| Katie
Roiphe is a doctoral candidate in English literature
at Princeton University. This article is adapted
from her book, "The Morning After: Sex,
Fear, and Feminism on Campus," published
in September 1993 by Little, Brown.
One in four college women
has been the victim of rape or attempted rape.
One in four. I remember standing outside the
dining hall in college, looking at the purple
poster with this statistic written in bold letters.
It didn't seem right. If sexual assault was
really so pervasive, it seemed strange that
the intricate gossip networks hadn't picked
up more than one or two shadowy instances of
rape. If I was really standing in the middle
of an "epidemic," a "crisis"-
if 25 percent of my women friends were really
being raped- wouldn't I know it?
The posters were not presenting
facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied
with issues like date rape and sexual harassment,
campus feminists produce endless images of women
as victims-- women offended by a professor's
dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers,
women trying to say no but not managing to get
it across.
This portrait of the delicate
female bears a striking resemblance to that
50's ideal my mother and other women fought
so hard to leave behind. They didn't like her
passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn't
like the fact that she was perpetually offended
by sexual innuendo. They didn't like her excessive
need for protection. She represented personal,
social, and intellectual possibilities collapsed,
and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote
to make her irrelevant for their daughters.
But here she is again, with her pure intentions
and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the
feminists themselves who are breathing new life
into her.
Is there a rape crisis on campus?
Measuring rape is not as straightforward as
it might seem. Neil Gilbert, professor of social
welfare at the University of California at Berkeley,
questions the validity of the one-in-four statistic.
Gilbert points out that in a 1985 survey undertaken
by Ms. magazine and financed by the National
Institute of Mental Health, 73 percent of the
women categorized as rape victims did not initially
define their experience as rape; it was Mary
Koss, the psychologist conducting the study,
who did.
One of the questions used to
define rape was: "Have you had sexual intercourse
when you didn't want to because a man gave you
alcohol or drugs." The phrasing raises
the issue of agency. Why aren't college women
responsible for their own intake of alcohol
or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she
herself decides to take them. If we assume that
women are not all helpless and naive, then they
should be responsible for their choice to drink
or take drugs. If a woman's "judgment is
impaired" and she has sex, it isn't always
the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always
rape.
As Gilbert delves further into
the numbers, he does not necessarily disprove
the one-in-four statistic, but he does clarify
what it means-- the so-called rape epidemic
on campuses is more a way of interpreting, a
way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon. It
is more about a change in sexual politics than
a change in sexual behavior. Whether or not
one in four college women has been raped, then.
is a matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical
fact.
That rape is a fact in some
women's lives is not in question. It's hard
to watch the solemn faces of young Bosnian girls,
their words haltingly translated, as they tell
of brutal rapes; or to read accounts of a suburban
teen-ager raped and beaten while walking home
from a shopping mall. We all agree that rape
is a terrible thing, but we no longer agree
on what rape is. Today's definition has stretched
beyond bruises and knives, threats of death
or violence to include emotional pressure and
the influence of alcohol. The lines between
rape and sex begin to blur. The one-in-four
statistic on those purple posters is measuring
something elusive. It is measuring her word
against his in a realm where words barely exist.
There is a gray area in which one person's rape
may be another's bad night. Definitions become
entangled in passionate ideological battles.
There hasn't been a remarkable change in the
number of women being raped; just a change in
how receptive the political climate is to those
numbers.
The next question, then, is
who is identifying this epidemic and why. Somebody
is "finding" this rape crisis, and
finding it for a reason. Asserting the prevalence
of rape lends urgency, authority to a broader
critique of culture.
In a dramatic description of
the rape crisis, Naomi Wolf writes in "The
Beauty Myth" that "cultural representation
of glamorized degradation has created a situation
among the young in which boys rape and girls
get raped as a normal course of events."
