From age sixteen to now, the night I was raped has played on a loop inside my head. I must have thought about it a million times, and never when I wanted. It’s an intrusion that doesn’t end, sometimes lurid and Technicolor bright, other times like I’m watching a scene behind a thousand panes of stained glass. It all depends on how much I allow myself to remember, how much I can’t forget.
I can tell you I said no. I can tell you I struggled. I can tell you the rough carpet rubbed a burn against my bare back. I can tell you that we were underneath his parents’ pool table; it felt like a cave with only a few feet between the floor and the table’s stained underside. I can tell you there was a condom, purple and grape flavored: a latex slime that made me gag. I can tell you that it didn’t last very long, that my kicking feet and my screams freed me, made him afraid his parents would hear. I can tell you that I ran, but he grabbed me tight before I could reach the stairs. Don’t tell. You’re overreacting. You wanted it. Just calm down. I love you. Just. Don’t. Tell.
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 forty 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.”
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.
Upon hearing the guilty verdict, Caleb collapsed on the floor. He needed his lawyer to help him get out of the room. He was a puddle, said Warner-Seefeld, and once he saw her it got worse. “He alternated between rage,” she told me, her voice wobbling, “where he was just unloading what happened in the hearing and then collapsing and sobbing on the floor. And then up again and raging about again, and then sobbing on the floor. It was horrific. I would never want to see it again.” Even now, five years later, she blinked back tears as she recounted that day, throat bobbing and eyelids rapid-firing, and apologized for losing composure. It’s hard, she told me, to get over remembering that part.
Today, she assured me, Caleb is thriving. Even though the university later reinstated him, he never went back. In the two years it took to overturn his expulsion, he got a job that paid more than his mom’s salary as a teacher. While her son was making bank, Warner-Seefeld took her personal battle and made it national. Fueled by the perceived injustice, she joined forces with two other moms of accused sons and together they officially launched FACE in 2014, with the major goal of getting due process cemented into school tribunal hearings for sexual misconduct and rape cases, making them similar to proceedings within the justice system. If this happens, it will certainly make it harder for a university to come to a different conclusion than police about any alleged rape or assault. Currently, accused men are allowed to have lawyers present during the hearings, but they may only advise or consult with their clients; they cannot speak on their behalf. In most cases, that’s up to the accused men themselves. If FACE wins, the school tribunal will resemble a courtroom, with all the same rights to legal representation and also, likely, all the same pitfalls. (May the richest, whitest student win!) With this push comes FACE’s less trumpeted, unofficial, but far scarier goal: the constant work to reshape the discourse on what is and isn’t rape and sexual assault. It’s hiding underneath every lobbying and outreach effort—a red sock in a basket of whites—ready to bloody the laundry.
“To me, you’re being raped if you are being penetrated when you are very obviously not wanting it,” Warner-Seefeld told me when I asked how she would define rape. Given her outrage that unwanted kissing currently equaled sexual assault, hers didn’t seem to match my definition at all. “I mean very obviously not wanting it,” she replied. “Not because you’re too tired to say no, because that has happened. Not because you got bored in the middle of it. Not because of all these silly things. But you are like, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex.’ You are like, ‘Get away from me.’ ‘No.’ You are very, very clear. And there’s no ambiguity for this guy.”
She’s not the only woman I spoke to who feels that way. Hanna Stotland is a Harvard-educated lawyer who voted for Barack Obama. She runs her own business as an admissions consultant for students who are applying to university. About half of her clients are special cases—students who have, for instance, been expelled from their original university—and a growing percentage of those special cases are men who have been expelled under Title IX violations, i.e., those deemed by the university to have committed rape or sexual assault, even if the justice system has cleared them or declined to prosecute them. Stotland coaches these men through the reapplication process and helps them get back into school, though not necessarily the school that expelled them. A big part of her job involves co-crafting the best possible version of her client’s rape story. She never encourages a client to lie and always gets them to own up to what they did wrong, whether it’s cheating on their girlfriends or drinking too much the night of a hook-up. But it’s always a hook-up, never a rape.
