By the end of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, two key questions were on the table for those who not only are aware of rape but would like to end men’s violence against women.
First, do we live in a rape culture, or is rape perpetrated by a relatively small number of predatory men?
Second, is rape a clearly definable crime, or are there gray areas in sexual encounters that defy easy categorization as either consensual or non-consensual?
If those seem to be tricky, or trick, questions, don’t worry. There’s an easy answer to both: patriarchy (more on that shortly).
This year’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month in April was full of the usual stories about men’s violence, especially on university campuses. From football-obsessed state schools to elite private campuses, the reality of rape and rape culture was reported by journalists and critiqued by victim-survivors.
But April also included an unexpected debate within the anti-violence movement about the appropriate boundaries of the discussion about rape and rape culture.
“In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming ‘rape culture’ for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campuses,” wrote the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN, in a letter offering recommendations to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault (see the government’s final report). “While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important to not lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.”
RAINN expressed concern that emphasizing rape culture makes “it harder to stop sexual violence, since it removes the focus from the individual at fault, and seemingly mitigates personal responsibility for his or her own actions.”
Feminists pushed back, pointing out that it shouldn’t be difficult to hold accountable the individuals who commit acts legally defined as rape, while we also discuss how prosecuting rapists is made difficult by those who blame victims and make excuses for men’s violence, all of which is related to the way our culture routinely glorifies other types of men’s violence (war, sports and action movies) and routinely presents objectified female bodies to men for sexual pleasure (pornography, Hollywood movies and strip clubs).
Meanwhile, conservative commentators picked up on all this, using it as a club to condemn the always-demonizable feminists for their allegedly unfair treatment of men and allegedly crazy critique of masculinity.
I’m a man who doesn’t believe feminists are unfair or crazy. In fact, I believe the only sensible way to understand these issues is through a feminist critique of — you guessed it — patriarchy.
Rape and rape-like behavior
Before wading into the reasons we need feminism, let’s consider a hypothetical:
A young man and woman are on a first date. The man decides early in the evening that he would like to have sexual intercourse and makes his attraction to her clear in conversation. He does not intend to force her to have sex, but he is assertive in a way that she interprets to mean that he “won’t take no for an answer.” The woman does not want to have sex, but she is uncertain of how he will react if she rejects his advance. Alone in his apartment — in a setting in which his physical strength means she likely could not prevent him from raping her — she offers to perform oral sex, hoping that will satisfy him and allow her to get home without a direct confrontation that could become too intense, even violent. She does not tell him what she is thinking, out of fear of how he may react. The man accepts the offer of oral sex, and the evening ends without conflict.
If that sex happened — and it’s an experience that women have described (see Flirting with Danger by Lynn Phillips and the companion film) — should we describe the encounter as consensual sex or rape? In legal terms, this clearly is not rape. So, it’s consensual sex. No problem, right?
Consider some other potentially relevant factors: If a year before that situation, the woman had been raped while on a date, would that change our assessment? If she had been sexually assaulted as a child and still, years later, goes into a survival mode when triggered? If this were a college campus and the man was a well-known athlete, and she feared the system would protect him?
By legal standards, this still clearly is not rape. But by human standards, this doesn’t feel like fully consensual sex. Maybe we should recognize that both those assessments are reasonable. In short, rape is a definable crime that happens in a rape culture — once again, both things are true.
What is patriarchy and why does it matter?
Patriarchy is a term rarely heard in mainstream conversation, especially since the backlash against feminism took off in the 1980s. So, let’s start with the late feminist historian Gerda Lerner’s definition of patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in the society in general.” Patriarchy implies, she continued, “that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources.”
Feminism challenges acts of male dominance and analyzes the underlying patriarchal ideology that tries to make that dominance seem inevitable and immutable. Second-wave radical feminists in the second half of the 20th century identified men’s violence against women — rape, child sexual assault, domestic violence and various forms of harassment — as a key method of patriarchal control and made a compelling argument that sexual assault cannot be understood outside of an analysis of patriarchy’s ideology.
