I want us to think about rape as it happens situationally, not as “rape culture.”
Rolling Stone just acknowledged that it now has “reservations” about the University of Virginia rape story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. In it, Erdely caimed that a student, “Jackie,” had been gang-raped by a host of fraternity members; the story has been widely criticised on numerous grounds, not the least of which is that Erdely never included responses from the accused men.
When the news of the Woody Allen scandal first broke, I sought the counsel and analysis of friends who, I knew, would not give in to the rabid and unreasonable responses that coloured so much of the discussion. James D’Entremont, Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Roger Lancaster, Matt Simonette and I have been engaged, for months, in a long and sustained and, for me, deeply enriching sets of conversations about this and related matters and scandals for a few months now. They are the kinds of conversations that seem impossible to have on a public FB post or on Twitter, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone for them. One of the things we predicted, in a looser fashion, is that the new culture around “rape culture” is bound to legitimise false or, at the very least, deeply problematic narratives — and these are, in fact, as critics of the RS piece have already noted, narratives with several borrowed elements from cultural texts.
I write all this not to dismiss every story about rape but to point out that in a culture where all men accused of rape are instantly judged as rapists, and where even the term “alleged” or “allegedly” is scoffed at as somehow victim-blaming, where numbers around sexual violence are massively inflated, where sex is deemed only as a clear-cut zone of “yes” and “no,” and where the term “rape culture” circulates as a bizarre shorthand for a nearly post-apocalyptic vision of eternal rape: this is the shit we get to deal with.
In an interview with Michael Kinnucan, I outlined some of the problems with the notion of “rape culture”:
“But I’d like to go back to rape culture for a minute. I think one of my problems with that concept is that it makes rape into, not a systemic issue, not an issue that’s specifically contextualized. Rapes are so different, it’s so circumstantial, in other words. The rape that occurs in a country that is being occupied by invaders, for instance, is rather different from the rape that occurs when a woman is walking alone at night. Those are very different instances of rape. It’s not that one is less traumatic than the other, just that they’re very different. And there are very different systemic issues at play. When we talk about rape culture, we erase all those differences, and we make it very difficult, we make it impossible, to really think about what engenders rape. The rape that is a pure and blatant expression of political power, in countries and at times when rape is actually a tool for exerting power and coercion and creating mass terror, rape is a tool of terror, a political tool.
That’s a rather different situation than the one in which women are raped because they are vulnerable at night. And when we talk about rape culture it turns it into—it’s almost as if we are all living under this geodesic dome where rape just permeates our DNA and our consciousness in a rather diffuse and undifferentiated way. And I find that really troubling. Because I want us to think about the politics, the geopolitics of rape. I want us to be able to think about rape as political terror. And I want us also to think about rape as individual terror. I want us to think about rape as it happens situationally, not as “rape culture.” Which to me is useless and counterproductive, and actually counters the kinds of effects that many feminists claim that they want, which is to engender a greater discussion of rape. I think it does the opposite, it creates an undifferentiated, apolitical attitude towards rape.”
And in case it is not as blindingly obvious as it should be, let me also make the point that this still doesn’t mean that something did not happen but also, sadly, that this kind of shitty approach of granting immunity to the person who claims rape — which, let us be blunt, had less to do with any fucking feminism on RS‘s part than with its desire to get massive amounts of eyeballs — does NO ONE ANY GOOD, least of all the many people, adults and children, who suffer an infinite number of sexual assaults every single day, and who are too often silenced due to everything ranging from patriarchy to war to power to the generally shitty ways humans treat each other. And you can cry rape culture all you want, but if you don’t believe that a man or men accused of rape (and soon we will hear from and about a range of sexualities and gender identities, so brace yourself) should have the right to defend themselves and/or that they could falsely accused, even if a hundred voices insist on their guilt, you’re shitty beyond belief and you have no fucking idea how power works.
I’ll have more to say in an ongoing series of pieces (for subscribers only) about sex scandals, rape accusations, and the dynamics of sex and power. For now, I just wanted to remind everyone that, in the words of the always incisive Freddie deBoer, “This is going to be an internet shitshow to end all internet shitshows.” Fasten your seatbelts.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