Like Warner-Seefeld, Stotland invoked feminism; she believes it’s good but it’s gone too far by arguing that rape is everywhere, that we should, as a matter of course, believe the accuser. Stotland, who admitted she has never been raped and, therefore, could not know how a woman reacts while being sexually assaulted, nevertheless told me, “I’m speaking for myself, but I don’t find it an imposition to say no when I don’t like what someone is doing.” She feared the current brand of feminism encourages passivity and silence. The “yes means yes” trend, she reasoned, sets up both men and women for failure. Instead, she felt we need to teach women to own their desire—to know it’s okay to want, or not want, sex, but above all, to know what, exactly, they wanted. Women, she assumed, didn’t say no when they wanted to say no not because they were “idiots” but because they are taught it’s their job to please men. “I don’t think anybody is that stupid. I don’t think that they behaved that way without instruction,” she said, her voice strained tight—whether that instruction is from our hypersexual society, from history, from their own upbringing, or some other pervasive narrative.
I found myself thinking she wasn’t entirely wrong. I’m sure many women have sexual interactions they don’t want because they feel pressured to have them—that they ought to do it if they want approval, whether it’s from specific men or the vaguely omnipresent capital-M men. I’d been under the sheets as a younger woman, doing things I wasn’t jazzed about because I was desperate for a dude to like me. But to me that’s not feminism gone wrong. The grin-and-bear-it bedroom games we should never have to play are a horrifying and precise symptom of rape culture.
I was, however, baffled that two self-proclaimed feminists (albeit one who was a conflicted and possibly former feminist) were still putting the blame for rape on the victim for not enacting the perfect protest. To me, their feminism didn’t support women’s rights; it actively undermined them. I asked both women what they’d want campus gender equality to look like today. “To me, it would look the same as it did in the 1970s and ’80s,” Warner-Seefeld responded. Sigh. Of course it would. That means no campaigns on consent, “yes means yes” messaging, or “believe survivors” advocacy; no “Dear Colleague” and no broadened scope for Title IX; but also, in many cases, no on-campus sexual assault centers, no safewalk programs, no on-campus blue-light security phones. FACE and groups like it are at the head of a move to rewind rape legislation and public attitudes back several decades. Like Stotland, Warner-Seefeld sees today’s push for affirmative, enthusiastic “yes means yes” consent as relieving women of their choices and robbing them of their independence.
Later, when I went back over my notes from these interviews, I saw that I’d carved angry circles into my notebook without realizing it, evidence of the effort it took to not lose it while talking to both women, to not unleash a tirade of emotion, a lifetime of what it meant to be a survivor. As I transcribed the audio from our conversations, though, I let loose, shouting angrily into the air, startling my cat out of his afternoon bask. Both women wanted to divorce their work from rape culture, but I couldn’t escape the link. Not only were those links there, they felt like an iron-strength chain that could rope the world.
I’m not sure that, had I yelled at them, either woman would have done more than blink benignly at me, like my cat. They were so convinced. Even if the new standard of consent worked, stressed Stotland, universities needed to give men time to adapt. Why was expulsion the first step, she wondered. Couldn’t schools just summon accused men to the dean’s office and give them a good scare? Her voice took on a gravelly Dick Tracy I’m-gonna-whup-you drawl to illustrate: “If you break this rule again, you’re out on your ass, buddy. You got that?” Most men who found themselves in the “rape pickle,” she added, weren’t monsters. They were teenagers who didn’t even know the girl didn’t want sex, men who cried when told what they’d done, men who’d stop if the girl said a louder no.
