This caption was used as part of a 2019 sexual violence prevention campaign in which posters displaying this message were hung in men’s toilets in pubs and nightclubs in London, UK. A similar UK poster campaign called #AskforAngela was launched in 2016 which also aimed to prevent sexual violence. The #AskforAngela campaign was aimed at helping those experiencing unwanted sexual attention in public venues by inviting them to ask staff for help, using the discreet codeword “Angela”. Important to note is that the #AskforAngela posters were hung in women’s toilets. The intended audience for both poster campaigns is made clear from where they were displayed; the message for potential perpetrators was aimed at men and the message for actual or potential victims was aimed at women. When taken together, these two campaigns make visible dominant ideas about gendered patterns of perpetration and victimisation—it is women who are constituted as the victims of sexual violence by men. The gendered targeting of sexual violence prevention messages would seem reasonable given the pervasive and disproportionate pattern of victimisation of women by men (Yucel et al., 2019). However, as I have argued throughout this book, feminist theorisation has also pointed to how binary understandings of male perpetrators and female victims rest on normative heterosexual scripts in which men are dominantly constituted as active and women as passive. These gendered patterns of men’s sexual agency and women’s relative passivity have been theorised, in Gavey’s (2018) words, as the “cultural scaffolding” that enables the possibility for sexual violence. While women’s sexual agency and empowerment has been a recurrent motif in popular culture over the last 20 or so years, these understandings have not displaced those around women’s passivity in relation to sexual victimisation (see Chapter 3).
The poster campaign which addresses men as perpetrators uses an example of the kind of behaviour that has been trivialised and even dismissed as not really counting as sexual violence (e.g. Fileborn & Phillips, 2019; Guiffre & Williams, 2005; Mott & Condor, 1997). This is a stark contrast to how this behaviour is cast in the poster in which it is defined as a criminal sexual offence. This idea is reinforced in the poster’s warning that men who engage in such behaviour are “offenders”, and “will be reported” by venue staff who have a “have a zero tolerance attitude towards sexual assaults” (“A smack”, para. 3). The move towards framing such behaviour within criminal justice terms is a new phenomenon in its visibility and prominence in contemporary culture. In this chapter, I explore the linking of sexual harassment and criminality in popular discourse. Of particular focus is the rise in the predominance of the sexual predator discourse in understanding celebrity men who were called out for sexual harassment and violence in #MeToo. The implications that the sexual predator discourse has for understanding men and male perpetrators of sexual harassment will be examined.
Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault and Sex Offending
The example of a “smack on the bum” in the aforementioned poster campaign is a cultural exemplar of everyday forms of sexual harassment. This particular example fits well with efforts to document and theorise less extreme instances of sexual harassment. Wise and Stanley (1987) referred to such instances using the analogy of a dripping tap to capture the unremarkable regularity of sexual harassment in women’s everyday lives. Wise and Stanley (1987) also used this analogy to point to the normalisation of routine sexual harassment and the ways in which it could be dismissed as trivial. The poster campaign challenges the trivialisation of the behaviour by defining it as a sexual assault. This is notable because sexual harassment and sexual assault have, in previously decades, been located as conceptually different within legal and popular discourse. More specifically, sexual assault has been more firmly located within crime and deviance discourses, whereas sexual harassment has been framed legally as a civil issue within discourses of workplace sex discrimination (e.g. Gregory & Lees, 1999; Mackinnon, 1979; Stockdale et al., 2019). As a form of sex discrimination, sexism has been treated as central to understanding the phenomenon of sexual harassment. However, this has not always been the case in understandings of sexual assault. As Gavey (2018) notes in her review of her landmark book on the cultural scaffolding of rape, sexism and misogyny were missing or implicit in her original work despite the ways in which the scaffolding described is sexist.
