The term “rape culture” has been in use at least since the late 1970s, but for obvious reasons, it’s been slow to enter mainstream parlance. It sounds so extreme at first that I confess even I, a proud feminist, initially balked at the term. Rape culture? Isn’t that overstating things just a smidge?
And isn’t such overblown terminology the kind of thing that makes people call feminists “humorless” and “strident,” and accuse us of holing up in our ivory towers, theorizing about human behavior without ever witnessing much of it?
I mean, granted, we live in a culture that claims to abhor rape yet adores jokes about the prisoner who “drops the soap,” the trans woman who discloses to a date that she has a penis and gets punished for it, the altar boy who follows a priest into a back room. A culture in which laws and norms prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace have been strenuously opposed by folks seeking to protect that fundamental civil liberty: objectifying and humiliating your subordinates.
And sure, yes, it’s a culture that rewards men for bagging as much anonymous pussy as possible, while condemning women for expressing any sexual impulses at all. A culture in which a young woman’s supposed friends will videotape her being violated and then use it as evidence that she’s a “slut.” A culture in which most victims of sexual assault and rape never report it because they fear they won’t be believed—and know that even if they are believed, they’re likely to be mortified and harassed, blamed and shamed, throughout a legal process that ultimately leads nowhere.
Also, we live in a culture in which a lot of people think we’re too rough on “tortured geniuses” like Roman Polanski, who pled guilty to raping a thirteen-year-old girl, and Woody Allen, who at the very least took naked pictures of his long-term partner’s teenage daughter when he was in his fifties, and whose own daughter has consistently maintained that he molested her. Both men have continued to have long, wildly remunerative and award-winning careers since those pesky facts came to light, all the while enjoying the support and company of our cultural elite. But one of them had to do it all outside the United States, and the other has frequently been the victim of jokes and criticism by people who have no power to interfere with his life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. So haven’t they suffered enough?
Fighter Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and served time for it, but jeez, that was all such a long time ago—did you see his cameo in The Hangover? Or maybe the episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, in which he was portrayed as a kind, gentle soul with whom you’d gladly leave your baby? Or how about the episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—a show about how difficult it is to catch and convict sex offenders—in which Tyson played a victim of sexual abuse? What an amusingly ironic bit of casting! Wink, wink.
Surely, like all criminals who pay their debt to society and must overcome the stigma of a felony conviction upon their release, Tyson has earned Hollywood’s extensive efforts to rehabilitate his image, while paying him lots of money just to show up in front of cameras.
I could go on. I will go on, in fact, for the length of a book. But I trust you’re getting the picture.
A Crime Unlike Any Other
In the preamble to their 1993 anthology Transforming a Rape Culture, feminist scholars Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth write, “In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.”1
Terrorism. Again, it’s a bold, shocking choice of words, but not much of an exaggeration. We tend to imagine rapists, like terrorists, as an omnipresent and often unidentifiable threat, everywhere and nowhere at once. Since we don’t know exactly who will strike or when, we agree that the best we can do is try to avoid victimhood. We put pressure on potential targets to volunteer for safety rituals that create the illusion of security while quietly eroding our freedom: airline passengers submit to groping by strangers for the sake of thwarting terrorism, and average women restrict their movements and clothing for the sake of thwarting strangers who aim to grope them. Like post-9/11 exhortations for passengers to fight back against skyjackers or die trying, our ostensibly empowering advice to women is to learn self-defense, to plan on disabling potential attackers at the first sign of any impropriety.
The part we’d prefer not to talk about, the part that’s much less “empowering” than praising the twin pillars of feminine vigilance and martial arts, is that there will still be victims in this scenario. (Not all of them women, by the way.) Our culture is not equipped to prevent their being attacked, and adding insult to injury, our system is not equipped to bring all of their attackers to justice. Hell, our system isn’t even entirely sure what that would mean at this point.
To an extent, this is merely a reflection of harsh reality. You can’t prevent every crime or catch every criminal. A certain number of murders, muggings, and aggravated assaults will also occur each year, and not all of those offenders will be arrested, charged, or convicted. But the difference is that prosecutors won’t say it’s too risky to charge a mugger because the jury will hear that the victim carried her purse in plain sight, and thus vote for acquittal. People who stand around watching and filming a barroom brawl will not later say on the stand that they thought it was okay because only punches to the face count as “assault,” not elbows to the kidneys or kicks to the shins. Jurors will not tell reporters, “Based on the evidence presented, we believe she killed him, but she says she didn’t, so we’re at an impasse.”
