The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit

  It’s not really about Cosby or Ghomeshi. As we argued after the Isla Vista mass shooting, perpetrators of violence against women aren’t anomalies or exceptional. They’re epidemic. At best these celebrity cases give us occasions to discuss the meaning of these kinds of crimes, to investigate the larger social questions and shift the framework a little. Women who are assaulted by celebrities matter. So do the Native women in the United States and Canada who face exceptionally high rates of sexual assault, rape, and murder; the women raped on campus, raped in the military, in prison; the sex workers who face extraordinary difficulties when they are victims of sexual assault. So do the women who are raped by police, of which there have been a great many accounts and a few criminal convictions recently. This year at least some of the people who think going to the police is a tidy solution may have learned that the police can be incredulous, unresponsive, abusive, or ineffective. Only a small percentage of rapes are reported, and only a small percentage of those reported result in convictions.

  What matters most in celebrity cases may not be that a few are belatedly held accountable for past crimes. It’s the message that these cases deliver: that the age of impunity is over; that in the future, it will not be so easy to get away with committing such crimes. In other words, the world has changed enough to change the odds for victims and perpetrators. Women have voices now.

  After shame

  This month, an arts administrator I know decided to speak up, forty-four years after the fact, about how she was, at nineteen, despondent, on a drug overdose in a seedy hotel, gang-raped by the men she had asked for help and then humiliated by a doctor who blamed her for what had happened. She recalls the doctor told her that “I was in no position to be pressing charges,” and so came four decades of silence. This winter felt like the right time to break it.

  Shame has been a huge factor in the silence of women—and men—who are victims of sexual assault. Shame has silenced people, isolated them, and let the crimes continue. The names of rape victims were traditionally not reported by the media to “protect” them, but this tradition had the additional effect of insisting that they had been shamed, keeping them invisible, isolated, and silent. “Who would want this 15 minutes of—not fame—shame?” asked one of Cosby’s accusers, explaining why she hadn’t spoken up before. Rape is an assault not only on the victim’s body but also on their rights, their humanity, and their voice. The right to say no, to self-determination, is taken away; shame perpetuates this silencing. Shame, says a website for survivors,

  involves destruction of self-respect, the deliberate efforts by the attacker to make her do things against her will, to make her feel dirty, disgusting, and ashamed. Feelings of shame may also affect her decision to report the crime to the police or to reach out for help . . . She may also believe her previous sexual experiences and details of the assault will be scrutinized.

  “‘He said/she said’ is always about discrediting ‘she said,’” a campus professional who handles sexual assault cases told me the other day. It worked well until now. The tables have turned. When actress Jennifer Lawrence’s nude photographs were stolen and distributed online, she started on the usual route of being ashamed and apologetic, but then revolted: “Anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame,” she thundered. A couple of months later, a California man went to prison for a year for using nude photographs to harass and humiliate his ex-girlfriend in front of her employers and others; California is one of several states to have passed revenge porn laws since the category arose.

  Emma Sulkowicz, an art student at Columbia University in New York, whose response to the lack of legal or institutional remedy after she accused a fellow student of raping her in her own dorm-room bed has been to carry a mattress every moment she’s on campus, began with a more conventional reaction. Her first response was to stay quiet; her second, to ask the university to adjudicate the situation, but neither that nor going to the police offered her a response she considered meaningful. So she turned to art, and, as a fellow student said, she “cracked shame not only for herself but cracked shame in all of us.” It must be very unpleasant to find out you’ve violated a brilliant artist whose public performance about you has drawn international attention and widespread support.

  Shame kept people silent, often for decades or a lifetime, and isolated; speaking up has formed communities and sparked activism. It’s hard to imagine Sulkowicz’s defiant gesture without the extraordinary campus antirape movement, including campus rape survivors-become-activists such as Andrea Pino and Annie Clark and organizations such as Safer (Students Active for Ending Rape), that has challenged universities across the United States. Sulkowicz’s genius was to make her burden tangible, and in so doing make it something others could share. Solidarity has been a big part of this feminist movement against violence.

  In Sulkowicz’s case, you could actually carry that mattress. In late September, I watched her coming out of a school building with a bearded blond student helping her until a group of young women swooped up to take charge of the mattress for a few hours. They hoisted the long blue mattress high, like pallbearers with a coffin, for a few hours one beautiful autumn morning at Columbia, giggling and chatting like young women anywhere, but also ferociously intent on solidarity in the form of transporting this symbol of conflict up stairs and along walkways. Sulkowicz made rape a visible burden, and though she will carry her mattress as long as both she and her alleged assailant are at Columbia University, she marks the return of shame to its rightful owners.

