Forget laid-back hook-up culture and jokes about friends with benefits. For many young people today, sex is problematic. It’s not sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy they worry about so much as each other. During a campus debate, I asked a group of students why they thought attendance at sexual consent classes should be made mandatory. Surely, I argued, people didn’t need to be taught the difference between rape and consensual sex; and statistically, their campus was one of the safest places in the country. ‘But,’ one young woman was clearly horrified by my question, ‘We could be raped. I don’t leave my room on campus after dark even to walk to the library.’ Others in the group were quick to correct the ‘not going out after dark’ narrative, not from a position of bravado but from a more sober understanding that a rapist was more likely to be someone known to them, perhaps a boyfriend or someone they had invited back to their room, rather than a random stranger.
This chapter looks at men’s and women’s private relationships and explores how feminism moved from celebrating sexual liberation to seeking to regulate sex and relationships. This changed dynamic in feminism took off in earnest at a time when old certainties about people’s behaviour, garnered from their membership of community organizations, trade unions, churches and political parties, could no longer be assumed. The old morality and values that once regulated people’s lives was being jettisoned. An ascendant feminism that transcends both the public and private realms of people’s lives provides schools, universities and other state institutions with a clear set of seemingly radical values to embrace. In this way, feminism comes to the fore in establishing a new means of regulating both social life and intimate relationships. In this chapter we explore how feminism works to regulate private relationships through a focus on three key issues: sexual harassment, pornography and rape culture.
The era of sexual liberation proved to be short-lived. Almost 50 years on from the dawn of second-wave feminism and it seems that chaperones, curfews and prudish sermons preaching a morally-approved way to have sex are all back. Only this time they do not stem from religious conservatives or old-fashioned relatives but from feminists with ‘I heart consent’ badges. The message to young women is clear: sex without explicit, verbal and ongoing consent is rape and all men are potential rapists. But this lesson is only ever partially imbibed. Young people are not opting en masse for self-imprisonment; most are still going out, getting drunk, hooking up, and later forming relationships and having children. It’s not that young people have been scared out of having sex altogether, it’s more that for many, relationships coexist with angst: intimacy has come to be associated with anxiety.
Talk of ‘rape culture’ and ‘sexual harassment’ dominates feminism today. But these words only rarely describe specific incidents; rather, their repetition fulfils a need to present women as victims of violence and abuse perpetrated by men. Old ideas of sexually chaste and vulnerable women having to ward off predatory men are being rehabilitated at a time when women, especially those in wealthy, Western countries, have greater financial and legal independence than ever before. Yet this independence brings with it not just new power but also, it seems, new fear. The young women consigning themselves to their rooms after dark have been put there not by tyrannical fathers but by their own anxieties.
Sexual liberation now seems as dated as flower-power. It has been cynically written off as a con – fun for men but disastrous for women. But this is to forget how much women’s lives have changed for the better. Not that long ago, cohabiting couples were ‘living in sin’ and babies born ‘out of wedlock’ were stigmatized. When marriage was one of the few routes for women to secure their future, sex before marriage could be ruinous. Young people, especially young women, were policed by an older generation intent on upholding religious and moral standards. The consequences of digression were serious. As Alison Wolf reminds us: ‘Pregnancy was more likely to be a prelude to a shotgun marriage than to an illegitimate child; but if the man couldn’t be persuaded or forced to do the “right thing,” then women faced social ruin, and their babies, for the most part, a miserable fate.’205
The ‘Pill’, safe and reliable contraception that allowed women to control their own fertility, emerged just as the women’s liberation movement was beginning to take off. Young women, already questioning the regulations and restrictions placed upon them, challenged the double standard that dictated only men could enjoy sex. Women wanted a sexual revolution so they could enjoy this freedom too. Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of rock band The Pretenders, sums up the mood of the times: ‘Never mind LSD – a passing fad – the pill was king, and like Cher it needed no second name.’
For Hynde this was something to celebrate: ‘In the name of women’s lib, women were becoming like men, and that was good news for me because I wanted what the boys had. In thinking we were in charge of our own sexuality, now we could say “yes” instead of “no”.’206 Wolf agrees, ‘Those of us who came to adulthood post-Pill stand on another shore, an ocean apart from all generations before us. Sex can be safe. You can relax about it. Women can avoid an undesired pregnancy, completely, securely, and on their own.’207 But today, erstwhile proponents of the sexual revolution express retrospective qualms. Even Hynde sounds a note of caution: ‘Now we could fuck and run like they did, even if it didn’t really suit our nature.’208
Contraception and abortion freed women from the constraints of their biology. Campaigners fought to secure access to them even when this meant taking on the church as well as national governments. As Mary Kenny recalls, feminists in Ireland famously boarded trains from Belfast in the north laden with condoms to distribute in the Catholic south where it had been illegal to sell ‘birth control artefacts’ since 1935. Kenny explains, in 1971 ‘a group of us in the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement decided to go to Belfast – then, as now, within the United Kingdom – purchase condoms and spermicides, and bring them back across the Border and declare them at Connolly Station (to the mortifying embarrassment of the customs officers).’209 In France, a Suppression of Contraception Act was passed in 1920 and was not repealed until 1967 while several American states also had legislation to prevent the sale or distribution of birth control products.
