Rape Culture: Men, Women, and Power

The only people who think all men are rapists, Soraya Chemaly writes, are, well, rapists.

Do you really doubt the idea of rape culture?

On any given day you can, if you chose, participate in an entertaining and informative pop culture rape happening. This week started with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald making jokes about President Obama raping nuns and week before last, #ItAintRapeIf, a fun Twitter hash tag was trending. You can find popular TV shows and movies and lists of music with rapey lyrics to hyper-real, 3-D video games like RapeLay (which went viral last year), in which players help the hero rape a mother and her two daughters. Facebook still has its controversial rape pages. Rape talk, as in “that was just like being raped,” long indulged in by right-wing shock jocks is now regularly slang. I mention all of this while admitting that Sarah Silverman, famous (or notorious) for her rape jokes, is one of my all time favorite comedians. How about last week’s “Who Would You Rape?” University of Vermont fraternity survey? And, of course, there is Penn State. Wonder how adults shield child rapists and perfectly nice boys play rape games? These examples are rape culture manifest. If you are not sure what rape culture looks like, this is it: sexual violence—overwhelmingly against girls and women—tolerated, excused and normalized through attitudes, norms, practices, and media.

It is hard to get people to acknowledge the startling reality of rape or to even imagine a world where rape isn’t happening at the rate of once every two minutes in the course of a regular day in the US. There are lots of ways that we talk about rape that perpetuate myths or diffuse the reality of what is an overwhelmingly gendered crime, the threat and reality of which vastly disproportionately affects women.

That does NOT mean that all men are rapists. The only people who think all men are rapists are, well, rapists. However, ninety-nine percent of the perpetrators of single offender sexual assault crimes, according to the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey,  are men, including boys being sexually abused. Pointing this out is not a feminist attempt to eradicate and undermine men and masculinity. It’s explaining the degree with which the crime can genuinely be seen as gender-based and why I think it’s important that individual stories be told in the context of rape as part of a larger dynamic of power.

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I’m also not saying that women don’t rape and sexually abuse children. Sexual assault of children, girls and boys, are part of rape culture, which is defined by its cultivation of specific, violent, male sexual aggression. However, when rape comes up in discussion, there is often a reflexive pointing out that women rape, too, as in this Women Rape, Too post. Saying that sexual violence affects girls and women disproportionately does not mean that boys’ and men’s experiences of assault and rape are in any way less relevant or horrific. In statistical terms, however, right now, while data on female sexual assault is hard to gather and verify for reasons listed below, it’s exactly like pointing out that some men get breast cancer every time the subject of women’s breast cancer fatalities comes up. According to the CDC study, in the US, between 1% and 2% of men have been raped or experienced an attempted rape, often by an intimate partner, almost always male, (many when they were younger than 11) compared to 20% of women.
 That 1-2% is a total – not just those where there may be female perpetrators.

The CDC study revealed that boys are twice as likely to be raped as children – 28% of male rape victims reported being raped between the ages of 6-10, after which the incidence of assaults drops off, versus 12% of girls, for whom the incidence peaks in their teens through twenties, but virtually never ends. No reliable source, including RAINN, The Department of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control, Advocates for Youth among others, has any substantive and quantitatively sound information regarding the incidence of single offender female perpetrators of abuse. This isn’t because of a boy hating, man-bashing feminist conspiracy. It’s because a) our culture doesn’t like admitting male weakness, b) it is rarely reported and/or c) it is actually comparatively rare. Interestingly, the breakdown for multiple offender crimes is different: 59% male, 12.9% female and 22.9% male/female combined.