Some of those feminists argued that “rape is about power not sex,” but other feminists went deeper, pointing out that when women describe the range of their sexual experiences it becomes clear there is no bright-line distinction between rape and not-rape, but instead a continuum of sexual intrusion into women’s lives by men. Yes, men who rape seek a sense of power, but men also use their power to get sex from women, sometimes under conditions that are not legally defined as rape but involve varying levels of control and coercion.
So, the focus shouldn’t be reduced to a relatively small number of men who engage in behavior we can easily label as rape. Those men pose a serious problem and we should be diligent in prosecuting them. But that prosecution can go on — and, in fact, will be aided by — recognizing the larger context in which men are trained to seek control and pursue conquest in order to feel like a man, and how that control is routinely sexualized.
Patriarchal sex
If this seems far-fetched, think about the ways men in all-male spaces often talk about sex, such as asking each other, “Did you get any?” From that perspective, sex is the acquisition of pleasure from a woman, something one takes from a woman, and men talk openly among themselves about strategies to enhance the likelihood of “getting some” even in the face of resistance from women.
This doesn’t mean that all men are rapists, that all heterosexual sex is rape or that egalitarian relationships between men and women are impossible. It does mean, however, that rape is about power and sex, about the way men are trained to understand ourselves and to see women.
Let me repeat: The majority of men do not rape. But consider these other categories:
Those men are not rapists. But is that fact — that the men in these categories are not, in legal terms, guilty of rape — comforting? Are we advancing the cause of ending men’s violence against women by focusing only on the acts legally defined as rape?
Rape is rape, and rape culture is rape culture
Jody Raphael’s book Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming Are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis points out that if we use “a conservative definition of rape about which there can be no argument” — rape as an act of “forcible penetration” — the research establishes that between 10.6 percent and 16.1 percent of American women have been raped. That means somewhere between 12 million and 18 million women in this country today live as rape victim-survivors, if we use a narrow definition of the crime.
Because no human activity takes place in an ideological vacuum — the ideas in our heads affect the way we behave — it’s hard to make sense of those numbers without the concept of rape culture. A rape culture doesn’t command men to rape, but it does make rape inviting, and it reduces the likelihood rapists will be identified, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished. It’s hard to imagine any meaningful efforts to reduce, and someday eliminate, rape without talking openly and honestly about these matters. But RAINN argues that such denial is exactly the path we should take.
Why should we fear talking about the socialization process by which boys and men are trained to see themselves as powerful over women and to see women as sexual objects? Why should we fear asking critical questions about all-male spaces, such as athletic teams and fraternities, where these attitudes might be reinforced? Could it be a fear that the problem of sexual assault is so deeply entwined in our taken-for-granted assumptions about gender that any serious response to the problem of rape requires us to all get more radical, to take radical feminism seriously?
This does not mean all men are rapists, that all male athletes are rapists, or that all fraternity members are rapists. It does mean that if we want to stop sexual violence, we have to confront patriarchy. If we decide we aren’t going to talk about patriarchy, then let’s stop pretending we are going to stop sexual violence and recognize that, at best, all we can do is manage the problem. If we can’t talk about patriarchy, then let’s admit that we are giving up on the idea of gender justice and goal of a world without rape.
It’s easy to understand why people don’t like this formulation of the problem, given that anything beyond a tepid liberal, postmodern feminism is out of fashion these days and radical feminist analyses of male dominance are rarely part of polite conversation. Sometimes people concede the value of such an analysis, but justify the silence about it by claiming, “People can’t handle it.” When someone makes that claim, I assume what they mean is “I can’t handle it myself,” that it’s too much, too painful to deal with.
That’s not hard to understand, because to confront the reality of rape and rape culture is to realize that vigorous prosecution of the small number of men who rape doesn’t solve the larger problem.
If anyone still doubts that rape culture exists and is relevant, how else would we explain the Yale University fraternity members who marched on campus while shouting sexist chants, including “No means yes, yes means anal,” as part of a 2010 pledge event?