There’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated. (Valiente & Williams, 2017, para. 8)
I have been a victim of each component of the sexual assault spectrum of which you speak. They all hurt…they are all connected to a patriarchy intertwined with normalized, accepted -- even welcomed - misogyny. (Fisher, 2017, para. 4)
In a similar vein, the move towards an understanding of “dripping tap” instances of sexual harassment as criminal sexual assault can be seen to ward off their potential trivialisation. Pertinent to this move is that it also frames perpetrators of sexual harassment as sex offenders. The link between sexual harassment and sex offending has circulated in media coverage of #MeToo by the use of the term “sexual predator” to describe those identified as perpetrators. The term sexual predator is embedded within the language of Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws in the US. These laws were introduced in the early 1990s in reaction to high-profile sexual violence cases, often involving child victims. The purpose of these laws was to provide legally endorsed management of sex offenders who had served their prison sentence but were seen as highly likely to reoffend (Donohue & Bromberg, 2019). Their recidivism risk was often based on a diagnosis of a psychological disorder linked to “dangerousness” (Newring & Carter, 2019, p. 170). The introduction of SVP laws paralleled a rise of the term in media discourse which has clearly linked the figure of the sexual predator to pathology and violence (DiBennardo, 2018). Following these developments in the US, the UK introduced tougher penalties in the Sexual Offences Act (2003), which allowed the monitoring of those considered at risk of recidivism through the sexual offences register.
The figure of the sexual predator is heavily associated with animalistic domination and violence that draws on associations with “the frightening, the disgusting, the horrible, the dangerous, and the unbearably, and erotically, fascinating: the human monster” (Douard, 2007, p. 39). DiBennardo (2018) suggests that in media discourse, the term sexual predator has been used most often to describe offenders in cases involving children. The use of the term in child victim cases highlights the vulnerability and passivity of children who are “preyed upon”, as well as the position of the sexual predator as outside the margins of cultural intelligibility. That the term sexual predator is now in common usage to describe those who sexually harass adult women is noteworthy because, in doing so, women are positioned as “prey” which produces them as passive and vulnerable in relation to sexually predatory men. As I mentioned earlier, the representation and treatment of women as passive in relation to men has been treated as a key part of the culturally scaffolding that enables sexual violence (Gavey, 2018; see Chapter 3). The associations of the sexual predator with extreme violence and pathology in many ways seems an uneasy fit with #MeToo. For example, Fileborn and Phillips (2019) suggest that one of the impacts of #MeToo has been to challenge the boundaries of sexual violence. This is because many #MeToo narratives that have become heard contest a narrow focus on extreme forms of sexual violence. The figure of the sexual predator in the #MeToo reporting may well support concerns that the media coverage has tended to frame perpetrators as proverbial bad apples (Gill & Orgad, 2018). Importantly, Loney-Howes (2019) argues that the focus on individual perpetrators as deviant, rogue or sick in the #MeToo coverage may also serve the carceral agenda of neoliberalism.
Carceral Politics
By way of context, a body of work has documented a growth pattern of mass incarceration which has paralleled the rise of neoliberalism, particularly in the US, but also in other countries including the UK. (Wacquant, 2009). In the UK, for example, a recent parliamentary briefing document of prison population patterns suggested a variable growth in rates of incarceration over several decades (Sturge, 2019). These rates do not seem to reflect an increase in crime (Taylor, 2019). Instead, the growth in prison populations has been connected to a steady rolling forward of neoliberal state apparatus to deal with the disenfranchised poor, minority and migrant populations that suffered from both the increased retraction of welfare support systems, and stricter regulation of trade union rights that accompanied the restructuring of the labour market (Bell, 2011; Story, 2019). Lamble (2011) argues that prison expansion has disproportionately targeted minoritised groups including, for example, raced and LGBTQIA1 communities, working-class people and people with mental health issues “who are increasingly forced into greater cycles of poverty, criminalization, incarceration, and violence” (p. 237). According to Wacquant (2009), in his classic book Punishing the Poor, the figure of the sex offender has been central in legitimising neoliberal carceral politics. Specifically, Wacquant (2009) argues that:
The sexual predator …. has acquired a central place in the country’s expansive public culture of vilification of criminals. As the living embodiment of moral abjectness, he provides an urgent and perpetually refreshed motive for the full repudiation of the ideal of rehabilitation and the turn to fierce neutralisation and vengeful retribution. (p. 214)
The overrepresentation of those predominantly marginalised in society, particularly raced men, in sexual offence categories in the criminal justice system (Ministry of Justice, 2015) would suggest that the vilification of sexual predators disproportionally impacts certain groups. It is also the case that certain problematic representations associated with minoritised groups may well exaggerate such vilification. For example, notions of predatory hypersexuality have been particularly associated with black men (Lipscomb et al., 2019) While the term sexual predator has been liberally applied to perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault regardless of race in the #MeToo coverage, it seems that the racial inscriptions of predatory sexuality is likely to intensify public reaction to racial minority perpetrators (see, for example, Leung & William, 2019).