Rape culture doesn’t happen in a bubble. It happens because women like Stotland and Warner-Seefeld are telling other women their experiences, while unpleasant, could have been stopped if only they’d said no, emphatically. It happens because, as a larger society, we’re telling women they could have stopped nice guys from making mistakes if only they were more responsible. It happens because we slut shame and invalidate and pressure survivors. It happens because it is terrifying to think our loved ones are capable of rape, that you don’t have to be an evil, midnight bush-lurker to cross a line. It’s so much easier to confirm a centuries-old status quo and blame women. But it’s only ever men who benefit from this.
In a controversial September 2014 Canadian court decision, a federal judge acquitted a 240-pound man accused of raping a small, drunk, and homeless nineteen-year-old woman. Among many things, Justice Robin Camp, a man, told the alleged victim (he bizarrely kept referring to her as “the accused”) that because she was drunk, the “onus [was] on her to be more careful” and “sex and pain sometimes go together, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” He also asked her why she didn’t keep her knees together and, when Crown prosecutors objected to his outdated and illegal views, he admonished the lawyer that the law doesn’t prevent him from thinking. Get it? HE’S A THINKING MAN, WOMAN!
Camp did give the accused a stern talking-to, something Stotland and others suggest is a reasonable punishment in such cases. In court, Camp said: “You’ve got to be really sure that she’s saying yes . . . So remind yourself every time that you get involved with a girl from now on and tell your friends, okay?” He added that men have to be very careful, because sometimes women make things up out of spite: “Is there not a possibility that a very unhappy thing happened here? Two young people made love, and somebody came afterwards and poisoned the girl’s mind?”
An official complaint was launched in 2015. Camp strenuously resisted efforts to have him permanently removed from the bench (his only concession to wrongdoing was to take “gender sensitivity” courses, and he took the unprecedented step of asking the federal court to halt the Canadian Judicial Council’s deliberation of his case), but he has recently accepted the decision of the council and resigned. The accused in the case was retried and acquitted; the prosecutor in the case has said the Crown may appeal.
Stotland, Warner-Seefeld, and their cohort acknowledge victim blaming is real but are adamant they’re not doing it. They truly believe their toughen-up-buttercup approach will stem on-campus rape. Still, it’s difficult to see how the “but he didn’t even know he was raping you!” defense doesn’t blame the victim. I mean, can we just stop for a moment and think about how ridiculous this is? Never mind that a dude’s tears aren’t magical unicorn drops that guarantee his innocence—he might be crying because he was caught, or because he’s overwhelmed, remorseful, acting, about to shit his pants. A deeper problem is at work if a man can’t tell if he’s committing assault, and that’s not a woman’s fault. I doubt a stern lecture will stop this type of man, someone who so obliviously thinks he has a right to a woman’s body. And, frankly, how dare we tell his victims they could have done more to stop or educate him?
Yet both Stotland and Warner-Seefeld adamantly believe the modern anti-rape movement encourages women to abandon responsibility for their choices. Bad sex, Warner-Seefeld said, does not equal rape. Regretting sex after a drunken hook-up, she said, does not equal rape. Not enjoying sex but still finishing it, she said, does not equal rape. She allowed that it was rape if a man had sex with an absolutely incapacitated woman incapable of giving consent or even knowing what was happening to her. It’s also rape if it is forceful and violent. Prior trauma, added Stotland, can muddle a woman’s view of what’s actually happening to her, causing her to confuse her current lover with her prior rapist. Flashbacks do happen, but many studies (and my own experience) attest they don’t happen like this; survivors can usually tell with whom they’re having sex. “You can make a good faith mistake about whether you were raped,” Stotland assured me, presumably benevolent, like a fairy godmother of victim blaming.
Warner-Seefeld, Stotland, and their ilk seem hell-bent on ignoring the numerous studies that have shown it is extremely rare for women to lie about rape—it happens in less than 10 percent of cases. In other words, flocks of women are not equating bad sex or regretful hook-ups with rape. That’s an idea that’s ludicrous at best and laden with slut shaming at worst. Warner-Seefeld laughed when I confronted her with this criticism, admonishing me for thinking women don’t lie. “I don’t know a young person in my school who actually doesn’t laugh at that,” she told me. “Because they literally know people who have done it.” I’d rather we didn’t blame and shame women based on the questionable authority of a high school rumor mill. Rape occurs in many different situations, but it all comes to down to simply this: a woman hasn’t consented to sex. If she doesn’t want it, or can’t tell a man she does, it’s rape. Full stop.