More than any other form of contraception, the pill allowed women to separate sex from pregnancy. Hynde again taps into the mood of the time, ‘Sex was becoming a recreational lifestyle choice. If you were to mention the word ‘procreation’ you’d probably get thrown out of any protest, commune or crash pad for being a bummer. Only a straight person would think like that.’ This drove other social changes: men and women began to delay getting married and when they did they had fewer children.
No sooner had the sexual revolution begun than feminists started to argue that sex was problematic. Writing in 1969, Kate Millett describes intercourse as ‘an assertion of mastery, one that announces his own higher caste and proves it upon a victim who is expected to surrender, serve and be satisfied’.210 Later, Andrea Dworkin describes bluntly ‘the role of the fuck in controlling women’.211 At the very moment sex stopped being about procreation, it began to be seen, by some, as a form of oppression and a means of patriarchal domination. Dworkin’s 1987 book, Intercourse, elaborates her theory that heterosexual sex is used by men to control, possess and dominate women.
These new ideas developed in climate that was already reappraising the sexual revolution because of the emergence of the AIDS virus. Panic-fuelled campaigns drew a link between casual sex and the transmission of AIDS. As Katie Roiphe points out in her exploration of attitudes to sex on campus in the early 1990s, ‘Now instead of liberation and libido, the emphasis is on trauma and disease.’212 For young women at this time, she explains, ‘the shift from free love to safe sex is itself part of our experience. Our sexual climate, then, incorporates the movement from one set of sexual mores to another.’213 Not for the first time we see a coincidence between the aims of radical feminism and more socially conservative moralists.
Those revising the history of the sexual revolution in the 1980s were consolidating around one half of a divisive split within feminism. As we will explore in more detail in Chapter Nine, second-wave feminism in the 1970s became increasingly fractured according to race, social class and sexuality; there was a growing divide between socialist, radical and liberal feminism. For a while, it looked as if the answer to this splintering could be found in the promotion of a common enemy: the patriarchy. All women, feminists at this time told us, shared an experience of being objectified and sexualized by men in a way that reinforced patriarchal power relations and kept women in a subordinate social position.
During the 1970s and the 1980s, feminists played a significant role in shedding light on previously private issues such as domestic violence. This was an important and much needed step. However, domestic violence began to be understood less in relation to the financial and practical power imbalances that existed in many relationships and more in the context of female psychological vulnerability and innate male aggression. In this way, domestic violence went beyond the immediacy of any individual woman’s situation and social issues were reconsidered as diagnosable syndromes. The American psychologist Martin Seligman developed a theory of ‘learned helplessness’ in the 1960s and this was taken up by fellow psychologist and feminist Lenore Walker. Walker had a longstanding interest in the issue of domestic violence and founded the Domestic Violence Institute to conduct further research. Walker’s theory of ‘learned helplessness’ led her to develop the ‘cycle of abuse’ model to explain abusive relationships. The cycle of abuse suggests that victims of domestic violence remain trapped within a situation, destined to play itself out repeatedly, until the relationship is abandoned altogether or some external intervention takes place. It focuses primarily on the psychological characteristics of the ‘co-dependent’ individuals within an intimate relationship.
Walker published her findings in 1979 in The Battered Woman. Here, she considers issues such as marital rape and child abuse as well as domestic violence. She explores the impact of exposure to violence on children, the personality characteristics of different types of batterers and new psychotherapy models for batterers and their victims. From this perspective, domestic violence stops being a feature of individual relationships within a specific set of circumstances. Instead it becomes a psychological condition associated with a particular personality type. Stopping domestic violence becomes a question of employing the correct psychological interventions as well as offering practical support. This focus on psychological harm enshrines women and children as victims of domestic violence – and men as perpetrators – even after the abusive relationship has ended. The woman is now said to be suffering from ‘battered wife syndrome’, later to become a legally recognized defence for spouse murder. It assumes that women, having been traumatized at the hands of their husbands, are so psychologically damaged they can no longer act rationally or exercise control over their actions.
