| 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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