After writing this post, I started thinking a little bit more about what happens when victims do fight back during rapes that have so far only included the threat of violence.
A few years ago, I read the book Understanding Sexual Violence, by Diana Sculley. Sculley interviewed hundreds of convicted rapists to try and learn something about their motives, their beliefs, their values, and their perception of sexual assault. The stated purpose of the book was to provide some information about rape other than “hay ladies no goin’ outside anymore, and you better be wearing gunny sacks from now on k thx,” and it was a pretty fascinating read. I’ve since lost my copy, and it’s tremendously out of print, so you’ll have to bear with my memory here.
Sculley discovered that the vast majority of rapists do not consider what they did to be rape. They will describe the act accurately, and their description will match up with legal and common definitions of rape. And if asked to describe “rape,” they will describe an act similar or identical to their own. But they will not admit that the act they committed was rape.
When discussing rape theoretically, the convicted rapists expressed a societally-appropriate level of disgust, hatred and venom. So it makes sense, Sculley theorized, that they did not want to integrate the social concept of a “rapist” — that of an evil, violent, depraved, and unanimously hated character — into their self-identification. And they managed to avoid this integration through societally-appropriate concepts of gender, sex, and control. Sculley found that these rationalizations existed entirely in the convicted rapist’s head; police and court records and the rapist’s own recollection of the rape indicated absolutely no external verification for their beliefs that negated the internal moral horror that raping a woman might otherwise create.
For example, a rapist might describe raping a woman who screamed in pain, cried, and begged him to stop. Yet he will claim what he did was not rape, because he could tell — through some kind of telepathic magic — that she was actually enjoying it. There is no evidence that the victim enjoyed it, but for the rapist to believe that he is not a rapist — that theoretical creature of evil and monsterhood — the victim must enjoy the rape, which will transform it into wanted rape-sex — sex that resembles rape and has all the desired benefits of rape (aggressive humiliation, sexual gratification, sadism, expression of power and domination) but carries none of the moral and legal baggage of real rape. This also aligns easily with gendered beliefs about men and women and sex: women secretly want sex, no matter what they say; men’s enjoyment of sex is the baseline to determine whether a sexual encounter is pleasurable; and that aggression, force, and a woman fighting back in pain is sexy and erotic. Thus, a rapist can rape a woman, but as long as he can find some way to convince himself she likes it, then it does not count as rape.
For another example, Sculley often found that convicted rapists would cite their impairment as a defense for rape. They were drunk, they were high, they wouldn’t have done that sober. This seems like a somewhat logical argument (though it doesn’t excuse rape), but our logic is based on our cultural assumptions. Sculley used the term “acceptable deviance” to describe an act that is normally considered deviant and wrong, but when performed in a certain cultural context, it becomes acceptable. In our culture, there is an awful lot you can do while drunk that is completely unacceptable while sober. This is a cultural construct, with no basis in biology. Alcohol and drugs do not actually make people lose complete mental control of themselves; it makes them more likely to act upon impulses otherwise reined in, precisely because they are unacceptable in any other context. But while impaired, deviant behavior becomes excused behavior, an outlet for otherwise punishable activities. So convicted rapists will often use their impairment — or the impairment of their victim — as a mitigating factor that makes rape into rape-sex.
That was just a general summary because I liked the book so much, and wanted to encourage anybody with access to a very stocked library to try to find and read it. Anyway, here’s my point: after compiling the information from these interviews, Sculley determined that the best rape prevention technique is to make more things culturally “count” as rape (she didn’t say it quite like this — this is my interpretation). Right now, we live in culture that provides too many contexts where rape is an acceptable deviancy. That’s what happens when somebody says something like “short skirt” “she was drunk” “she didn’t fight back” “they were dating.” They aren’t saying it wasn’t rape — they are saying that rape was okay, in that context, at that time, with those two people. That rape was an acceptable outcome, an acceptable form of sexual expression, and it doesn’t deserve punishment or consequences.