At the same time as the identification of battered wife syndrome came the ‘discovery’ of sexual harassment. Second-wave feminists tried to explain why gender inequality continued despite equal pay and anti-discrimination legislation. This led to the articulation of sexual harassment – an issue which, up until this point, had no specific name. There was a particular focus upon sexual harassment within the workplace where gender inequality seemed to be entrenched. The legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon successfully argued that sexual harassment was a feature of sexual discrimination and needed to be outlawed if women were to have equal opportunities in education and work. Linking sexual harassment to formal processes of discrimination meant drawing equivalence between an individual woman’s experiences of being mistreated, perhaps groped or propositioned in the office, with policies such as a marriage bar.
This expanded the definition of discrimination and moved sexual harassment away from a problem experienced and dealt with by individuals within a specific context to it being seen as a broader explanation for women’s disadvantage. The cause of women’s lack of opportunities and continued underperformance in education and work became located within their experiences of sexual harassment rather than in practical obstacles such as lack of access to childcare or in social pressures on women to remain at home once they had children. Instead, the explanation for continued inequality between the sexes was laid firmly with the collective bad behaviour of men. Mackinnon explained that sexual harassment was not tangential to women’s inequality but ‘a crucial expression of it’.214 Nonetheless, it turned out to be far more difficult a problem to solve than some other obstacles working women faced.
Following a 1976 court case, sexual harassment in America became legally recognized as a form of discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Heightened awareness of the issue meant that suddenly sexual harassment was uncovered everywhere; writing in 1979, MacKinnon reports that seven out of ten women had experienced sexual harassment ‘in some form at some point in their work lives’.215 For a previously unidentified problem to encompass so many people in such a short space of time is quite remarkable. Daphne Patai, author of Heterophobia, is cynical about the processes that led women to attach this label to their experiences. She suggests the efforts, particularly virulent on university campuses, to uncover and name this newly discovered problem are best described as a ‘Sexual Harassment Industry’. Patai argues this industry offers women a ‘training in victimhood’, through which they ‘learn how to identify the injuries they suffer’ and come to see themselves first as ‘victims’ then as ‘survivors’.216
According to Patai, the sudden explosion in the number of sexual harassment victims suggests the offence is too broadly defined and the problem overstated. However, this is not to deny that sexual harassment takes place: Lin Farley, Catharine MacKinnon and other feminists who first drew attention to sexual harassment did indeed identify a particular problem. In the 1970s, women had a much lower status in the workforce than they do today. They often held poorly paid and insecure jobs and had few employment rights. As Mackinnon correctly points out, because women are ‘economically vulnerable they are sexually exposed’.217 Women’s low status could be exploited by unscrupulous bosses safe in the knowledge that those wanting to keep their jobs had little option other than to put up with unwanted advances. Mackinnon makes clear, ‘following the woman’s refusal, the man retaliated through use of his power over her job or career’.218 The Sexual Harassment Industry was less quick to point out that not all male bosses harassed their female employees – and neither did all women see all sexual advances as unwelcome.
The problem for women was not just that feminist campaigns defined sexual harassment far too broadly; more importantly, they did not focus on improving women’s pay and conditions or raising their status in the workplace. Instead, sexual harassment came to be viewed as a problem solely of men’s bad behaviour. Mackinnon spells this out: ‘The common denominator is that the perpetrators tend to be men, the victims women.’219 This suggests that the power imbalance that enabled sexual harassment to occur was not driven by women’s precarious employment conditions but by the innate characteristics of men and women. Again, MacKinnon makes this point clearly: ‘The relationship between a woman’s anatomy and her social fate is the pivot on which turn all attempts, and opposition to attempts, to define or change her situation.’220
Campaigns against sexual harassment focus on exposing and correcting men’s offensive behaviour. This means women have to recognize themselves as victims so that men can be held to account for their indiscretions. As a result, workplace relationships, perhaps between friends or family members, become problematized and situations that were previously viewed as trivial, or something women could easily deal with themselves, are re-interpreted as abusive. Any solution to women’s problems that requires women see themselves as victims can only ever be a hollow victory.
Teaching women to see themselves as victims increases the perception of sexual harassment as a significant problem. It’s no surprise then that, despite the fundamental transformation in women’s working lives since the 1970s, the problem of sexual harassment has not gone away. Instead, over the course of four decades, definitions of sexual harassment have become ever more expansive and are now incorporated into the law. The UK’s Equality Act (2010) describes behaviour as sexual harassment ‘if it is either meant to, or has the effect of violating your dignity, or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’.221
Legally, sexual harassment encompasses, ‘sexual comments or jokes, physical behaviour, including unwelcome sexual advances, touching and various forms of sexual assault, displaying pictures, photos or drawings of a sexual nature, sending emails with a sexual content’.222 By this definition, sexual harassment is entirely subjective – what one woman experiences as unwelcome another might see as a compliment. Whether or not a picture, email or joke violates someone’s dignity or creates an offensive environment can only be determined by the recipient. The need, identified by Patai, for a Sexual Harassment Industry not only to train women to see themselves as victims but also to step in and reprimand the male perpetrators becomes clear.