Everyone recognizes the mocking reference to the anti-rape message, “No means no,” which expresses women’s demand that men listen to them. These Yale men reject that. The second part of their chant — “Yes means anal” — states that women who agree to sex are implicitly agreeing to anything a man wants, including anal penetration. This will make sense to anyone who is aware of the prevalence of anal penetration in today’s pornography marketed to heterosexual men. In those pornographic scenes, women sometimes beg for that penetration and other times are forced into it, but the message is the same: Men’s pleasure is central.
In this one chant, these men of Yale — one of the most elite universities in the United States, which produces some of the country’s most powerful business and political leaders, including five presidents — clearly express a patriarchal view of gender and sex. Their chant is an endorsement of rape and an expression of rape culture.
Is a feminist critique of rape and rape culture a threat to me as a man? I was socialized in a patriarchal culture to believe that whatever feminists had planned, I should be afraid of it. But what I have learned from radical feminists is that quite the opposite is true — feminism is a gift to men. Such critique does not undermine my humanity, but instead gives me a chance to embrace it.
The main problem with rape culture activists is that they lack any solid proof that the current American culture fosters and encourages rape. Rather, they rely on fuzzy logic and incomplete correlations to “prove” their point, which is, I think, undefined.
Take the author’s first example, in which the young man “does not intend to force her to have sex, but he is assertive in a way that she interprets to mean that he ‘won’t take no for an answer.'”
There are problems with this attempt to broaden the term “sexual assault” to cover a wide enough spectrum for rape culture activists to claim their 1 in 5 statistic. First of all, what is the gesture he does that signifies “he won’t take no for an answer.” This must be defined, otherwise the reader imagines a quite menacing individual who can instill fear in a woman’s heart if she does not obey his sexual command – and that sounds like rape to me and most people. Second, in case Mr. Jensen didn’t feel like he got his point across, he literally puts rape scenarios into the equation: “If a year before that situation, the woman had been raped while on a date, would that change our assessment? If she had been sexually assaulted as a child and still, years later, goes into a survival mode when triggered?”
Why, yes it would change our assessment – because now rape is now officially a part of this story. And there’s a good chance that the young man would also change his assessment if he knows about it and would act much differently and act differently in his advances toward to the woman. But by bringing actual rape incidents into the scenario, Mr. Jensen creates a rape culture scenario out of date by making the woman already a victim of rape.
This pretty much sums up the rape culture activists: nonsensical arguments and skewed statistics.
Patriarchy and the religiosity connected to it means that women aren’t taught to be proud of sexual assertiveness (and that men know that). Men are taught to push the gas, and women to push the brakes. Women also know that if they are raped by someone they know (especially if it is a physically non-violent experience leaving no marks), they generally will not be believed, and subsequently questioned and blamed for not putting the brakes on enough.
This leaves the woman in our scenario at a loss for saying what she thinks, directly.
In the state I live in, children are not taught about sexual education at all, religiosity puts a focus on purity and women grow up believing sex is inherently a battle. Women are not, generally, taught that having sex on the first date is a great thing (and men are not taught to slow down). Our young woman in question may not have been raped, but she probably didn’t enjoy the encounter (and the young man either is now believing she did and is completely in the dark about her real feelings-a terrible way to start a relationship, or does’t much care).
I’m all for the empowering “go girl” tropes but reality tells a different story when it comes to norms of behavior, how people are socialized through school and church (and popular television).
I don’t know of a single woman who hasn’t had an experience like the one mentioned above which says a hell of a lot of bad things about how men view initial sexual encounters and how terribly women are prepared to be sexual beings.
What this means to me is not that we should be having less sex, but far far more communication and education about it, as well as deconstructing myths and beliefs about purity, dominance, etc.
I know a number of men who have had encounters like the one above (but reversed). You know what? They hated it and felt like the couldn’t talk to anyone about it.
“Rape culture” may or may not be real, but the dearth of actual culture focused on real pleasure, real consent, real intimacy and real connection is very real.