The italics are hers ["as..." in italics
in original]. Whether or not Wolf really believes
rape is a part of the "normal course of
events" these days, she is making a larger
point. Wolf's rhetorical excess serves her larger
polemic about sexual politics. Her dramatic
prose is a call to arms. She is really trying
to rally the feminist troops. Wolf uses rape
as a red flag, an undeniable sign that things
are falling apart.
From Susan Brownmiller- who
brought the politics of rape into the mainstream
with her 1975 best seller, "Against Our
Will: Men, Women, and Rape"- to Naomi Wolf,
feminist prophets of the rape crisis are talking
about something more than forced penetration.
They are talking about what they define as a
"rape culture." Rape is a natural
trump card for feminism. Arguments about rape
can be used to sequester feminism in the teary
province of trauma and crisis. By blocking analysis
with its claims to unique pandemic suffering,
the rape crisis becomes a powerful source of
authority.
Dead serious, eyes wide open
with concern, a college senior tells me that
she believes that one in four is too conservative
an estimate. This is not the first time I've
heard this. She tells me the right statistic
is closer to one in two. That means that one
in two women are raped. It's amazing, she says,
amazing that so many of us are sexually assaulted
every day.
What is amazing is that this
student actually believes that 50 percent of
women are raped. This is the true crisis. Some
substantial number of young women are walking
around with this alarming belief: a hyperbole
containing within it a state of perpetual fear.
"Acquaintance Rape: Is
Dating Dangerous?" is a pamphlet commonly
found at counseling centers. The cover title
rises from the shards of a shattered photograph
of a boy and a girl dancing. inside, the pamphlet
offers a sample date-rape scenario. She thinks:
"He was really good looking
and he had a great smile... We talked and found
we had a lot in common. I really liked him.
When he asked me over to his place for a drink
I thought it would be O.K. He was such a good
listener and I wanted him to ask me out again."
She's just looking for a sensitive
boy, a good listener with a nice smile, but
unfortunately his intentions are not as pure
as hers. Beneath that nice smile, he thinks:
"She looked really hot,
wearing a sexy dress that showed off her great
body. We started talking right away. I knew
that she liked me by the way she kept smiling
and touching my arm while she was speaking.
She seemed pretty relaxed so I asked her over
to my place for a drink... When she said 'Yes'
I knew that I was going to be lucky!"
These "cardboard"
stereotypes don't just educate freshmen about
rape. They also educate them about "dates"
and about sexual desire. With titles like "Friends
Raping Friends: Could It Happen to You?"
date-rape pamphlets call into question all relationships
between men and women. Beyond warning students
about rape, the rape-crisis movement produces
its own images of sexual behavior, in which
men exert pressure and women resist. By defining
the dangerous date in these terms- with this
type of male and this type of female, and their
different expectations these pamphlets promote
their own perspective on how men and women feel
about sex: men are lascivious, women are innocent.
The sleek images of pressure
and resistance projected in rape education movies,
videotapes, pamphlets, and speeches create a
model of acceptable sexual behavior. The don'ts
imply their own set of do's. The movement against
rape, then, not only dictates the way sex shouldn't
be but also the way that it should be. Sex should
be gentle, it should not be aggressive; it should
be absolutely equal, it should not involve domination
and submission; it should be tender, not ambivalent;
it should communicate respect, it shouldn't
communicate consuming desire.
In "Real Rape," Susan
Estrich, a professor of law at the University
of Southern California Law Center, slips her
ideas about the nature of sexual encounters
into her legal analysis of the problem of rape.
She writes: "Many feminists would argue
that so long as women are powerless relative
to men, viewing a "yes" as a true
consent is misguided... Many women who say yes
to men they know, whether on dates or on the
job, would say no if they could... Women's silence
sometimes is the product not of passion and
desire but of pressure and fear."
Like Estrich, most rape-crisis
feminists claim they're not talking about sex;
they're talking about violence. But, like Estrich,
they are also talking about sex. With their
advice, their scenarios, their sample aggressive
male, the message projects a clear commentary
of sexuality: women are often unwilling participants.