A 2016 survey conducted by the UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC) reported that over half of all women have experienced sexual harassment at work.223 The problem with subjective definitions of harassment is apparent in the methods the TUC researchers used to gather their headline-generating data. The claim that ‘over half’ of women have experienced sexual harassment refers to 52 per cent of roughly 800 women surveyed. A third of those questioned had been subjected to unwelcome jokes and a quarter had experienced unwanted touching. The largest category of positive responses came from women who had heard a comment of a sexual nature being made about another woman or women in general. In other words, a woman who overheard colleagues share a lewd joke a decade ago, who had never interpreted this as sexual harassment, comes to be counted as a victim.
The TUC researchers express concern that: ‘Women seemed reluctant to extend the meaning of sexual harassment to their own experience; this was not because they failed to understand what constituted sexual harassment. Rather, it was because women had defined certain acts in terms of seriousness and therefore, did not define their own experience as serious enough.’ In other words, women who understood the meaning of sexual harassment had decided that their experiences were not serious: yet they were still recorded as victims. The results of surveys like this are reported in good faith because people have come to accept uncritically a narrative of women as victims. Feminism comes to be concerned not just with correcting male behaviour but with regulating how women see themselves.
The issue of sexual harassment quickly spread beyond the workplace. Today, it is presented as a problem for women in all aspects of their lives. Towards the end of 2014, a video of an actress walking through New York became a viral hit. A hidden camera filmed the woman as she was ‘cat-called’ over 100 times. This footage was then edited down to a two-minute clip and viewers watched as the woman, ‘endured a barrage of comments like: “What’s up, Beautiful?” “Smile!” and “God bless you, Mami”’.224 This was said to illustrate the hostile environment women face every day. However, women generally do not walk for ten hours at a stretch, alone, and looking for examples of cat-calling to film. As with all such projects, the makers of this video found exactly what they set out to discover.
The perception that women are bombarded by harassment from the moment they leave their homes leads, inevitably, to calls for greater regulation of public life. In the British city of Nottingham, men’s ‘uninvited verbal engagement’ of women is now recorded by police as a hate crime equivalent to racial abuse. This has major consequences for civil liberties. The right to risk an uninvited comment is integral to our freedom as citizens – one that many people welcome rather than perceive to be a risk. A feminism that tells us women need police protection from such exchanges is no champion women’s liberation. Yet challenging incursions into our civil liberties conducted in the name of feminism is complicated by the promotion of such new legislation as pro-woman.
Campaigns against sexual harassment took off when feminists in the 1970s looked to the cultural sphere – and the attitudes and values it promoted – as the cause of sexual inequality. Pornography in particular was singled out for objectifying and degrading women. Writing in a 1974 essay, feminist activist Robin Morgan made the now famous claim that ‘pornography is the theory and rape is the practice’.225 This heralded a strange alliance between radical feminists and conservatives. Catharine MacKinnon’s characterization of pornography as the active subordination of women found echoes in the work of the conservative campaigner against sex education, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly who likewise argued that ‘pornography really should be defined as the degradation of women’. Schlafly claimed pornography subordinates women ‘for the sexual, exploitative, and even sadistic and violent pleasures of men’,226 further sharing with MacKinnon a presumption that pornography might have a particular impact upon a man ‘who is already prone to violence against women’.227
The focus on pornography represented a broader feminist critique of heterosexuality as the means through which men, in the form of the patriarchy, collectively exercised power over all women. Dworkin argued that ‘as long as men desire women for intercourse, and women are used as sexual objects, regardless of laws and other public reforms, women’s status will be low, degraded’.228 In the 1960s, Betty Friedan argued that the ‘lavender menace’ of lesbianism was a threat to the women’s movement; just two decades later ‘the destruction of heterosexuality as a system’ had become an aim for some feminists.229 Feminism was beginning to assert its influence in the realm of private relationships. Although MacKinnon’s claim that heterosexual sex is rape, and Dworkin’s cynical retort that romance is merely ‘rape embellished with meaningful looks’ never gained popular traction among women, such views did have an impact upon the direction of feminism at this time.230
Dworkin and Mackinnon argued that pornography was not simply speech or free expression but an act of discrimination and therefore it did not warrant protection under the First Amendment. This argument was partially successful in a legal attempt to get pornography recognized as a violation of women’s civil rights. In 1984, an anti-pornography civil rights ordinance was enacted in the city of Indianapolis allowing women harmed by pornography – even indirectly – to claim damages. However, this legislation was soon overturned by the Supreme Court that sought to uphold freedom of speech.