  In one of the most conservative corners of the United States, Norman, Oklahoma, three high school students reported being raped by the same fellow student. The alleged rapist, like the high school boys who documented their sexual assault of a fellow student in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2012, and like so many others, circulated a video of the latest of these assaults in September 2014. In Norman, as with so many previous high school cases, the alleged victims were mocked and bullied by peers and unprotected by administrators, who encouraged them to withdraw from school. Up to that point, it was like too many cases before.

  Then the tide changed: another male student, distressed by the alleged rapist’s account of his actions, recorded what amounted to a confession as well as a boast, and in December 2014 the alleged rapist was charged by the police. A group of women, including a fellow high school student, Danielle Brown, took up the cause, launched the hashtag #yesalldaughters, and made demands on the school. On November 24, 2014, hundreds of students walked out in protest as part of a demonstration said to have numbered 1,500 people. Maybe we won’t have to read the same story over and over; maybe young men won’t think that such crimes enhance their status or that they have impunity. Maybe shame will be returned to its rightful owners.

  The North American stories I’m telling here are about a shift in power that is partly a shift in whose story gets told and believed, and who does the telling.

  This has not been a harmonious year, and male rage is definitely part of the landscape—the trolls, men’s rights movement misogynists, Gamergate ranters, and the perpetrators of the actual violence, which has not stopped. The histrionic response to California’s “Yes Means Yes” campus consent law shows that some heterosexual men are alarmed that they will now have to negotiate their erotic and social interactions with human beings who have voices and rights backed up by law. In other words, they are unhappy that the world has changed—but the most important thing is that it has. Women are coming out of a silence that lasted so long no one can name a beginning for it. This noisy year is not the end—but perhaps it is the beginning of the end.

  * * *

  § In March 2016 Ghomeshi was acquitted on four counts of sexual assault and one of choking. At the trial, Ghomeshi’s lawyer bullied the victims and the judge accused them of lying or concealing evidence. Ghomeshi avoided a second sexual assault trial by signing a peace bond.

  Feminism: The Men
Arrive

  (2014)

  What do the prime minister of India, retired National Football League punter Chris Kluwe, and superstar comedian Aziz Ansari have in common? It’s not that they’ve all walked into a bar, though Ansari could probably figure out the punch line to that joke. They’ve all spoken up for feminism this year, part of an unprecedented wave of men actively engaging with what’s usually called “women’s issues,” though violence and discrimination against women are only women’s issues because they’re things done to women—mostly by men, so maybe they should always have been “men’s issues.”

  The arrival of the guys signifies a sea change, part of an extraordinary year for feminism, in which the conversation has been transformed, as have some crucial laws, while new voices and constituencies joined in. There have always been men who agreed on the importance of those women’s issues, and some who spoke up, but never in such numbers or with such effect. And we need them. So consider this a watershed year for feminism.

  Take the speech the generally malevolent Indian prime minister Narendra Modi gave on that country’s Independence Day. Usually it’s an occasion for boosterism and pride. Instead, he spoke powerfully of India’s horrendous rape problem. “Brothers and sisters, when we hear about the incidents of rape, we hang our heads in shame,” he said in Hindi. “I want to ask every parent [who has] a daughter of 10 or 12 years age, you are always on the alert, every now and then you keep on asking where are you going, when would you come back. . . . Parents ask their daughters hundreds of questions, but have any parents ever dared to ask their son as to where he is going, why he is going out, who his friends are? After all, a rapist is also somebody’s son. He also has parents.”

  It was a remarkable thing to say, the result of a new discourse in that country in which many are now starting to blame perpetrators, not victims—to accept, as campus antirape activists in the United States put it, that “rapists cause rape.” That act, in other words, is not caused by any of the everyday activities women have been blamed for when men assault them. This in itself represents a huge shift, especially when the analysis comes from the mouths of men. And from this violently conservative man, the words seemed remarkable—not because they were evidence of some emerging virtue in Modi, but because he seemed to be a conduit for arguments framed elsewhere: feminism was so powerful a force it emerged even from his mouth.

  The Obama administration, too, recently launched a campaign to get bystanders, particularly men, to reach out to protect potential victims of sexual assault under the rubric “It’s On Us.” Easy as it might be to critique that slogan as a tone-deaf gesture, it’s a landmark all the same, part of a larger response in this country to campus rape in particular.

  And here’s what it all means: the winds of change have reached our largest weathervanes. The highest powers in the country have begun calling on men to take responsibility not only for their own conduct but also for that of the men around them, to be agents of change.

  When X doesn’t equal Y

  Feminism needs men. For one thing, the men who hate and despise women will be changed, if they change, by a culture in which doing horrible things to, or saying horrible things about, women will undermine rather than enhance a man’s standing with other men.