They say yes because they feel they have to,
because they are intimidated by male power.
The idea of "consent"
has been redefined beyond the simple assertion
that "no means no." Politically correct
sex involves a yes, and a specific yes at that.
According to the premise of "active consent,"
we can no longer afford ambiguity. We can no
longer afford the dangers of unspoken consent.
A former director of Columbia's date-rape education
program told New York magazine, "Stone
silence throughout an entire physical encounter
with someone is not explicit consent."
This apparently practical,
apparently clinical proscription cloaks retrograde
assumptions about the way men and women experience
sex. The idea that only an explicit yes means
yes proposes that, like children, women have
trouble communicating what they want. Beyond
its dubious premise about the limits of female
communication, the idea of active consent bolsters
stereotypes of men just out to "get some"
and women who don't really want any.
Rape-crisis feminists express
nostalgia for the days of greater social control,
when the university acted in loco parentis and
women were protected from the insatiable force
of male desire. The rhetoric of feminists and
conservatives blurs and overlaps in this desire
to keep our youth safe and pure.
By viewing rape as encompassing
more than the use or threat of physical violence
to coerce someone into sex, rape-crisis feminists
reinforce traditional views about the fragility
of the female body and will. According to common
definitions of date-rape, even "verbal
coercion" or "manipulation" constitute
rape. Verbal coercion is defined as "a
woman's consenting to unwanted sexual activity
because of a man's verbal arguments not including
verbal threats of force." The belief that
"verbal coercion" is rape pervades
workshops, counseling sessions and student opinion
pieces. The suggestion lurking behind this definition
of rape is that men are not just physically
but intellectually and emotionally more powerful
than women.
Imagine men sitting around
in a circle talking about how she called him
impotent and how she manipulated him into sex,
how violated and dirty he felt afterward, how
coercive she was, how she got him drunk first,
how he hated his body and he couldn't eat for
three weeks afterward. Imagine him calling this
rape. Everyone feels the weight of emotional
pressure at one time or another. The question
is not whether people pressure each other but
how our minds and our culture transform that
pressure into full-blown assault. There would
never be a rule or a law or even a pamphlet
or peer counseling group for men who claimed
to have been emotionally raped or verbally pressured
into sex. And for the same reasons- assumptions
of basic competence, free will and strength
of character- there should be no such rules
or groups or pamphlets about women.
In discussing rape, campus
feminists often slip into an outdated sexist
vocabulary. But we have to be careful about
using rape as a metaphor. The sheer physical
fact of rape has always been loaded with cultural
meaning. Throughout history, women's bodies
have always been seen as property, as chaste
objects, as virtuous vessels to be "dishonored,"
"ruined," "defiled." Their
purity or lack of any purity has been a measure
of value for the men to whom they belonged.
"Politically, I call it
rape whenever a woman has had sex and feels
violated," writes Catherine MacKinnon,
a law professor and feminist legal scholar best
known for her crusade against pornography. The
language of virtue and violation reinforces
retrograde stereotypes. It backs women into
old corners. Younger feminists share MacKinnon's
vocabulary and the accompanying assumptions
about women's bodies. In one student's account
of date rape in the Rag, a feminist magazine
at Harvard, she talks about the anguish of being
"defiled." Another writes, "I
long to be innocent again." With such anachronistic
constructions of the female body, with all their
assumptions about female purity, these young
women frame their experience of rape in archaic,
sexist terms. Of course, sophisticated modern-day
feminists don't use words like honor or virtue
anymore. The know better than to say date-rape
victims have been "defiled." Instead,
they call it "post-traumatic stress syndrome."
They tell the victim she should not feel "shame,"
she should feel "traumatized." Within
their overtly political psychology, forced penetration
takes on a level of metaphysical significance:
date-rape resonates through a woman's entire
life.
Combating myths about rape
is one of the central missions of the rape-crisis
movement. They spend money and energy trying
to break down myths like "She asked for
it." But with all their noise about rape
myths, rape-crisis feminists are generating
their own. The plays, the poems, the pamphlets,
the Take Back the Night speakouts, are propelled
by the myth of innocence lost.