The argument that the sexual predator discourse has played an important role in supporting the carceral turn is curious because sexual offences have historically had low reporting, prosecution and conviction rates in comparison to other kinds of crime (e.g. Gregory & Lees, 1999; Lazard, 2017). The phenomenon of secondary victimisation has been heavily implicated in these low rates and is characterised by the disbelief, victim blame or lack of sympathy that individuals are frequently exposed to in the aftermath of sexual violence (Anderson & Doherty, 2008; Williams, 1984; see Chapter 3). A body of work has argued that the processes of secondary victimisation are tightly interwoven with cultural expectations around normative heterosexual femininities and masculinities. The heterosexual dynamic of sexually agentic men and passive women has been used, for example, to contest the idea that particular experiences count as sexual violence. Relevant to this is the male sex drive discourse, which is a dominant and persistent feature of normative notions of heterosexuality. The male sex drive constitutes men as needing sex and frames this need as normal, natural and inevitable (Hollway, 1984, 1989). This discourse has been drawn on to reposition experiences of sexual violence as normal (Gavey, 2018). This can be seen in understandings of the sexual harassment of women by men as “courtship” or date rape as “just sex” (Lazard, 2009). Normative heterosexual prescriptions for femininity and masculinity have also long been used to blame victims. Women, for example, who can be positioned as deviating from the active–passive heterosexual script have been accused of provoking men’s sexual violence (Dhanani et al., 2019). As I argued in Chapter 4, masculine ideals which position men as resistant to sexual violence can also be harnessed to blame male victims for failing to fight back. Such forms of secondary victimisation have found to be interwoven in the treatment of victims in the criminal justice system and in decisions to not prosecute or convict those accused (Anderson & Doherty, 2008).
While over the last four decades, reforms aimed at improving the treatment of victims have been attempted, studies suggest that many victims continue to experience secondary victimisation in the criminal justice system (e.g. Gregory & Lees, 1999; Jordan, 2015). What this suggests is that secondary victimisation remains a pervasive feature of contemporary society. While poor and negative treatment of victims persist, it is also the case that in recent years there has been a rise in public support for victims. This can be seen in the ways in which much media coverage has been generally supportive of #MeToo (De Benedictis et al., 2019). The analyses presented in this book suggests that the #MeToo discourse has also explicitly challenged the secondary victimisation of those who have experienced sexual violence (see Chapter 3). There has also been a documented increase of both incarceration and length of prison sentence for sexual offences in the US and the UK (Elkin, 2018). These trends have been linked to public anxieties about sexual predators which have been used to justify punitive criminal approaches to sex offending (e.g. Taylor, 2019). Indeed, while the term “sexual predator” was initially used in relation to extreme and violent sexual offences, it has become more liberally applied to the general category of sexual offences. As, Wacquant (2009) points out, while sexual offences comprise a wide range of behaviours (e.g. lewd behaviour, loitering for prostitution), the expanse covered by the term have become “virtually indistinguishable” from concepts such as paedophile, molester and predator (p. 211). The inclusion of a plethora of sexual offences within the sexual predator discourse appears to have been used as a warrant for justifying mass incarceration patterns and increasingly punitive rather than rehabilitative approaches to sex offending (Taylor, 2019; Wacquant, 2009).