  There are infinite varieties of men, or at least about 3.5 billion different ones living on Earth now, Klansmen and human rights activists, drag queens and duck hunters. For the purposes of feminism, I’d like to delineate three big blurry categories. There are the allies, mentioned above (and below). There are the raging misogynists and haters in word and deed. You can see them in various places online, where they thrive (and seem to have remarkable amounts of time on their hands): the men’s rights forums, for instance, where they endlessly stoke the flames of their resentment, and the guys on Twitter who barrage almost any outspoken woman with threats and insults. Take the threat not just to kill media analyst Anita Sarkeesian for daring to speak up about sexism in video games but to launch a massacre of women at a speech she was to give at the University of Utah. Sarkeesian’s not the only one in that world to receive death threats. And don’t forget all the gamers who have gone down the rabbit hole of misogynist conspiracy theories under the hashtag #Gamergate.

  Their position was recently attacked in a striking rant by avid gamer, former pro football player, outspoken queer rights advocate, and feminist Chris Kluwe. He told his gaming brethren, in one of his more polite passages:

  Unfortunately, all you #Gamergaters keep defending this puerile filth, and so the only conclusion to draw is the logical one: That you support those misogynistic cretins in all their mouthbreathing glory. That you support the harassment of women in the video game industry (and in general). That you support the idiotic stereotype of the “gamer” as a basement-dwelling sweatbeast that so many people have worked so hard to try and get rid of.

  Someone then tweeted at Kluwe, “Go fuck yourself you stupid cunt. Gamergate is not hating on women.” To which I’d like to append a variation on Lewis’s Law (“all comments on feminism justify feminism”): the plethora of men attacking women and anyone who stands up for women in order to prove that women are not under attack and feminism has no basis in reality are apparently unaware that they’re handily proving the opposite.

  There are so many rape and death threats these days. In Sarkeesian’s case, the University of Utah declined to take the threat of a massacre at the school seriously (despite the fact that weapons could legally be brought into the lecture hall), because she gets death threats all the time, and as a result, she had to cancel her own lecture.

  So there are the allies and the haters. And then there are a slew of men who may mean well but enter the conversation about feminism with factually challenged assertions that someone—usually, in my experience, a woman—will spend a lot of time trying to rectify. They may be why Elizabeth Sims started a website called The Womansplainer: “For men who have better things to do than educate themselves about feminism.”

  Other times they try to refocus anything said about women’s woes on men’s woes. Reading men’s comments online about campus rape, for example, you’d think that we face an epidemic of unconscious but malicious young women regularly impaling themselves on innocent bystanders for the purpose of getting them in trouble. Forbes recently ran, and then scrambled to delete, a tirade by a former president of an MIT fraternity titled, “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities.”

  Sometimes, men insist “fairness” means admitting that men suffer from women just as women do from men, or even that they suffer more. You might as well argue that white people suffer from racism exactly as much as Black people, or that there are no hierarchies of privilege and degrees of oppression in this world. Some do.

  It’s true, for example, that women do commit domestic violence, but the consequences are drastically dissimilar in both numbers or severity. As I wrote in Men Explain Things to Me, domestic violence is

  the number one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a million of those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and you don’t want to know about the dentistry needed afterward. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.

  Pregnant women are not, however, a leading cause of death for spouses of pregnant women. There’s just no equivalency.

  Not all men get this, but some do (and that might make a nice hashtag). I saw standup comic Aziz Ansari perform a routine focused on sexual harassment. “Creepy dudes are everywhere,” he said, while describing a woman who had to take refuge in a pet store for an hour to shake off a guy following her. He pointed out that men never have to deal with women whipping out their genitals and masturbating at them in public or harassing them in other similarly grotesque ways. “Women just don’t do that shit!” he exclaimed. (He credited his girlfri
end with turning him into a feminist.)

  The comedians Nato Green, W. Kamau Bell, Elon James White, and Louis C. K. are among the other feminist standup comics now speaking out, and Jon Stewart has had some fine feminist moments. It’s great that men are not only in the conversation but an increasingly witty part of it as well. Black men such as Bell, White, and Teju Cole have been exceptionally perceptive, articulate, and outspoken on the issues, perhaps because oppression understands oppression.

  Cole wrote:

  Last night, reading the accounts by women who had been assaulted by Cosby, I was overcome with sorrow.

  Tricky to say anything about this, but silence is simply not an option. This is everybody’s business. But I’ll say some things to the men who are reading.

  We men benefit, all of us men benefit, from rape culture. We benefit from the pain it causes women because we sprint ahead obliviously; we benefit from the way it knocks them off circuit and opens space for us; we benefit from the way it dehumanizes them so that our own humanity can shine more greatly; and we benefit from the aura of power it gives us as perpetrators or as beneficiaries. And because we benefit, explicitly or implicitly, we are not vociferous enough in our opposition to it.

  We must be allies in this, in a subsidiary but vital role, to the generations of women who have been fighting it since forever. Why should it be easy? It can’t be.