All the talk about empowering
the voiceless dissolves into the image of the
naive girl child who trusts the rakish man.
This plot reaches back centuries. it propels
Samuel Richardson's 18th-century epistolary
novel, "Clarissa": after hundreds
of pages chronicaling the minute details of
her plight, her seduction and resistance, her
break away from her family, Clarissa is raped
by the duplicitous Robert Lovelace. Afterwards,
she refuses to eat and fades toward a very virtuous,
very religious death. Over a thousand pages
are devoted to the story of her fall from innocence,
a weighty event by 18th-century standards. But
did these 20th-century girls, raised on Madonna
videos and the 6 o'clock news, really trust
that people were good until they themselves
were raped? Maybe. Were these girls, raised
on horror movies and glossy Hollywood sex scenes,
really as innocent as all that? Maybe. But maybe
the myth of lost innocence is a trope- convenient,
appealing, politically effective.
As long as we're taking back
the night, we might as well take back our own
purity. Sure, we were all kind of innocent,
playing in the sandbox with bright red shovels--
boys, too. We can all look back through the
tunnel of adolescence on a honey-glazed childhood,
with simple rules and early bedtimes. We don't
have to look at parents fighting, at sibling
struggles, at casting out one best friend for
another in the Darwinian playground. This is
not the innocence lost; this is the innocence
we never had.
The idea of a fall from childhood
grace, pinned on one particular moment, a moment
over which we had no control, much lamented,
gives our lives a compelling narrative structure.
It's easy to see why the 17-year-old likes it;
it's easy to see why the rape-crisis feminist
likes it. It's a natural human impulse put to
political purpose. But in generating and perpetuating
such myths, we should keep in mind that myths
about innocence have been used to keep women
inside and behind veils. They have been used
to keep them out of work and in labor.
It's not hard to imagine Clarissa,
in jeans and a sweatshirt, transported into
the 20th century, at a Take Back the Night march.
She would speak for a long time about her deception
and rape, about verbal coercion and anorexia,
about her ensuing post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Latter-day Clarissas may worry more about their
"self esteem" than their virtue, but
they are still attaching the same quasi-religious
value to the physical act.
"Calling it Rape,"
a play by Sonya Rasminsky, a recent Harvard
graduate, is based on interviews with date-rape
victims. The play, which has been performed
at Harvard and may be taken into Boston-area
high schools, begins with "To His Coy Mistress,"
by the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell. Although
generations of high-school and college students
have read this as a romantic poem, a poem about
desire and the struggle against mortality, Rasminsky
has reinterpreted it as a poem about rape. "Had
we but world enough, and time, this coyness,
lady, were no crime." But what Andrew Marvell
didn't know then, and we know now, is that the
real crime is not her coyness but his verbal
coercion.
Farther along, the actors recount
a rape that hinges on misunderstanding. A boy
and a girl are watching videos and he starts
to come on to her. She does not want to have
sex. As the situation progresses, she says,
in an oblique effort to communicate her lack
of enthusiasm, "If you're going to [expletive]
me, use a condom." He interprets this as
a yes, but it's really a no. And, according
to this play, what happens next, condom or no
condom, is rape.
This is the central idea of
the rape crisis movement: that sex has become
our tower of Babel. He doesn't know what she
wants (not to have sex) and she doesn't know
what he wants (to have sex)-- until it's too
late. He speaks boyspeak and she speaks girlspeak
and what comes out of all this verbal chaos
is a lot of mixed signals and crossed stars
has to do with more than just gender politics.
It comes in part, from the much-discussed diversity
that has so radically shifted the social composition
of the college class since the 50's.
Take my own Harvard dorm: the
Adams House dining hall is large, with high
ceilings and dark paneling. It hasn't changed
much for generations. As soon as the students
start milling around gathering salads, ice cream
and coffee onto green trays, there are signs
of change. There are students in jeans, flannel
shirts, short skirts, girls in jackets, boys
in bracelets, two pierced noses and lots of
secondhand clothes.