And so we maintain this double consciousness in our culture, where all of us grow up knowing that rape is bad, rapists are evil, and anybody who rapes deserves worse than death. And yet, when rape (frequently) occurs, victims aren’t believed, convictions aren’t made, and excuses for why it was okay abound. The only way to reconcile that — to claim that rape is evil but your brother-in-law who locked that drunk girl in a bathroom is not a rapist — is to consider rape an acceptable kind of sex. To consider it, as long as cultural context is provided, rape-sex. What if your brother-in-law told you, in so many words, that he had raped a girl, but then said it was okay because her sister owns a dildo? Or it was okay because she looks at bestiality porn? Or it wasn’t really rape, only rape-sex, because she wore shoes that were easy to take off? That all sounds ridiculous, but those excuses aren’t any more ridiculous or non-sensical than short skirt, not a virgin, and was making out beforehand. The only difference is, those non-sensical excuses for rape have cultural sanction, make rape into rape-sex and thus acceptable. We do not live in a culture where witchcraft is an acceptable excuse for strange behavior or unlucky circumstances — that sounds fucking retarded to us. Imagine how retarded we look when we claim that breasts somehow incite violent riots and attacks.
So Sculley believed we had to strip away these cultural excuses. That we had to stop saying there was any kind of circumstance or context where rape became acceptable. That having sex with a woman who has not consented is rape, no matter where you raped her, how you raped her, how you felt about her, how she felt about you, what she was wearing, what you were wearing, who was present, what you were thinking about. That by itself isn’t very radical, but it takes on a new meaning when you read the book, and understand just how many of these excuses really truly make a rapist feel like what he did was not rape. But she also took it over to the safety side. Because rapists build up a bulwark of acceptable excuses in their minds that make rape into rape-sex, potentially, a victim can lessen her chances of a completed rape by attacking these excuses. For rapists, the more a rape began to look like a rape, the less likely they were to continue, because their bulwark was crumbling, and their self-identification as not-rapists collapsing. So Sculley recommended that women fight back, because many of the rapists she interviewed stated they would have — or in some circumstances did — cease a rape attempt when the victim began to seriously struggle. As long as she was lying there motionless, he could project all sorts of theoretical sexual pleasure onto her, which made her a woman who could acceptably be rape-sexed without guilt or moral horror. When she was screaming “rapist” while trying to get away, the fantasy that this was rape-sex began to dissipate as it started to suspiciously look like the kind of rape that was evil and wrong.
I read this before my rape, and so I hoped I would be smart enough, and together enough, to fight back if I was ever raped. Of course it didn’t happen that way. Even if the books and statistics said I had a better chance of getting away, unraped, none of that bore any relation to my immediate terror. And, too, probabilities are probabilities. I might have a better chance, but I didn’t have an assured chance. And my surroundings made a difference. I was being raped by my husband, in his parents’ house. I had nowhere else to live. I had no money saved. I had no friends that weren’t also his friends. I could fight, and scream, and run… and then what? Get away unraped, and be homeless? Of course, I can look back now and see the thousands of things I could have done. But abuse — including rape — couldn’t operate effectively if a victim believed it was abuse, and believed she didn’t deserve it. I believed what my husband did to me was only right, because I was such a bad wife. I believed that if I was a good wife, I would not mind what he did, and he would not do it so much. But I was a selfish wife, and weak. I did not believe I belonged in a place like a women’s shelter, where women went when they had been abused. Because I had not been abused. I had been punished rightfully.
Because we have a cultural narrative where women who dress, drink, or act in a certain way are rapeable, these women also grow up believing that women who dress, drink, or act in a certain way deserve their rapes. And when these women are raped, they do not necessarily believe at that moment that it is abuse, and wrong, and evil. Nobody wants to be abused, nobody wants something so evil in their lives, especially when the evil thing is your husband. It is easier to believe that they earned this, deserved it, that they are being punished, and that perhaps in the future, if they act far better, it will not happen again. Victims believe the same things their rapists believe that help them rationalize rape as acceptable, because we all grew up hearing the same cultural story.
I’ve gotten way off topic. I meant to talk about fighting back when rape hasn’t yet included violence or force, but spun off again into all the reasons a woman might not fight back. Here’s what I meant to say:
Flint and I started dating in high school. Before me, he’d only had one other girlfriend — let’s call her Jean. I knew Jean, and honestly, didn’t care for her too much. Once I’d started dating Flint, I got suckered in by his abusive perspective of her. He would go on and on about what a horrible, selfish, manipulative bitch she was. Looking back, I can see plenty of examples he gave of what is actually normal healthy behavior in a relationship, but he considered those things to be indicative of why she was an evil person, and why evil things should happen to her. I internalized all that — he was, in effect, giving me a blueprint of all the things he would not allow me to do if I stayed with him. And I took my already very vague and general dislike of her and blew it up into an enormous and overwhelming allied hatred — Jean was evil, Jean was mean, Jean was a terrible person who would die a miserable death, and deserved nothing better. And I would never be like Jean.