Emily Lindin, founder of the anti-slut-shaming project UnSlut, told me, “People don’t believe there is such a thing as consensual sex for women.” If that statement sounds bold, consider this: the ugly idea persists that if you were, as a woman, to have consensual sex and enjoy it, then you would deserve to be called a slut, which is just about the worst thing ever, so instead of being shamed, you lie about it and say it was rape. It’s a giant shame vortex: we don’t believe women who say they’ve been raped because we believe they should feel ashamed for having sex—so ashamed that they’d rather say it was forced. It’s why police still ask women who make rape claims if they have boyfriends or husbands. But, as Lindin argues, a woman who has consensual sex is much more likely to just go on minding her sexy business than to call the police.
Warner-Seefeld was careful to say that FACE doesn’t work with men’s rights activists (MRAs). She has kept MRA groups at a distance because she believes they’re radical and any alliance would keep her organization from getting a seat at the tables where legislative change happens. Stotland similarly scoffed at the groups, though she warned that the strange bedfellow syndrome—the partnership in ideology between MRAs and those who do work like hers and Warner-Seefeld’s—means feminists are seriously getting the rape question wrong. FACE has received hundreds of calls from families who have sons and need help. She received three calls from families the day of our interview. She doesn’t know what will happen to them—if they’ll be expelled, stay expelled, or be acquitted. She’s not willing to jeopardize that work with radicalism. It’s worth mentioning, however, that much of FACE’s literature references major MRA organizations and their work. For an organization that claims it wants to keep its distance, it both reinforces and applauds men’s rights rhetoric.
One FACE document, titled “Title IX’s Other Victims,” quotes several blog posts from A Voice for Men, including one that says, in reference to the accused, “He sees very clearly that very few believe him while nearly everyone believes the woman. The system and our culture are failing him. His pain is invisible while hers is treated with reverence, even though she is lying.” The article goes on to say that most women are believed, no matter what. We know that’s blatantly false. Studies show only one out of about every one thousand rapes results in jail time, and conviction rates have decreased from 15 percent to 13 percent in the past three decades. That’s not to mention the skeptical and downright hostile reaction that often greets accusers. And yet, as a society, we’re primed to believe droves of women are unfairly sending men to jail. In a way, Lindin told me, she gets it, and I do, too. It’s incredibly difficult to admit that our athletes, our brothers, our sons, our friends, our idols are capable of rape. It’s so much easier to believe the girl’s a slut. She’s a liar. She made a mistake. She wanted it. But that doesn’t make it right—in the sense of justice or accuracy. What it does make is a slippery slope, down which decades of the feminist reframing of rape is plummeting.
So what would the aftermath of my rape look like today? It’s likely I’d have waited even longer to tell somebody what happened, knowing my own assault didn’t fit into a perfect box. Back then, as a competitive kickboxer, I knew enough self-defense to make it stop immediately, but my brain turned off. I didn’t fight hard enough to end it fast enough, which would have been instantly, clicked off like a TV. I struggled, but my body didn’t catch up to my brain, because I couldn’t process what was happening. My shock and my fear overtook me. And what if Warner-Seefeld had been my high school teacher? Would I have squashed the voice that said it wasn’t my fault? Would I have been convinced I’d just made bad choices? That it wasn’t rape at all? And even if—if—she hadn’t convinced me it wasn’t rape, would I have been too afraid to tell any authority figure, knowing my relationship to my rapist could have been used against me? After all, in many of the seventy FACE-backed lawsuits, prior text messages between the accused and accuser comprised a major piece of evidence, as if talking to a guy is blanket consent for sex and an exoneration of rape. When the victim-blaming voices are reaching rock concert decibels, how would I, or any other victim, be able to step forward, especially when the loudest of those voices belong to other women?