In response to #MeToo, there have been some moves towards more punitive legal approaches to deal with sexual harassment and violence. For example, in France, an anti-street harassment law was passed in 2018 and has reportedly resulted in 450 fines between the time of legislation introduction and the reporting of its impact in 2019 (Willsher, 2019). While the UK has not yet introduced a specific anti-street harassment law, the poster that began this chapter certainly points to a sympathetic leaning towards a “zero tolerance” criminalising approach to sexual harassment. A criminal justice approach is also reflected in the work of MPs sitting on the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee. In 2018, this committee reported their recommendations for furthering sexual harassment protection in public places for women and girls. This included a proposal for a systematic review of gaps in criminal law around sexual harassment, which has been progressed by the UK Law Commission in 2019 (Eighth Special Report, 2019). However, Loney-Howes (2019) questions whether such law reforms and criminal justice approaches are a reflection of a feminist agenda or that of a neoliberal state which is effectively reformulating the impacts of #MeToo to enact the punitive punishment of individuals. A focus on individuals, Loney-Howes (2019) argues effectively conceals the conditions underpinning contemporary sexual harassment. Thus, the possibilities for social change are thus hijacked by dominant neoliberal structures and repackaged as a “victory for feminism and women’s rights” (p. 32).
Accounting for Perpetration
Neoliberal carceral politics would appear to be an important context for understanding perpetrator speaking rights. Specifically, neoliberal discourse which posits that all people must take individual responsibility for all aspects of their lives is a dominant frame within which perpetrator’s accounts of their actions are said and heard. Of course, encouraging offenders to take responsibility has long been a feature of both punitive and rehabilitative reforms (Bell, 2013; Morris, 1995). However, under neoliberalism, the emphasis on offenders as individually responsible is intensified by the eschewing of social and structural accounts of offending (e.g. O’Malley, 2018). Relevant to understanding offender’s accounts of their behaviour is the use of excuses and justifications to pardon actions. Excuse-making is both much maligned in social discourse and a widely used and expected feature of everyday interaction. Excuses typically constitute undesirable actions or outcomes as unintentional or beyond the individual’s control (e.g. Childs & Hepburn, 2015). While excuse-making is often dismissed as just that, the absence of it can be equally problematic. This is because excuses can play an important role in negotiating a reality that is palatable to both the wrong-doer and the wronged. Excuses can thus be seen to perform valuable repair work in interactions and relationships (e.g. Maruna & Mann, 2006).