It was in this context that Flint told me a story about something that had happened between him and Jean. Like all stories about Jean, he pitched it as some terrible emotional wound she had inflicted that he needed my help in overcoming — some unbelievable thing she had done that no sane woman would ever do to a man. He told me that one day, while they were making out, she had just attacked him. Just kneed him right in the balls, and then ran and locked herself in the bathroom, refusing to let him in.
Out of fucking nowhere, like.
It wasn’t long after that that she broke up with him. And she never would explain why she’d done it.
I asked him what was going on right before she attacked him. Oh, nothing, he said. They were just kissing. You know. Well, I asked, were you being too aggressive? He shrugged, and made a pained horrible puppy dog face. Oh god, he said, what if I was? What if I did something wrong and didn’t even know it?
I assured him he hadn’t. He was too good a person, and Jean, well, we all knew what Jean was like. Crazy Jean. Angry Jean. Evil Jean. And yeah, you don’t have to ask, I feel pretty fucking bad about that, even understanding why I said it. And I feel pretty fucking foolish. He couldn’t have been more obvious if he had given me a note that said, “Someday I will rape you, Harriet.” And I couldn’t have been anymore forcibly blind.
But this is the dilemma victims in “non-violent” rapes face. No physical attack has been made — at least nothing that, in our cultural narrative, we consider a physical attack, because somehow taking off a women’s clothing or grabbing her body without her consent is not an aggressive action. So to respond with a physical attack is to become the aggressor. Let’s not even bother getting into the cultural reasons that physical responses are difficult for women, who are not raised to ever expect to engage in physical violence. Beyond that, there’s a general impulse to, you know, not attack people for no goddamn reason. And especially if this person is your boyfriend/best friend/lover/husband. All the reasons a rapist might have created to make rape into rape-sex are also in the victim’s head, and luring her into thinking that she deserves this. And at the same time, all the very logical and natural fear of a worse physical attack is inhibiting her from screaming and punching and biting.
At the time, I couldn’t understand why Jean would have kneed Flint in the balls — jesus, couldn’t she have just tried talking to him first? Not even considering that she probably had, and Flint had just omitted this from his story, as he had probably omitted it from the event as it was occurring. I never went around mouthing off about that story, but I did go around telling people that Jean was just totally fucking nutso, seriously. And Flint got what he wanted — some kind of external validation for the story he had made up in his head, the story where he hadn’t tried to rape his first girlfriend, the story where his first girlfriend was just too crazy and, let’s face it, aware to submit to rape-sex. And he got a girlfriend that had now been told, in so many words, that physically attacking him would result in being labeled as a psychotic whore who deserved to die miserable and alone.
When I gave my list of options victims have when being raped, that’s pretty best-case scenario. That assumes that a victim has her wits about her while, you know, being physically attacked and placed in a frightening situation. Some victims would, but we should as a baseline assume that most people will freak when something terrible happens. And so, while I know there was a very rational little place in my mind clicking along that list — fight and be hurt, or submit and let this get over with — there was also another place in my brain aghast that I would even consider fighting. I mean, what would that look like? I was naked, in his parents’ house. I could have attacked him and ran away — no time to get dressed if things had gotten to an attack-and-run level — and then his parents would have found me naked and shivering, and found their son possibly bleeding. And the story would be, “She attacked me out of nowhere!” They would ask, had he become violent with you? And the answer was no. Had he hit you? No, he had not. So, that’s it: I attacked him out of nowhere. Obviously because I was so vengeful, so crazy, so evil. Because forcing sex on a woman who has not given consent is not considered a physical attack in and of itself. As long as the victim is vaguely known to the rapist, as long as she has had sex before, as long as she might possibly enjoy it, as long as she deserves it for leaving him, as long as he has not threatened to murder her puppy or something. It’s not a physical attack. For it to become “violence,” the victim has to wait for the rapist to do something even more horrible to her — and then she has half a chance of justifying her attack. Provided the violence hasn’t frightened her into submission.
So now, today, instead of being the person who attacked Flint “out of nowhere,” I am the person who accused Flint of rape, “out of nowhere.”