Not all members of the women’s movement agreed with what was seen as a censorious and explicitly anti-male turn in feminism. Those, like Dworkin and MacKinnon, who supported legal restrictions against pornography and sexual harassment, and saw heterosexual intercourse as the primary source of women’s oppression, were characterized as ‘sex-negative’. Nadine Strossen, author of Defending Pornography and former chair of the American Civil Liberties Union, refers to feminists wanting to restrict pornography as ‘pro-censorship’. She says their claim that women are ‘being manipulated as tools of “pimps” or “pornographers”’ contains ‘at least as subordinating or degrading a view of women as does the pornography they decry’.231 She sums up the feminist anti-pornography argument as being based on nothing more than speculation that it may lead to discrimination or violence against women. ‘If we should restrict pornography on this basis, then why shouldn’t we suppress any expression that might ultimately have a negative effect?’ asks Strossen.232
Feminists such as Strossen, Kathy Acker, Camille Paglia and Wendy Kaminer who campaigned against censorship and suggested that sexual freedom was an important part of women’s liberation were labelled ‘sex-positive’. Sex-positive feminists claimed that women could consent to take part in pornography and, far from being damaged by it, could get just as much pleasure from it as men. They argued that linking pornography directly to rape assumes a degraded view of men while, at the same time, absolving individual rapists of responsibility for their actions. Battles around pornography and sexual harassment sharply divided feminists in the 1970s and 1980s and, in the short term at least, led to a further splintering within the women’s movement.
In the UK, a significant event in the positioning of women and children as victims of abuse by men within their own homes was the 1987 Cleveland child abuse crisis. A new method of detecting abuse, examining anal dilation, was used on children in a hospital in Middlesbrough, a town in the north east of England. Over 120 children were removed from their families and taken into the care of social services before the technique was finally discredited. Health professionals and social workers were all too ready to believe that the sexual abuse of children was widespread. The feminist writer Bea Campbell, reflecting in the aftermath of the scandal, chose to criticize not the doctors who instigated the test for sexual abuse with little evidence, or the social workers who removed children from their families on the word of a single doctor, but the police who ‘quickly took the side of the fathers’.233 She explains, ‘For the police there is a particular problem: as a praetorian guard of masculinity, sexual abuse faces them with an accusation against their own gender.’234 The upshot of the Cleveland scandal was not a retreat away from public intervention into the private sphere but calls for more recognition of men as perpetrators of abuse within the home.
Women were to see themselves as victims, or at very least potential victims, irrespective of anything they might or might not have experienced personally. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, not only does the word victim proliferate in use, its definition also expands. It is no longer used solely to describe a specific event in the past tense, for example, ‘to have been a victim of a crime’. Instead, it comes to describe a permanent state in the present. This broader meaning has remained and today we talk of victims of sexual harassment, child abuse and domestic violence not as people who have been through, and emerged from, a terrible ordeal, but as people who carry with them a permanent psychological mark of their experiences. Being a victim becomes an intrinsic part of who they are, it is incorporated into a woman’s sense of identity.
Feminism has internalized the view of women as victims to such an extent it is no longer relevant whether an individual woman has had personal experience of violence, abuse or rape. Women who have personally suffered are merely typical of the suffering endured by all women. From the late 1970s onwards, to be a feminist was to recognize women as victims and men as perpetrators of abuse. To perform feminism at events such as Reclaim the Night marches involved raising awareness and gaining public recognition for the myriad ways women are abused. Once invested in victim status, women are pushed to defend this position. Any attempt to challenge the perception of women as victims strikes at the heart of what it means to be a feminist and also at what it means to be a woman. It is perceived as an existential threat rather than just a presentation of a counterargument.
Over recent years, the issue of sexual harassment has morphed into a more generalized discussion of ‘rape culture’; a term which was first used in the 1970s. The discourse of rape culture presents the most extreme forms of sexual violence as everyday occurrences by focusing on a broader set of attitudes and beliefs rather than on specific crimes. One author, writing in 1993, described rape culture as ‘a society where violence is seen as sexy’.235 Rape culture is said to be manifest in song lyrics, advertisements and pornographic images that sexually objectify women, as well as in male-dominated sports and fraternities where discussion of rape is trivialized in jokes and comments. Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me, argues the term rape culture is useful precisely because it ‘insists that a wider culture generates individual crimes’.236
The narrative of rape culture shifts attention away from a particular act carried out by a deviant individual to present rape as being socially legitimized behaviour on a continuum with other actions such as suggestive comments. Discussion of rape culture began to take off in earnest in 2011 after a Toronto policeman told women students to protect themselves from rape by not dressing like ‘sluts’. This comment was roundly interpreted as a demand on women to change their behaviour rather than on men to stop committing rape. Periodically, a British judge hits the headlines for similar reasons, perhaps for commenting that women, who get so drunk they cannot remember what happened, make less credible witnesses in rape trials. Such attitudes are said to be symptomatic of rape culture in blaming victims for being raped. ‘Slut walk’ protesters claim men and women should be equally free to drink as much as they want and dress how they choose without fearing being raped.