Excuses, and how they work with notions of individual intention and responsibility have, however, a complex history in relation to sexual harassment and violence. This is because there has been a long-standing prioritisation of offender intention in cases of sexual harassment and violence. This can be seen in the ways in which the notion of intention played a prominent and legally sanctioned role in constituting an event as sexual harassment. In early UK civil court cases, for example, the notion of intention was the lynchpin in establishing whether an act of sexual harassment transgressed consent rights. More specifically, for a transgression to be established, courts generally required evidence that the victim had clearly signalled the unwelcomeness of sexual harassment (Edmunds et al., 1998). This requirement was premised on the idea that perpetrators needed to be told at least once that the behaviour was unwelcome. If perpetrators continued in the face of the victim’s non-consent then courts could assume that the perpetrator was acting intentionally and thus their behaviour could be sanctionable (Monti, 2000). The justification for this requirement was grounded in the dominant understanding that sexual harassment was an ambiguous and contestable concept. As mentioned above, normative heterosexual dynamics of sexually agentic men and passive women have introduced the basis for arguments that suggest that sexual harassment and normal behaviour are difficult to disentangle. This can be seen in the early guidelines produced by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (Monti, 2000):
Because sexual attraction may often play a role in the day-to-day social exchange between employees, “the distinction between invited, uninvited-but-welcome, offensive- but-tolerated, and flatly rejected” sexual advances may well be difficult to discern. (Policy Guidance on Current Issues of Sexual Harassment, 1990, para 13)
The logic underpinning this “unwelcomeness” requirement has been problematised, not least because it ignores the social and interactional difficulties of negotiating consent so explicitly (Kurth et al., 2000; Monti, 2000). The burden of this negotiation is placed squarely on the shoulders of the victims, who as I have argued, tend to be women (Kurth et al., 2000). Women’s agency in sex has tended to be socially constituted in terms of their role as gatekeepers in which they agree to or reject advances (see Chapter 1). As gatekeepers, women have been held responsible for monitoring not only their own behaviour but also the behaviour of perpetrators. These normative expectations around women’s agency in sexualised interactions become mobilised in order to refuse victim recognition in sexual harassment cases (Stringer, 2014).
The emphasis on the responsibility of victims for communicating non-consent has also served to prioritise the perpetrator’s belief about whether an interaction was consensual, over and above the treatment the victim was subjected to. This reflects a longer history of how consent has been treated in sexual violence cases more generally. Historically, the legal test of consent in rape trials has been that if a man honestly believed that the woman is consenting then he cannot be convicted of the crime (Duncan, 1995). This served to imbue men with the ultimate power to define consent and to excuse men by the idea that any harm caused was not intentional. Disclaiming intention has been a key way in which sexual harassment has been downplayed or otherwise minimised (Kitzinger & Thomas, 1995). For example, claims that sexual harassment was intended as a joke or as a means to progress an intimate relationship have been identified as common ways to disclaim harm or the seriousness of victim experiences (Lazard, 2018).
The importance of intention in understanding sexual harassment is reflected in two UK Q methodological studies, which used the same materials and procedures, that I conducted in 2002 (Lazard, 2009) and 2018 (Lazard, 2018). Q methodology identifies shared understandings that have purchase in the cultural context in which they circulate. In the 2002 study, perpetrator intention was seen as key to defining sexual harassment and attributing culpability in five out of nine understandings identified. In the 2018 study, perpetrator intention was treated as either irrelevant or unimportant to defining sexual harassment and establishing guilt across the eight understandings identified. This theme appears to be consistent with current UK legal definitions of sexual harassment, which have deprioritised perpetrator intention in order to give precedence to victim perspectives. However, it is also consistent with an increasingly punitive stance towards perpetrators of sexual harassment, which seems to be legitimised by reference to the impact of actions rather than intention to cause harm (Lazard, 2018).
This more recent deprioritisation of perpetrator intention is particularly notable given the concomitant shift in understanding perpetrators of sexual harassment as sexual predators. Relevant to this, is Maruna and Mann’s (2006) argument that offender excuse-making has been largely treated as a different phenomenon to everyday, normative excuse-making. Particularly within mainstream psychology, offender excuses have been treated as evidence of pathological cognitive deficits that produce errors in how offenders make sense of and appraise situations. For Maruna and Mann (2006), offenders are thus caught in a double bind in which they are treated as cognitively deficient if they make excuses, or as a thoroughly pathologised criminal type if they offer no palatable account of their offending behaviour. The pathologisation of both the presence or absence of offender excuse-making as criminogenic thinking can render invisible complex social situations raised in offender accounts of their behaviour.
Sorry, not Sorry?