Not so many years ago, this
room was filled with boys in jackets and ties.
Most of them were white, Christian and what
we now call privileged. Students came from the
same social milieu with the same social rules
and it was assumed that everyone knew more or
less how they were expected to behave with everyone
else. Diversity and multiculturalism were unheard
of, and if they had been, they would have been
dirty words. With the shift in college environments,
with the introduction of black kids, Asian kids,
Jewish kids, kids from the wrong side of the
tracks of nearly every railroad in the country,
there was an accompanying anxiety about how
people behave. When ivory tower meets melting
pot, it causes tension, some confusion, some
need for readjustment. In explaining the need
for intensive "orientation" programs,
including workshops on date rape, Columbia's
assistant dean for freshmen stated in an interview
in The New York Times: "You just can't
bring all these people together and say, 'Now
be one big happy community,' without some sort
of training. You can't just throw together somebody
from a small town in Texas and someone from
New York City and someone from a conservative
fundamentalist home in the Midwest and say,
'Now without any sort of conversation, be best
friends and get along and respect another.'"
Catharine Stimpson, a University
Professor at Rutgers and lifelong advocate of
women's studies programs, once pointed out that
it's sometimes easier for people to talk about
gender than to talk about class. "Miscommunication"
is in some sense a word for the friction between
the way we were and the way we are. Just as
the idea that we speak different languages is
connected to gender- the arrival of women in
classrooms, in dorms, and in offices- it is
also connected to class.
When the Southern heiress goes
out with the plumber's son from the Bronx, when
the kid from rural Arkansas goes out with a
boy from Exeter, the anxiety is that they have
different expectations. The dangerous "miscommunication"
that recurs through the literature on rape and
sexual harassment is in part a response to cultural
mixing. The idea that men don't know what women
mean when women say no stems from something
deeper and more complicated than feminist concerns
with rape.
People have asked me if I have
ever been date-raped. And thinking back on complicated
nights, on too many glasses of wine, on strange
and familiar beds, I would have to say yes.
With such a sweeping definition of rape, I wonder
how many people there are, male or female, who
haven't been date-raped at one point or another.
People pressure and manipulate and cajole each
other into all sorts of things all of the time.
As Susan Sontag wrote, "Since Christianity
upped the ante and concentrated on sexual behavior
as the root of virtue, everything pertaining
to sex has been a 'special case' in our culture,
evoking peculiarly inconsistent attitudes."
No human interaction s are free from pressure,
and the idea that sex is, or can be, makes it
what Sontag calls a "special case,"
vulnerable to the inconsistent expectations
of double standard.
With their expansive version
of rape, rape-crisis feminists are inventing
a kinder, gentler sexuality. Beneath the broad
definition of rape, these feminists are endorsing
their own utopian vision of sexual relations:
sex without power, sex without persuasion, sex
without pursuit. If verbal coercion constitutes
rape, then the word rape itself expands to include
any kind of sex a woman experiences as negative.
When Martin Amis spoke at Princeton,
he included a controversial joke: "As far
as I'm concerned, you can change your mind before,
even during, but just not after sex." The
reason this joke is funny, and the reason it's
also too serious to be funny, is that in the
current atmosphere you can change your mind
afterward. Regret can signify rape. A night
that was just a blur, a night you wish hadn't
happened, can be rape. Since "verbal coercion"
and "manipulation" are ambiguous,
it's easy to decide afterwards that he manipulated
you. You can realize it weeks or even years
later. This is a movement that deals in retrospective
trauma.
Rape has become a catch-all
expression, a word used to define everything
that is unpleasant and disturbing about relations
between the sexes. Students say things like
"I realize that sexual harassment is a
kind of rape." If we refer to a whole range
of behavior from emotional pressure to sexual
harassment as "rape," then the idea
itself gets diluted. It ceases to be powerful
as either description or accusation.