It would have been so tempting to stay silent.
Mary P. Koss is a University of Arizona professor who is a leading voice in sexual violence research. In 1982 she worked with the Ms. Foundation, which runs Ms. Magazine, and feminist icon Gloria Steinem to conduct the first ever US national survey on campus rape. Koss has been studying rape on campus for longer than I’ve been alive, and yet she told me the researchers have made little progress. On the whole, she said, studies that show rape on campus exists and is a proliferating problem, but not much funding or time has been put into figuring out a way to reduce campus rape numbers. In other words, she lamented, we keep proving and re-proving rape is a problem to satisfy naysayers, but we never do anything about it.
This failure to act on the studies, Koss argues, has left room for men’s rights activists and rape truthers and apologists, as well as those with presumably good intentions, to skew the conversation. “Virtually nothing that is happening today is touching base with science,” she said. “It’s being propelled by assumptions, belief systems, and cherished icons.” In her mind, men’s rights groups and rape apologists are keeping the public outraged, no matter what side of the issue they’re on. For example, said Koss, recent years have seen much rallying around the need for rape kits and even more anger over the backlog of already completed kits. The result has been a tornado of fundraising and awareness activity, but not much else. None of this, maintained Koss, will fundamentally change anything. Piles of research show the kits rarely get used and even more rarely help secure a conviction, especially when it comes to rapes committed by someone the survivor knows. These assaults tend to be less violent but also account for the majority of rapes on campus.
“It keeps us busy,” Koss told me, referring to the intense focus on rape kits and the fundraising surrounding them, although she doesn’t necessarily mean “busy” in a good way. It’s projects like these (ones that put the focus on catching so-called real rapists) that can keep us from achieving real change. From the outside, it looks as if we’re making progress and empowering women, but the effect is the same as if we’d dismissed them entirely. It’s a curious, chilling game of PR strategy, and one that’s working. We look like we’re doing something, yet our surface actions keep us from tackling root causes, factors that are often more thorny to parse and difficult to confront. Koss was astounded that so much of today’s policy is politically driven, which to her is like creating a public health strategy on cancer without consulting any actual cancer researchers. She’s even more worried that said policies push us further and further away from nuanced definitions of rape and toward simplistic, limiting ones, ones that use the same parameters women like Stotland and Warner-Seefeld impose.
I’d spent years punishing myself for my own rape, and it depressed me that we were, more than ever, encouraging women en masse to do the same. I can tell you that rape breaks us, even when we want to be strong. We carry it with us always, tucked in an invisible pocket, even when that pocket’s small and zipped shut. We don’t need anybody to tell us what we could have done better, because we’ve told ourselves thousands of times. We don’t need anybody to blame us, because we’ve done that, too. Everything the worst rape apologist has ever said, we’ve likely whispered to ourselves, alone in the dark of the night but also during a romantic candle-lit dinner, or driving to work in rush hour, or eating grilled cheese for lunch with a friend.
Here’s what we do need: support, real prevention strategies, wellfunded research, women’s centers, and a society that values women and allows them, in turn, to value their sexuality. Rape is used as a weapon in war for a reason: it can make you never want to get up again. If we ever want to reach true gender equality, we need to engage in the mountainous task of eradicating rape, not in the far too easy, and dangerous, one of convincing women they’re making up the whole damn thing. Of course, that would also mean ensuring women have bodily autonomy, something for which we’ve always had to fight. Instead, we’re seeing a thicker and thicker veneer of “empowerment” painted on, a shiny gloss over all sorts of anti-feminist work, from the undoing of feminist work on sexual violence to the dismantling of reproductive rights and resources. My next steps would take me into the height of this rebranding: the mission to portray the anti-abortion activist as the ultimate feminist.