Who Deserves Our Sympathy?
Rape culture manifests in myriad ways—I’ll get to several of them in the rest of this book—but its most devilish trick is to make the average, noncriminal person identify with the person accused, instead of the person reporting a crime. Rape culture encourages us to scrutinize victims’ stories for any evidence that they brought violence upon themselves—and always to imagine ourselves in the terrifying role of Good Man, Falsely Accused, before we “rush to judgment.”
We’re not meant to picture ourselves in the role of drunk teenager at her first college party, thinking, “Wow, he seems to think I’m pretty!” Or the woman who accepts a ride with a “nice guy,” who’s generously offered to see her safely home from the bar. Or the girl who’s passed out in a room upstairs, while the party rages on below, so chaotic that her friends don’t even notice she’s gone.
When it comes to rape, if we’re expected to put ourselves in anyone else’s shoes at all, it’s the accused rapist’s. The questions that inevitably come along with “What was she wearing?” and “How much did she have to drink?” are, “What if there was no rape at all? What if she’s lying? What happens to this poor slob she’s accusing? What if he goes to prison for a crime he didn’t commit?”
Don’t get me wrong—I completely understand why many men feel a visceral terror at the thought of being falsely accused of sexual violence, given how theoretically difficult it would be to prove your innocence. But as it is right now, we behave as though we live in a society where innocent men are accused thousands of times a day, while real rapes are few and far between. We swiftly presume that nearly all people who report rape must have some secret, twisted motivation to lie, while ignoring the strong, straightforward motive an actual rapist would have. We look for ways to rationalize sexual violence as a big misunderstanding—she was flirty; he thought the sex was consensual—without questioning why we can easily believe there are people who deliberately murder, steal, and beat the crap out of strangers, yet not people who deliberately rape.
Or rather, we believe there’s one very specific type of rapist—the kind who wields a weapon, attacks strangers with no warning, and leaves abundant evidence of violence on the victim’s body—but not that some people deliberately rape their friends, girlfriends, wives, children, colleagues, or drunk new acquaintances. We can talk about how that sort of rape exists, and even about how it’s the most common sort, but when pressed, we’re almost never willing to acknowledge that those rapists exist. Not when the accused are people we know, or even just people who remind us of people we know. Not when they remind us of us.
Nor do many of us like acknowledging that genuine rape victims might just remind us more of ourselves than some other, more vulnerable, less savvy person. Even calls for increased awareness too often implore the listener to empathize with the feelings of an impotent bystander, not a victim. “Imagine it was your wife who was raped,” we suggest. “Imagine it was your mother or daughter or sister.”
Picturing a female loved one enduring a violent crime may be a good way to work up anger against a hypothetical criminal, but it doesn’t create genuine identification with and compassion for victims. In many cases, it will just send somebody off on a hero fantasy about beating the rotten hypothetical bastard up, or shooting him dead, before they’ve even had time to wonder how their wife, mother, daughter, or sister is hypothetically feeling.
With this book, I’m asking you to do better than that. I’m asking you to imagine it’s you who was raped. And I’m asking you to get angry about it.
Placing Blame Where It Belongs
Maybe you don’t have to imagine. At some point in their lives, one in five women and one in seventy-one men in this country will find out what it’s like to be raped.2 Among the most vulnerable and marginalized populations—people of color, bisexual and transgender men and women, children, prisoners, sex workers—the numbers are even more nauseating. A whole lot of us already know.
In the pages that follow, I’ll ask you to empathize with many different types of people, but above all, with women. (Specifically, Western women, because exploring rape cultures worldwide would turn this into a lifelong, multivolume project.) Women are no more important than any other potential victims, but we are the primary targets of the messages and myths that sustain rape culture. We’re the ones asked to change our behavior, limit our movements, and take full responsibility for the prevention of sexual violence in society. Anyone can be raped, but men aren’t conditioned to live in terror of it, nor are they constantly warned that their clothing, travel choices, alcohol consumption, and expressions of sexuality are likely to bring violations upon them.