The idea that offender excuses are evidence of criminogenic thinking is a relevant lens through which to explore how perpetrator accounts of sexual harassment and violence became understood during the galvanisation of #MeToo. After the Weinstein exposé in October 2017, many perpetrators came forward publicly to account and apologise for their behaviour. The number of admissions and apologies by high-profile men as #MeToo went viral was exceptional, particularly given the aforementioned history of prioritisation of perpetrator intention over and above the wrong experienced by victims. The sheer number of celebrity apologies made during the rise of #MeToo, which gained momentum particularly in late October through to December of 2017, can be linked to an upward trend in public apologising across the last 30 years or so (Dierking, 2019). This trend has included apologies by prominent public figures for criminal acts. The increased visibility of offender apologies has been attributed to the growing political influence of victim advocacy groups in recent decades (Lerum & Dworkin, 2015). The importance attributed to victim advocacy activism has been linked with the neoliberal project of mass incarceration which, of course, demands victims to enable its continuation (e.g. Lerum & Dworkin, 2015). One pertinent feature of the mass celebrity apologising around #MeToo was the public condemnation that many of these apologies received (Dierking, 2019). Relevant to understanding this condemnation is a body of work that has examined the structure and sequencing of public apologies to identify patterned features of talk and text that are likely to engender public forgiveness. For example, studies suggest that apologies which are more successful in repairing a transgression include, for example: the naming of the wrong committed; taking full and unequivocal responsibility; and/or, displaying regret and promises of non-repetition (e.g. Cerulo & Ruane, 2014; Okimoto et al., 2015). Kampf (2009) suggests that because public figures are required to negotiate competing demands in the public sphere after wrong-doing (e.g. manage credibility, trust, image restoration and continued public presence), they often mitigate or downplay their personal responsibility in order to manage negative outcomes. In doing so, what is produced quite often, according to Kampf (2009) is a “non-apology” in which the apologetic sentiment is effectively negated.
It was the issue of celebrity perpetrator non-apologies post the Weinstein exposé that was picked up in the media. Media coverage focused on unpicking the discursive strategies deployed in perpetrator apologies, and the degree to which perpetrator responsibility was mitigated or negated. In considering the celebrity public apologies for sexual harassment, however, I would like to shift focus from the analysis of the actual apologies, and attend instead to how the issue of non-apologies was reported. Given the tighter weaving of sexual harassment with sex offending in the reporting of #MeToo, it is important to examine how those issuing apologies were constituted in public spheres by exploring media reactions to perpetrators. This exploration may provide insight into how perpetrators are made sense of, and the implications that this has for their treatment in contemporary culture.
The Apologetic Predator
Condemnation of Insincerity
What Many Of The Current Sexual Assault Apologies Have In Common. These male predators need to man up and say sorry without qualification. (Halverson, 2017, para. 1)
we have seen dozens of high-profile men craft their own narratives once they have been accused of being predators….They have been accused of crimes, but they are determined to shape the story, to dim the lights and to prepare their comeback…Those who are accused of sexual misconduct release wily statements apologising to women “if” they were offended, and promising to go to rehab or donate to charity. They throw in supposed bombshells as a means of distraction…. The PR spin has become positively formulaic. (Revesz, 2017, para. 2)
For a certain type of power-crazed, predatory, sexually dysfunctional man, “sorry” isn’t just the hardest word, it’s a nonstarter…The challenge you’ve got with the apologies from people like Weinstein and Spacey is that it appears they’re not sorry for the behaviour. They’re sorry they got caught…Most people mess up. What matters is how you deal with it afterwards. Most things you can come back from. Though not… if you cross a moral line. (Rayner, 2017, para. 5)
This description of perpetrators as “power-crazed”, “predatory” and “sexually dysfunctional” clearly portrays them as pathological and deficient. The abject morality of these men is emphasised by their self-serving tendencies which can be seen in the claim that they are not truly sorry for what they’ve done to their victims, they are “sorry they got caught” (Rayner, 2017, para 5). What this implies is that if these perpetrators not been caught, they may do it again which fits with notions of the sexually violent predator as a recidivism risk. The apology issued is therefore constituted as a confirmation of the “type” of person they are rather than as an act of atonement. The morality of these men is further called into question by the positioning of what they did as something that cannot be dismissed or forgotten because they “crossed a moral line”. This also constitutes sexual harassment and violence as heinous, which is a sharp contrast to the routine dismissal of sexual harassment and violence in popular and legal discourse in the not so distant past.