Some feminists actually collapse
the accusation between rape and sex. Catharine
MacKinnon writes: "Compare victims' reports
of rape with women's reports of sex. They look
a lot alike. ...In this light, the major distinction
between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal)
is that the normal happens so often that one
cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with
it."
There are a few feminists involved
in rape education who object to the current
expanding definitions of sexual assault. Gillian
Greensite, founder of the rape prevention education
program at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, writes that the seriousness of the crime
"is being undermined by the growing tendency
of some feminists to label all heterosexual
miscommunication and insensitivity as acquaintance
rape." From within the rape-crisis movement,
Greensite's dissent makes an important point.
If we are going to maintain an idea of rape,
then we need to reserve it for the instances
of physical violence, or the threat of physical
violence.
But some people want the melodrama.
They want the absolute value placed upon experience
by absolute words. Words like "rape"
and "verbal coercion" channel the
confusing flow of experience into something
easy to understand. The idea of date rape comes
at us fast and coherent. It comes at us when
we've just left home and haven't yet figured
out where to put our new futons or how to organize
our new social lives. The rhetoric about date
rape defines the terms, gives names to nameless
confusions and sorts through mixed feelings
with a sort of insistent consistency. In the
first rush of sexual experience, the fear of
date rape offers a tangible framework to locate
fears that are essentially abstract.
When my 55-year-old mother
was young, navigating her way through dates,
there was a definite social compass. There were
places not to let him put his hands. There were
invisible lines. The pill wasn't available.
Abortion wasn't legal. And sex was just wrong.
Her mother gave her "mad money" to
take out on dates in case her date got drunk
and she needed to escape. She had to go far
enough to hold his interest and not far enough
to endanger her reputation.
Now the rape-crisis feminists
are offering new rules. They are giving a new
political weight to the same old no. My mother's
mother told her to drink sloe gin fizzes so
she wouldn't drink too much and get too drunk
and go too far. Now the date rape pamphlets
tell us: "Avoid excessive use of alcohol
and drugs. Alcohol and drugs interfere with
clear thinking and effective communication."
My mother's mother told her to stay away from
empty rooms and dimly lighted streets. In "I
Never Called It Rape," Robin Warshaw writes,
"Especially with recent acquaintances,
women should insist on going only to public
places such as restaurants and movie theaters."
There is a danger in these
new rules. We shouldn't need to be reminded
that the rigidly conformists 50's were not the
heyday of women's power. Barbara Ehrenreich
writes of "re-making love," but there
is a danger in remaking love in its old image.
The terms may have changed, but attitudes about
sex and women's bodies have not. Rape-crisis
feminists threaten the progress that's been
made. They are chasing the same stereotypes
that our mothers spent so much energy escaping.
One day I was looking through
my mother's bookshelves and I found her old
battered copy of Germaine Greer's feminist classic,
"The Female Eunuch." The pages were
dogeared and whole passages marked with penciled
notes. It was 1971 when Germaine Greer fanned
the fires with "The Female Eunuch"
and it was 1971 when my mother read it, brand
new, explosive, a tough and sexy terrorism for
the early stirrings of the feminist movement.
Today's rape-crisis feminists
threaten to create their own version of the
desexualized woman Greer complained of 20 years
ago. Her comments need to be recycled for present
day feminism. "It is often falsely assumed,"
Greer writes, "even by feminists, that
sexuality is the enemy of the female who really
wants to develop those aspects of her personality...
It was not the insistence upon her sex that
weakened the American woman student's desire
to make something of her education, but the
insistence upon a passive sexual role [Greer's
italics]. In fact, the chief instrument in the
deflection and perversion of female energy is
the denial of female sexuality for the substitution
of femininity or sexlessness."
It is the passive sexual role
that threatens us still, and it is the denial
of female sexual agency that threatens to propel
us backward.
Source:
MenWeb: Men's Voice
Magazine
http://www.menweb.org/throop/books/roiphe.html
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