The separation of a rape culture from actual incidence of rape helps propagate a view that all women are potential victims. It creates a climate of fear by eliding words with actions, song lyrics with sexual assault and fraternity chants with rape. As such it trivializes rape and distances the behaviour of the rapist from responsibility for their actions. Critics such as Wendy McElroy argue rape culture redefines rape not as a crime committed by one man against one woman but as a more generalized ‘political act committed collectively by men against women’. She explains that rape culture ‘is a social construct that derives from the concept of “the patriarchy”, a system of oppression by which women as a class are said to be victimized by men as a class through the omnipresent threat of sexual violence’.237
The concept of rape culture is underpinned by an assumption that rape is common, under-reported and surrounded by myths. But accurately assessing the prevalence of rape is notoriously difficult. The Crime Survey estimates that 85,000 women in England and Wales are raped each year but, as Luke Gittos, author of Why Rape Culture is a Dangerous Myth points out, this is not a measure of recorded crimes. Instead, it is based on a calculation that 0.5 per cent of women have been victims of rape or sexual assault by penetration in the previous 12 months. This figure is then multiplied up to represent the population as a whole.
Respondents to the crime survey were not asked if they had been raped but if they had been penetrated without consent, which, as Gittos suggests, does not necessarily make someone a ‘victim’ of rape or serious sexual assault, even in law. The crucial point, missed by the rape culture crusaders, is that ‘rape requires that the perpetrator lacked an honest belief in consent’. The figure of 85,000 ‘fails to capture those circumstances where a complainant may have been incapable of consenting, but the perpetrator did not know they lacked such capacity and honestly and reasonably believed they were consenting’.238 Interestingly, 19 per cent of those who reported penetration without consent did not report the incident to the police because they said it was a ‘private/family matter and not police business’ while a further 11 per cent said the matter was ‘too trivial and not worth reporting’.239 In other words, women who do not consider they have been raped are being recorded in crime statistics.
Of the assumed 85,000 rapes each year, 15 per cent are reported to the police and only 1,000 result in a conviction. Campaigners argue a huge number of rape cases go unreported but, by its very nature, unreported crime is difficult to quantify. Further, it is assumed that only a tiny proportion of rapists are ever punished and the gap between the number of reported rapes and the number of convictions is put down to the attitudes of all involved in the judicial process. As Helen Reece, then Associate Professor of Family Law, notes, this suggests that ‘reform has proved relatively ineffective because a range of agents hold “rape myths”’. In contrast, Reece argues, ‘the claim that rape myths are widespread may be challenged on three grounds: first, some of the attitudes are not myths; secondly, not all myths are about rape; thirdly, there is little evidence that the rape myths are widespread. To a troubling extent, we are in the process of creating myths about myths.’240 Campaigners are unperturbed by the accuracy of statistics because they are less concerned about actual incidences of rape than they are about attitudes and behaviour that are said to create ‘an environment in which rape and sexual violence is seen as more acceptable’.241
Proponents of rape culture argue rape has become normalized. In America, discussion around rape culture was ignited by a case in Steubenville, Ohio, involving the sexual assault of a teenage girl. Feminists criticized the media’s focus on the loss to the boys rather than the harm to the victim as an example of ‘the normalization of rape’. A similar charge was levelled at coverage of student Brock Turner, found guilty of three counts of sexual assault, which made frequent references to his doomed swimming career.242 In the UK, professional footballer Ched Evans was imprisoned for rape but later had his conviction overturned. This did not stop campaigners from arguing he should be prevented from resuming his playing career. This focus on a few high-profile individuals takes us far away from a rational investigation into the likelihood of a woman being raped.
Alarmingly for women, what is becoming normalized in the rape culture narrative is the assumption that men and women should be treated differently before the law. Campaigners argue women cannot give full consent to sex, especially if they have consumed alcohol: if both parties are drunk at the point at which they have sex, the man should be held responsible for rape. Even when a woman says yes to sex, the man needs to prove that the woman knew what she was consenting to. This recalls Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that ‘in the context of a patriarchal society, women cannot give informed consent’.243 As Patai argues, this represents an astonishing recapitulation of ‘traditional, pre-feminist stereotypes about men and women, according to which women have been socialized into passivity and weakness’. The upshot, lost on many of today’s feminists, is that ‘men have freedom and responsibility but women have none’.244 The assumption that women are passive and have no sexual agency sets feminism back decades.