Sexual Predators as Thinking Differently
…it is worth looking at the eerie similarities between these canned public apologies. Collectively, they expose the mindsets of sexual abusers. The alleged predators invoke passive verbs…and employ excuses, producing what usually feels like a disingenuous, excusatory apology, at best…According to one study from the British Journal of Social Psychology, “individuals who were generally more accepting of rape myths used more passive forms to describe the actions of a [sexual assault] than did individuals who rejected rape myths.” … It’s no surprise that someone who crosses sexual boundaries would believe rape myths. (Halverson, 2017, para. 2–6)
Here, the authority of psychological research is used to position perpetrators’ “excusatory” apologies as evidence that they have “mindsets” which endorse “rape myths”. Rape myths are a persistent feature of much secondary victimisation which, as I argued earlier, continue to be relevant to the treatment of victims in contemporary culture (see also Chapter 3).
I [Louis C.K.] also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it. (The New York Times, 2017, para. 22)
He’s unsuccessfully trying to express an interesting idea here. I don’t believe that he didn’t think about what he did with women… In any event there’s something no one has yet untangled here, about the denial and mental machinations of these men. But 100 percent they thought about it…even when they …focus on their most important mission, building their careers. (The New York Times, 2017, para. 22)
The New York Times analysis of the bolded text in Louis C.K.’s apology focuses on his claim that he did not reflect on his behaviour. While Louis C.K.’s comment could be read as an acknowledgement of his privileged position that allowed him not to reflect, The New York Times analysis positions this comment as an excuse. The implication is that by not thinking about his behaviour, Louis C.K.’s effectively denies that his actions were intentional. The New York Times claim that Louis C.K. did in fact think about his behaviour with women, but continued nonetheless, is again constituted as suggestive of an individualised problem reflecting deficient or aberrant internal cognitive processes. “These men” are thus positioned firmly within the non-normative frames of the pathologised sexual predator.
Creating Monsters
The phrase sexual predator …[suggests] that the sex offender is a monster or nonhuman animal rather than sick. This view of sex offenders as predators has enabled states to become increasingly punitive. (p. 6)
it equally follows that we must critically rethink popular notions of who may be considered a perpetrator and in the process confront destructive and dehumanising myths. For instance, if behaviours that have previously been cast as forms of ‘seduction’ and ‘normal’ aspects of heteronormative encounters are being reframed as problematic, this requires us to reconsider the comforting, but inaccurate, myth of the ‘monster’ predator. (p. 108)
This, I would argue, is particularly important given how the sexual predator discourse can work in the service of neoliberal carceral politics at the expense of broader social change.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the increased prominence of the sexual predator discourse in making sense of sexual harassment and violence. The popularisation of the term sexual predator has dovetailed with neoliberal carceral politics in which the vilification of the sexual predator has been argued to serve as a central justification in moves towards mass incarceration. Within the sexual predator discourse, sex offending is treated as symptomatic of an individual’s abnormal psychology which is treated as a fixed and stable part of identity. This understanding of perpetrators presents barriers to perpetrator speaking rights as well as for being heard. This was explored in this chapter through the examination of media coverage of celebrity perpetrator apologies for sexual harassment during the galvanisation of #MeToo. These reportings treated offender explanations and excuse-making as evidence of individual pathology which provided the basis to infer perpetrator intentions and dismiss offender accounts. I have argued that the prominence of the sexual predator discourse may constrain or even undo some impacts of #MeToo, which include men’s reflection and discussion of doing sex and doing relationships within gendered and heterosexualised frames.
- 1.
Abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, intersex and asexual and/or allies.