Fetishized feminism is not a gift to men. It is a scourge to peace and justice. Jensen’s article is full of groundless assumptions and false claims which add up to a malignant prejudice against men and boys. Doubtless this judgement will be cheered as justified. So it is with every hegemonic ideology: self authenticating process of justifying the threats it falsely creates from the start.
The ever expanding definition of rape is the essential example in this article. It puts men in an impossible position, which seems to be the objective. Even when a woman consents to sex, ideologists such as Jensen want them to have the right to ruin a man’s life, because, you know, the patriarchy. That it does in fact, ruin and end many lives, including the lives of children matters not to the likes of Jensen who is clearly blinded by his own hubris.
“Men who do not rape but would be willing to rape if they were sure they would not be punished.” What the hell does this even mean? Besides it being an ungrammatical fragment, it is simply an unsourced smear against men in general. Similarly: “Men who do not rape but buy sex with women who have been, or likely will be, raped in the context of being prostituted.”
Jensen is a fraud and this whole tide of fetishized “feminism” is a trojan horse for the likes of Hillary Clinton and her humanitarian interventionism. The drive to criminalize men and boys is central to the class war of the rich against the working class. Obama took to the airwaves a few weeks ago to preach the new moralism of the manufactured rape culture. His statistics on the incidence of rape are dishonest. He does it to pander to a voting block that will deliver his pal Hillary into the killer-in-chief throne.
The pathologization of human sexuality is what all this nefarious discourse adds up to. The consequences aren’t small or insignificant. But the movement Jensen is a part of only feigns concern about social justice. The academic language in these sorts of articles demonstrates the larger fraud. This is a political movement designed around the class interests of the ruling elite. Yet it poses as a social justice concern. How better to penetrate and destroy but from the inside?
My, my. You sound like you are carrying some heavy guilt, Kevin. Lay your burden down some. Jensen is not suggesting we arrest men for only thinking about rape. He is just asking we become more aware and compassionate. What is wrong with you? You have a serious castration complex. You seem to know next to zilch about feminism and only seem to be condoning. You contempt and utter lack of compassion regarding women seems to suggest you might have a lot of shame you are carrying. I would get some counselling. Your hatred is inappropriate and has little relevancy here.
correction: only seem to be condoning the violence.
Your Yale frat pledge example wanders into—and straight out of—some rich territory. The ubiquity of man-on-man violence (and sexual violence in particular) within such rituals calls for questions about how fear, peer pressure, and gender insecurity among other things play into rape and rape culture. That is, I suspect that men’s understanding of violence against women is inextricably bound up in men’s understanding of violence against one another. You gesture toward this when you mention sports and homosocial environments, but the examples you give go straight to–and only to–women as objects of sexual objectification, fetish, and violence.
I think it’s worth considering the intermediary step of sexual/gender violence against men. When fraternity pledges are ritually stripped of clothing, called girls, made to clean things to impossible standards, forced onto their knees, blindfolded, made to perform sexually, and yes, are raped, by other men… only then to be delivered of such threats and elevated to a status higher than previously held, there’s a false and dangerous perception of empathy, I think, for women in rape culture. As in, “It’s no big deal, you’ll get through it. It’s a rough world.” And while this Yale frat example may seem an extreme one, I think a similar dynamic without the explicitly sexualized end plays out day-in-and-out among grade school boys on playgrounds.
This is all to say that boys are hardened. And that men compare themselves first with other men. And that resentment breeds entitlement. And that some people, when assaulted, assault others.
I want to thank Robert Jensen for his insightful article. I still remember when feminists were criticized for demanding that ABC fire weatherman Tex Antoine for telling a joke about rape after a news repoert about an attempted rape of a nine-year-old girl. After Antoine was criticized, he said, “I didn’t know the victim was only nine years old.” I think that Mr. Jensen and other feminists are very helpful in reminding us that rape is a crime- no matter how old the victim is or how the woman is dressed or where she was hanging out.
To only focus on the act of sexual penetration misses the point. Physiological strength being what it is, it’s easy for a male to overpower a more vulnerable person, but there is much more to the violation that damages the victim, even without “rape” occurring.