Even if you are a Western woman, empathizing with others of that cohort might not be as easy as it sounds. After all, it was a female judge, Teresa Carr Deni of the Philadelphia Municipal Court, who described the armed gang rape of a twenty-year-old sex worker as mere “theft of services,” and told a reporter that such a case “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”3 Another female judge, Jacqueline Hatch of Arizona, told the victim of a sexual assault that took place in a bar, “If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened.”4
Less publicly, women call each other “sluts” and “whores,” doubt each other’s stories, and help perpetuate the myth that if we always dress modestly, drink responsibly, and avoid dark alleys and dangerous-looking men, we’ll be effectively rape-proofed. We are part of the problem.
But the problem—the larger context in which all of that occurs, aka rape culture—is what we’ll be considering throughout this book. To blame women for it would be as wrongheaded and shortsighted as blaming men or the justice system or Hollywood or the news media or religious institutions or sports culture or celebrity worship or popular music.
Each of those is also part of the problem, but the Problem itself is the cumulative effect of so many people, working through so many organs and institutions, to deliver a constant stream of sexist bullshit that trivializes the crime of rape and automatically awards the benefit of the doubt to the accused.
If she hadn’t been drinking, it would never have happened.
If she’s had sex before, how do we know she didn’t want it this time?
Why did she go out wearing that, if she didn’t want to have sex?
Why was she there at that time of night?
“Date rape” is just sex that a woman regrets the next morning.
An attractive guy like that doesn’t need to rape anyone.
Oh, no, it can’t be him—he’d never do that.
I elaborate on (and debunk) these pernicious beliefs throughout the first section of this book, “Slut Shaming, Victim Blaming, and Rape Myths.” In the second section, “Law and Order,” I consider why successful prosecutions of rapists are so rare, and in the third, “The Culture of Rape,” I detail how those myths and stereotypes reproduce like a nasty virus. In each chapter, just when you’re thinking this book is so relentlessly bleak that you’d rather read the obituaries for fun, I’ll keep the promise of the book’s subtitle and offer suggestions as to what we can actually do to make change happen. Sometimes the only honest answer is “not much”—but current research, the work of dedicated activists, and increased awareness of issues surrounding sexual violence are all cause for a guarded optimism, at the very least. Finally, I’ll wrap up with some promising examples of new attitudes and legislation on the horizon, in hopes that you’ll put this book down feeling energized to join in the struggle for change.
As a culture, we got ourselves into this mess, so it stands to reason we can get ourselves out of it. But the first step, as they say, is admitting we have a problem.
Author’s Note
When I sold the proposal for this book in late 2012, I foolishly agreed to finish the manuscript in six months, because my agent, editor, and I agreed that rape culture was having a moment, as it were. News of the Steubenville, Ohio, gang rape case was picking up steam, and the memory of Missouri Representative Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” gaffe was fresh in all our minds. Sexual violence was suddenly a popular topic, but—based on national conversations about rape in the 1970s and 1990s that started strong and dissipated quickly—we feared that if we waited too long, this book might be released to a public that was already over it.
The bad news is that it took me way longer than six months to finish the manuscript. The good news—amazing, wonderful, really sort of mind-blowing news, actually—is that years later, Americans are still talking seriously about rape and rape culture. The topic outgrew that initial rash of trend pieces and took its place in the Zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. Sexual violence is in the news every day, and pressure is increasing on colleges to protect students, on police departments to take reports seriously and process all relevant evidence, on the media to stop blaming victims. It looks a lot like the culture is moving in the right direction, which, quite frankly, I never anticipated when I began writing Asking for It.
Thrilled as I am about this development, there are a few side effects worth noting here. Primary among them is the likelihood that, by the time you read this, countless new stories will be on our collective mind, and there will have been new developments in some of the ones covered here. Between the time I turned in the manuscript and the time I got the first round of edits back, Bill Cosby was accused of umpteen sexual assaults, and a long Rolling Stone story about a gang rape at University of Virginia was lauded as a devastating exposé of campus rape culture, then swiftly reframed as a devastating failure of fact checking. The news moves much faster than a book, and one of the most difficult challenges I faced in writing was simply stopping. Every day there is new information I could add.
Speaking of which, even with the depth and nuance a book allows, I have left many facets of rape culture uncovered or only lightly covered. I have no doubt I’ll hear about oversights and omissions in reviews and on social media, and I look forward to learning more about aspects I haven’t fully considered in these pages.
Asking for It is my best effort, however ephemeral, to contribute to this miraculously ongoing conversation about a subject that’s historically gone unremarked. My hope is that all who read it will be moved to join that conversation, too.
Kate Harding
Chicago, Illinois
April 16, 2015