The panic about rape culture is particularly virulent in higher education. The 1990s campus is described by Katie Roiphe in The Morning After: ‘We arrive at college amid a flurry of warnings: “Since you cannot tell who has the potential for rape by simply looking, be on your guard with every man.”’245 Today these warnings come with the pseudo-scientific backing of statistics. In the US, it’s often uncritically reported that one in five women are raped at college.246 Meanwhile, in the UK, we’re told that a third of female students have been groped and one in four has experienced ‘unwanted sexual advances’.247 The more such claims are repeated the more veracity they appear to accrue but dig beneath the surface and the evidence crumbles away.
The ‘one in five’ statistic comes from a 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study conducted by the American National Institute of Justice, a division of the Justice Department.248 The research was conducted at just two universities, but politicians, journalists and campaigners have since applied this small sample across all US college campuses.249 It is rarely acknowledged that this frequently cited figure has even been criticized by those who conducted the research that led to it.250 In the UK, most often quoted is a 2010 report which claims that 68 per cent of women students have been victims of sexual harassment.251 This data is based on a tiny sample size of just 2000 self-selecting participants who completed an online survey that grouped together behaviour ranging from sexist jokes and inappropriate touching to serious sexual molestation. Again, we see that these figures are extrapolated to the student population as a whole. Christina Hoff Sommers, a critic of rape culture hysteria, argues we are in the throes of ‘one of those panics where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish – and otherwise sensible people abandon their critical facilities’.252
Such is the strength of the rape culture narrative that fact and fiction become blurred. In November 2014, Rolling Stone magazine published the story of ‘Jackie’, a young woman who alleged she had been gang raped at a fraternity party.253 The absence of evidence to substantiate her account was not to stand in the way of a story that appeared to confirm all feminists’ worst fears of women’s safety on campus. Yet Jackie’s claims unravelled and the story was later retracted. This would no doubt have happened more quickly if there wasn’t an exceptionalism surrounding rape victims that moves us away from ‘innocent until proven guilty’ towards an uncritical ‘I believe her’. Any attempt at questioning an alleged victim’s narrative is said to re-inflict trauma and normal legal procedures, it is argued, should be jettisoned.254 Campaigners seeking to raise awareness of rape culture appear unconcerned about evidence – their efforts are spent promoting what they assume to be a greater truth. That, as a consequence of this distorted narrative, some women students are afraid to walk across campus unaccompanied after dark is never the fault of the awareness raisers. On the contrary, it is considered further justification for self-perpetuating fear-mongering.
In the eyes of feminist campus crusaders, rape is everywhere. As MacKinnon and Dworkin’s offspring, they might not go quite as far as to claim that all heterosexual intercourse is rape but certainly they see all unpleasant or regretted-after-the-event sex is rape. As Roiphe puts it, ‘the word “rape” itself expands to include any kind of sex a woman experiences as negative’. She continues, ‘You can change your mind afterward. Regret can signify rape. A night that was a blur, a night you wish hadn’t happened, can be rape.’255 As a result of this linguistic overreach, sex has become so problematized that some young women genuinely do not know whether or not they have been raped.256 In the past, the severity of the crime of rape and the physical nature of the attack would leave little room for doubt. Today, these certainties no longer hold. Although no young woman would ever say she wanted to be raped, the accounts of college rape survivors seem to suggest a perverse determination to interpret past relationships so as to reach this conclusion.
Writing in 2000, Nadine Strossen declared, ‘We are in the midst of a fully-fledged “sex panic,” in which seemingly all descriptions and depictions of human sexuality are becoming embattled.’257 The panic has not gone away. In this context, all the rituals of growing up and forming relationships – flirtation, drinking, showing off, hooking-up, regret and doing it all again – become interpreted as a prelude to the act of rape. Raising awareness of rape culture is unlikely to prevent one rape from taking place. In fact, the opposite is the case and it can only lead to an exponential growth in the number of rapes reported. This is disastrous for young people. It leads to a generation of frightened young women and falsely accused young men expelled from college, ostracized and possibly facing legal charges. It paves the way for consent classes, chaperones and the regulation of young people’s private relationships.
Dworkin and MacKinnon never did succeed in getting pornography outlawed and today it is more accessible than ever before. Soft pornography has become part of daily life with sexualized images used in advertisements, music videos and even in children’s clothing. But this is hardly a victory for sex-positive feminism. Sexual harassment was afforded legal status as discrimination, chiming as it did with an era more willing to recognize women as victims. In the 1980s, the AIDS panic ushered in a new fear of sex being played out not in arguments about religion and morality but through the prism of health. There was to be no return to an era of sexual liberation. Today, the prevalence of pornography, and especially self-pornography, all too often represents a retreat from the necessity of involving another person in a sexual relationship. Nude selfies are less indicative of a more liberal attitude towards sex than a reluctance to leave the privacy of one’s bedroom.
