOS) ridicules, taking an eraser to decades of activism that states, as any three-year-old should know, “no means no.” The rape, to constitute rape, these groups say, must be demonstrably violent and the victim must have fought back hard. Only then should the law “treat these cases with the seriousness they deserve, bringing those who commit this crime to justice.” Sound familiar, Medieval Alice?

  I want to dismiss these groups as hot, fetid air, but they’re a terrifying new step in the campaign to shame and silence women. They’re behind more than seventy lawsuits against women who have accused men of campus rape. I knew I had to talk to them, to see where their battle plan would take them. But even fifteen years after my rape, the thought of talking to someone who would validate all my victim-blaming fears gave me sweaty palms. I was afraid talking to these women would force my mind to whip back not to my rape, or my simmering rage in Dr. Porter’s classroom, but to all the nights I spent huddled under my childhood stars-and-sun comforter, desperately hoping for my body to feel like mine again, and even more fiercely replaying the short, terrible minutes of that night, searching for a way to make it fit into my life, to make it make sense. I was afraid their voices and their arguments would reduce me. I wished I could get angry and wear it like armor.

  It wasn’t just these groups that scared me but the thought that their victory would inevitably mean more girls would feel like I had all those years ago. When a week went by and FACE still hadn’t answered my interview request, I was happy. They didn’t want to talk to me either! Hurrah! But then Sherry Warner-Seefeld, the group’s president, said yes.

  Warner-Seefeld Skyped me from her home in North Dakota. A blond high school teacher, she wore a slash of pink lipstick and a seafoam-colored long-sleeved T-shirt that matched her office walls. Family photos adorned the wooden ledge that wrapped around the room: a suburban altar of all that is good and godly in life. A cast iron single bed, a time-worn pastel quilt folded neatly overtop the black frame, was tucked in the corner. Warner-Seefeld’s office, the place where she works tirelessly to redefine rape, was a bucolic guest room.

  To my surprise, she opened our conversation with a declaration that she was an “ardent feminist”—or at least, she added, she used to be. She wouldn’t go as far as to say she was anti-feminist; she just wasn’t sure anymore. The sociology teacher reconsidered her feminist values as well as how she taught rape and rape culture to teens in her high school after her son, Caleb, was
accused of rape in early 2010. She’ll never forget that January call. Her second oldest of four sons, Caleb opened the phone call with, “Mom, you’re going to be so mad.”

  Lots of things raced through her mind. At first, she thought he’d been arrested for drunk driving or, at worst, a minor misdemeanor. But she never thought rape. Not for an instant. Not her son. As he launched into his story, assuring her it would be fine, Warner-Seefeld remembers sinking into her couch. Caleb was insistent he didn’t rape anybody and, as his mother, she believed him. He was also insistent the university wouldn’t unfairly prosecute him; he was innocent. But Warner-Seefeld didn’t trust the school. All the next day at work, her mind kept returning to the conversation, stuck like an awful jingle: Dum-de-dum-dum, She’s saying I raped her, Mom, dumde-dum-dum. Warner-Seefeld took emergency leave halfway through the day and started calling lawyers. They advised her to tell Caleb to zip his lips shut.

  In the end, says Warner-Seefeld, a criminal investigation did not result in Caleb’s arrest and no charges were laid. In fact, according to her, police issued a warrant for her son’s accuser, who, she claims, made a false report. Apparently, the woman subsequently fled the state. The University of North Dakota, not bound by the justice system’s decision, proceeded with its own investigation, and found Caleb guilty of assault and expelled him. According to Warner-Seefeld, the school’s lawyer was “antagonistic and mean and cruel.” The lawyer didn’t believe that Caleb’s alibi held up, since his main witnesses were fellow fraternity brothers—friends, the lawyer surmised, who could blur the truth for him. Warner-Seefeld saw this as deeply unfair; it seemed to me that if she believed women frequently lied about rape, she shouldn’t have had such a hard time believing Caleb’s friends would lie to protect him.