When power-over controls the thinking of either party, mutuality is impossible. Without shared agreement, violation occurs on many levels: mental, emotional, psychological, as well as at the core of being; physical violation is just the most obvious and most readily documentable.
The problem begins with the “Boys will be boys” mentality. As long as society agrees that young boys can’t learn self-discipline, then rape culture is fostered; it is perpetuated as they become further habituated to seek control and pursue conquest especially around girls/women.
To turn this rape-culture-precursor around, it is essential to begin at the foundation and teach young boys that they do have self-control: Boys ARE able to exert self-discipline. Boys must learn they can’t always have their way and that they must sometimes be willing to stop a pursuit entirely, and always so when the effort violates the interests and rights of another person.
Until both men and women understand that in every context each is responsible for self discipline of his/her own choices, the basis for mutual agreement is absent.
Lack of mutuality is the underlying cultural flaw that enables rape culture. Lack of mutuality subliminally pervades the thinking of both genders. Focusing rape prevention measures as female responsibility just perpetuates that flaw.
Boys will become, if not rapists, sexual predators as long as society doesn’t expect them to become self-disciplined and self-responsible.
I would ask…if after he was so assertive about wanting to have sexual intercourse then why did she go home with him? If she had previously been raped why would she go home with him on a first date? If The woman does not want to have sex, but she is uncertain of how he will react if she rejects his advance then WHY DID SHE LEAVE A PUBLIC PLACE AND GO HOME WITH HIM!!!!! WHY DID SHE OFFER ORAL SEX!?!?!?
Sheesh like standing in traffic and NOT expecting to be hit….my experience with feminist women has actually bee the opposite, they usually are the aggressor. I’ve been offered sex by many a “first” date who then invited me to their home and required of me that I perform in ways that were not just sweet love making. Most of the time I have countered that they really shouldn’t be inviting strangers on first dates 1) into their home alone and 2)offering up and encouraging first date sex to which I have heard the reply 9/10 times, “what are you some kinda fag!”
How do you know they are the category feminists Jensen is talking about?
Maybe the date was dinner at his home. You miss the points entirely when you try to reinvent it for your own narrow-minded narcissistic assumptions.
Your fag comment is sort of reminiscent of when women were commonly accused of being lesbian. I am probably casting some pearls here.
There is a very sad phenomena whereby women, who were sexually abused as children, and there are many, become promiscuous in counterphobic attempt to overcome anxiety caused by PTSD through, many times, re-enactment.
You sound like a guy who might turn of some nice girls. Sounds like you attracting the Faux Libertarian feminists, the Nina Hartley types. If so, you my examine why.
“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”― Margaret Atwood
I really do not understand what some of these critical replies are all about. I love the way Robert Jensen interconnects the institutional systematic social and cultural tolerance for rape and the personal realities for women. Being raped as a child or adult has its consequences.
Most of men’s perceived privilege and entitlement comes from a narcissism that was born from millenniums of violence and wars while commanding obedience and subservience. Do I have to fully explain Atwood’s quote above to the deniers?
Recently, a woman was beat to death at a McDonald’s in Hong Kong by a gang of young men because she would not give them her phone number. US women revealed that that they will give a fake number to men because they fear violent reactions if they refuse to.
Wake up Frida, as Erich Fromm said, this is only a veneer of civility covering up some of the most barbaric impulses. No better example than some of the gang rapes by high school sports stars, Glen Ridge being the most famous.
Next Frida and Kevin will tell us there is no such thing as the trafficking and slavery of females worldwide, because it is just too hard for them to face the music, pop their bubbles. You are living in a fantasy where blaming the victim re-establish you superiority, whatever flavor that might be.
The rape culture seems to be a self perpetuating one. It is a reality that some men will kill or brutally pistol whip or batter if not satisfied, so on the everyday reputation of “shock and awe” reality, women sometimes hypnotically succumb if they feel their lives might be in danger.
I speak from first had experience of nearly all these phenomena, so Jensen rings true for me.