Dworkin and MacKinnon may not have won the sex wars in the short term but their arguments against objectifying images of women, the blurred lines between heterosexual sex and rape and the need to regulate expressions of sexuality found most resonance with a later generation of feminists. Today, the subjective and socially constructed concept of sexual harassment is still presented as a persistent problem. Rhetoric is inflationary: we move at a stroke from harassment to violence to abuse; from woman to girl, from victim to survivor. Definitions of sexual violence have become ever broader:
Sexual violence against women is often perpetrated by intimate partners, as well as by strangers, and takes many forms, including rape, sexual assault, unwanted sexual advances or comments, trafficking, and sexually coercive behaviour. Globally, one in three women has experienced either physical or sexual violence.258
Violence against women, feminist campaigners tell us repeatedly, has become ‘pandemic’ and, as Rebecca Solnit, author of the viral essay Men Explain Things To Me, points out, ‘it gets explained by anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of them all’.259 While feminists may wish men in general, rather than specific groups of men, were more frequently labelled as the perpetrators of sexual violence, there is no escaping gender as an attribute of victims. Time and again we are reminded that it is women who are the victims of sexual violence. Loose definitions lead to the charge that ‘violence against women and girls is at epidemic levels’.260 Words like ‘epidemic’ create a highly charged vision of an escalating threat to women. This violence is rarely explained by war, poverty or inequality between men and women. Instead, it is put down to inherent traits within men. Masculinity is the problem women face.
According to Solnit, masculinity is primarily associated with violence, ‘Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.’261 To broaden the definition of violence to such an extent trivializes the experiences of women who have been raped or sexually assaulted. But broad definitions are preferred by campaigners because they enable all women to attach to themselves the label of victim. Obviously, this is not to say that no women in the West are victims of sexual violence or that all lead prosperous and stable lives. However, women who do experience violence are not best helped by relativizing their experiences to the point of meaninglessness.
Sexual violence and rape are undoubtedly serious problems, but when definitions are this broad then the surprise is that only one in three women is a victim. When all actions perceived by women as unwanted are on a continuum with rape and violence, and all women are incorporated into the category of victim, identifying and helping women who have suffered actual physical or sexual harm becomes increasingly difficult. Crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault and rape all deserve to be taken seriously rather than expanded and inflated to such an extent that they lose all meaning.
In the 1990s, the definition of violence expanded – and the corresponding group of victims increased – with the idea that language can inflict actual psychic harm on people. The opening lines of a 1993 book, Words That Wound, describe how words are used ‘as weapons, to ambush, terrorize, wound and degrade’.262 We are told that ‘victims of vicious hate propaganda experience physiological symptoms and emotional distress ranging from fear in the gut to rapid pulse rate and difficulty in breathing, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, hypertension, psychosis, and suicide’.263 One contributor calls the use of racist language, ‘spirit murder’.
This equation of words with violence makes sense only when harm is experienced subjectively: if I am offended then a statement is, by definition, offensive. It also assumes a fragile sense of self; not a robust individual but an ‘identity’ that is constructed through language and can, therefore, be dismantled through language. The crime of ‘spirit murder’ is the invalidation of identity and language is the source of oppression. When being a woman becomes an identity like any other, one that is fragile and vulnerable to invalidation, threats are everywhere. To be a woman is to be a victim; to be a feminist is to fight against spirit murder and for recognition of women as victims.
Today, the definition of violence envelops ever more women in the category of victim. In March 2017, organizers of a women’s strike against President Trump explained that women experience:
the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women; the violence of state criminalization of migratory movements; the violence of mass incarceration; and the institutional violence against women’s bodies through abortion bans and lack of access to free healthcare and free abortion.264
What’s notable here, alongside a definition of violence far removed from any actual physical threat, is the checklist of special interest groups; lesbian, trans and queer women, who have victim status, not because of specifically violent situations they find themselves in, but as a result of who they are.
Even though young women today are largely freed from the moral and religious pressures of a previous era, they are far from sexually liberated. The desire to present women as victims of sexual harassment and rape and discriminated against through pornography removes sexual agency from women. If young people are to enjoy sex and forge intimate relationships with one another, they need to be freed from a narrative of risk. For older generations, this means backing off and leaving millennials to work things out for themselves, even if they make some mistakes along the way. After all, this is what people have done since the beginning of time.
The rape culture narrative benefits only feminist campaigners who get an opportunity to socialize young men and women into forming relationships in a way that meets with their approval. The next chapter explores the consequences of this in relation to the collapse of intimacy and the demonizing of masculinity.