Our news media has been filled, sadly, in recent years by stories of boys being raped by priests, coaches and other trusted adults. But these reports, which highlight the vulnerability of boys, is disproportionate considering female rape as part of a pandemic spectrum of sexual violence against girls and women, which typically begins at adolescence and, unlike the abuse of boys, does not taper down after adolescence. This isn’t dismissing boys’ abuse or adult male victimization, only pointing out a bias in coverage that incorporates typical approaches to “debunking” rape realities and perpetuating rape myths. The exact same culture that supports rape myths and apologies related to victim blaming, defining consent, accusing women of lying, contribute to the difficulty of getting accurate information about boys being victimized. Here are some ways that the rape experiences of boys and men are specifically denied, ignored and hidden—not by feminism—but by sexism, misogyny and the application of heteronormative standards:

• Traditionally, and I use that word very specifically, rape has been considered part of a natural order, in other words, the normal consequence of how men and women are built. In this scenario, women are passive, weak and often temptresses; men are physically strong, violently sexual and unable to help themselves when provoked. This definition of sexuality, which by the way is an essential component of abstinence-only “sex ed,” is narrow and results in a restrictive, forcible, male-on-female definition of rape. It certainly doesn’t allow for boys to be victims, certainly not at the hands of women or even of adult men. As Advocates for Youths points out: “Male victimization is particularly hard to estimate due to beliefs that only girls can be abused; that sex between older women and boys is desirable; that male victimization of boys indicates lack of masculinity and/or acquiescence by the child.” Gender stereotypes in the employ of sexism and misogyny are to blame for that. Not feminists fighting against rape culture.
• Sexual assault of children by women is underreported because patriarchal, cultures don’t like admitting that women can be sexually motivated or use sex to wield power in aggressive and monstrous ways. That would mean admitting that some women are more “like men,” not the champions of a higher morality, not weaker, not all naturally more “nurturing.” That’s a lot of subversive information if you want to highlight how vulnerable and dependent women are. In addition, in the same environments, boys grow up knowing that to be weak or powerless in particularly when the aggressor is female is a big no-no.
• Lastly, as Hugo Schwyzer pointed out here—which was one of the catalysts to huge controversy, men should be angry—not at feminists for describing rape culture, but at rape culture’s insistence on a vile definition of male sexuality that has violence at its core and that makes suspicion of all man the only rational approach to safety.

It’s hard to step back from the horror of rape, particularly the rape of children, to consider the larger context in which it happens, especially in a forum dedicated to the primacy of individual stories and experiences. There is a qualitative difference between saying men rape women and women rape men and that difference gets eliminated when you tell individual stories without context. Male-on-female rape is part of a larger system of violence and oppression—this is a fundamental aspect of rape theory. Boys and men don’t have to think about being the victims of rape on a regular basis. (And comparing being mugged to an underlying perpetual awareness of vulnerability to rape is just sloppy and inaccurate in terms of scope or effect.) Rape—the threat of it, the frequency of it, the gendered reality of it—is one of a long list of ways that women are controlled in private and public spaces. Men don’t alter the cadence of their days—their commutes, hobbies, jogging paths, sleeping habits, parking routines, dog walking, working hours—because they have to consider being raped. Women, not even consciously, incorporate their protective responses and defenses into everything they do. Girls learn that they have to do that in their first introduction to gender based inequities after a childhood of hearing that boys and girls are equal. Raising the specter of women raping boys implies a false equivalence and doesn’t help us understand and change a culture where rape—the power, the crime, the threat, and the jokes—is acceptable.

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A lot of the debate over rape culture theory that I’ve read here hinges on its being filtered through the lens of individual stories instead of the other way round. As a result it ends up being misrepresented as an individual man-bad/perpetrator, woman-good/victim argument. The problem of rape is not a problem of individual men and women. It’s a culture that we live with—a systemization of harm that we are immersed in. Rape, regardless of whom it happens to, is horrible and violent and dehumanizing. Only men can stop rape. Organizations like My Strength, Men Can Stop Rape, Advocates for Youth and others are working hard to do that. Books like the The Guys Guide to Feminism, with its illustrated rules of consent, is another good start. To me, good men and women are people who say this has to end. They stop deflecting, trivializing and joking about it and then do something to change it.

—Photo Boa-sorte&Careca/Flickr