And now we must talk about what women fear the most: rape. Rape, which will come to one in four of us—as Sarah Silverman puts it, “When you’re walking down a street late at night and you hear footsteps and you think: ‘Is this my rape? Is it now?’”—and yet which still, so often, shames us rather than the rapist. Rape, which is still seen as something almost 100 percent preventable by women, so long as you do the “right” things. Rape—which has the bastard’s curse of being to do with women and sex, and therefore lying on terrible fault lines in our logic and compassion. Rape, which I would like to rename.
This piece was written in the aftermath of the Delhi rape case in 2012, which horrified the world: twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh Pandey was attacked and gang-raped on a bus, on which she was traveling with a male friend. During the astonishingly, incomprehensibly brutal attack—during which six men, including the bus driver, raped her—Pandey had a metal pole forced into her vagina, and her intestines torn from her body. She later died from her injuries.
That broken, ex post facto bastard’s curse—“She was asking for it”—reached its spiteful apogee last week, in the wake of the Delhi gang rape.
The lawyer representing three of the men charged with her murder, Manohar Lal Sharma, gave an interview you will want to hide from your children—but whether more urgently from your sons or your daughters, I cannot say. Both become more doomed if they read it and believe it.
“Until today, I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Sharma said—insisting that the partner of the dead woman was “wholly responsible” for her death. The unmarried couple should not have been out so late at night, using public transport.
This woman, now dead, had brought this upon herself. She left the house, intending to be fucked on a bus. She had essentially walked through the streets, looking for six men to help her commit suicide via an iron bar. She was searching for the quiet sound of a fly zip, as ruinous as the sound of a bullet being thumbed into a gun. This is something women do.
The idea of “asking for it”—whether said by an Indian lawyer in Delhi, a drunkard in an NYC bar, or a careless woman in an office in Slough, tapping through the Daily Mail website—is the single, toxic pathogen from which all our problems with rape blossom. Culpability. Blame.
It’s so hard to convey the notion that rape happens wholly unprompted, with the lights on, to a cheerful woman who had done everything “right.” Surely she had a token of ill luck somewhere on her body? Some evil glamour left in a pocket, a glance that would have been better off left at home? Even though a new report shows one in twenty British women have been raped—someone you have been in a room with, today—we think black lightning cannot fall on a sunny day, although we know it can with all the other crimes: on the bonnet of the drunk driver; in the nursery, with a shotgun.
The awful issue of victim-blaming the injured is what makes rape so iniquitous—like telling children in care they should simply have picked better parents in the first place. Why does this happen?
Well, the problem with rape is the sex. As a species, we are still confused, overwhelmed, afraid of, and intoxicated by sex. It is a cocktail mixed in with religion, politics, suffrage, power, love, magic, fear, self-loathing, and things left widely unspoken. It makes us drunk. It makes us dumb. It confuses us in manifold. Look here, at this pile, in merely its nonfatal complications: Fifty Shades of Grey, with its duct tape. Happy marriages, with their rape fantasies. Count the sex counselors, and agony aunts. Rape couldn’t happen on a bigger moral and philosophical fault line. Rape couldn’t strike in a worse place.
That’s why I sometimes think we should do away with the word “rape” altogether. Let’s not call this a sexual crime anymore—with its baggage of shame, and blame, and ruin. A word so hard for an injured woman—or a man, or a child—to say, now that we’ve used it in too many places, for too many disparate things, for it to be functionally descriptive of a crime.
Let’s call this crime something simpler, and less confusing, instead: internal assault. Intramural attack. Regard it just as we would an assailant violently forcing a hammer handle into a mouth, or puncturing an eardrum with a knife. Does it make any real difference if it’s a vagina being brutalized or an eye? If the weapon is a penis or a cosh? This is punching, but inside. This is the repeated piercing of someone’s body. When you put it like that, suddenly the issue of rape becomes very clear: How many women would ask for that?
The phrase “sexual assault” confuses a million men, and women, like Manohar Lal Sharma, right across the world—that troubled word “sexual” casting a shadow so deep that it hides the “assault” part altogether. It makes people think of rape merely as some sex that just “went wrong.”
The police report of the Delhi gang rape alleges that the victim was so badly broken, one assailant “pulled her intestines from her body with his hands,” before throwing her from a moving bus.
And yet, still, everything we debate about this incident is framed around it being a sexual assault. That they attacked her below, before they attacked her above, has defined it. It’s become another argument about men and women and desire and politics and culture. Rather than what it is—what all rapes are: one human ripping another human being to pieces.
Not sexual assault. Just—assault. Not a sexual crime. Just—crime. Not rape—with all the confusions we can’t afford, can’t bear, another generation to painfully sift through, as we have had to.
Just a violence, like any other.