I refer to this abominable text only because this “science” still survives today. We see evidence of it in our justice system, our literature, our television shows and movies. It survives as attitudes, as biases, as stereotypes, as bigotry.
* * *
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou writes how, at seven years old, she is raped repeatedly by her mother’s boyfriend, who threatens to murder her brother if she speaks about what they’ve done. What we’ve done? she wonders. When the man’s crime is finally discovered, far too late, and when young Maya, then called Marguerite, is hospitalized with injuries and the man is finally arrested for his crimes, Marguerite testifies against him. The lawyer asks her if it was just the one time or if it was many times, and Marguerite feels herself caught in a trap: if she tells the truth and says yes, it was many times, the lawyer will use it as proof of her “natural sensuality,” that she in fact could not have been raped by this adult man; and yet if she lies and says no, it was just the one time, she fails to convey the full force of his crimes against her. No is what she feels everyone in the courtroom expects her to say, even wants her to say. The lie enters her mouth and she lets it escape.
Her rapist is sentenced to a year and a day in prison, though his lawyer arranges his release later that afternoon. That night, he is found beaten to death, likely by Marguerite’s brothers and uncles, seeking justice where the courts failed to deliver it. She is struck mute with guilt about his death and does not speak for the next six years.
* * *
When an institution like a court, or a police department, or a district attorney’s office, or a university, or a family does not listen to a woman who speaks about her sexual assault, they betray an attitude that women’s speech does not matter—not when we give testimony, not when we make appeals, not when we report the violent crimes committed against us, not even when we say, very clearly, no.
* * *
Perhaps the lesson isn’t, then, that the violation of women’s bodies is unthinkable, but that men wield immense power when they think about, plan, and perform an act that we are told is forbidden. To be sure, one can often find pleasure in doing things that are expressly forbidden. We can each, no doubt, think of examples from our own youth. And yet I do not believe that the exclusive reason men rape is because they find pleasure in breaking a taboo. There are also taboos against cannibalism, but we hear of people eating other people almost never. But men rape women every day.
* * *
Part of the problem seems to be the myth that is perpetuated about the sort of person a rapist is and the sort of person he is not. “The man I know would never do this,” say the people who protect and defend these men. Perhaps these people truly believe these men are incapable of the things they have been accused of doing. Or perhaps they believe these men are capable of those things—even believe they are guilty of the crimes of which they are accused—and yet they love these men anyway and cannot reconcile that.
We are told that rape is something only “monsters” do, undeterred by the accumulation of the suffering it inflicts. A rapist is a man in a mask who jumps out of the bushes with a knife—a man who cannot control his baser instincts, whose physical impulses get the best of him—as if rape is a natural temptation some men simply fail to resist. In reality, most rapists are men who have been taught from an early age that to be feminine means to be weak, and to be masculine means to overcome all weakness to prove that they are manly and strong. The insults boys learn teach them that a weak man is always a feminine one. The result is a culture of men who hate women because they have learned to hate the feminine in themselves.
Not all men, to be sure, but there are, without a doubt, some men for whom this mandate toward virility and strength is so strong, holds such sway on their minds and their actions, that the possibility of any culpability, or any violence, or aggression, or wrongdoing, simply cannot also exist. A man like this has been taught to understand that women are not people, not in the same way as men are. Resistance to his advances are seen as an invitation to advance more aggressively. Lack of resistance is also seen as an invitation to advance more aggressively. In either scenario, overcoming all resistance is a mark of virility for the man, but it doesn’t mean anything at all for the woman because she is seen as meaningless.
* * *
“I don’t hear her say anything,” Bill Cosby tells a team of lawyers during his deposition in the Andrea Constand civil suit. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.” Cosby’s euphemisms and innuendoes call to mind an image of the violence without the language of violence. To speak frankly, to admit drugging and raping this woman, would produce horror and revulsion, because drugging a woman in order to rape her is supposedly an unthinkable act. Cosby’s language is playful, as if the woman—what she says, what she does, what she might want for herself, the goals she might have set for her life—are entirely beside the point. It’s as if the fact of his eventual conquest has the power to remove his culpability for committing a crime, to remove the crime from history, to remove it even from the realm of possibility.
This trick, in which a man disappears himself (or is disappeared) from his actions, isn’t magic. We perform it on behalf of men whenever we talk about this violence that is supposedly unthinkable. We talk about the number of women and girls who are raped—in high school, in college, in marriages, in an attic, on a Tuesday—but not the number of men who rape women and girls. We talk of the women and girls who are murdered, kidnapped, found decapitated or frozen or barely alive in the front yard, or on the porch, or tossed on the side of the road, but not the number of men who murder, or kidnap, or maim, or destroy them. Nicole Brown Simpson was a “battered woman” before she was a dead one, but the man who beat her, and very possibly murdered her, escapes our sentences. We call Andrea Constand an “accuser,” a label we apply also to each of the dozens of women, individually and as a group, who have come forward to demand justice for being drugged and raped by Bill Cosby. Our language shields him, disappears him from the scene of the crime, transforms his crime into an allegation, a suggestion, a rumor.
* * *
The lawyers for Owen Labrie—a student at a private preparatory school in New Hampshire—disappeared him in exactly this way from accusations that he had raped a fifteen-year-old classmate. The girl’s testimony was harrowing: Labrie took her to a locked mechanical room, where he took off her pants and removed her underwear, where he kissed and bit her breasts as she was crying and telling him, “No, no, no,” where he scraped inside her vagina with his fingers, and held her hands above her head, and penetrated her with what she believed to be his penis. On the stand, Labrie denied this version of events, telling jurors, “I thought she was having a great time.” He denied penetrating her, denied that she had said no—although, when pressed by his lawyer about whether he had perhaps kissed the girl’s breasts too aggressively, he acknowledged that he “may have been a little carried away.”
If getting “carried away” is intelligible as any part of a defense, it is because some part of us believes that all men have this inside them—an instinct to which he had simply succumbed. And in the end, that defense succeeded. The prosecutors could not prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the jury—made up of nine men and three women—that the sex was “nonconsensual,” so they acquitted him on the charge of felony rape. But they could prove that he used a computer to lure a minor for sexual activity, a felony, and that he endangered a child, a misdemeanor, and these are the crimes for which he was convicted, along with three misdemeanor charges of sexual assault. He wept as the verdict was read, even though his defense had prevailed in what it set out to prove: that he was, in fact, just a “normal” young man.
* * *
“One in five women who goes to college will be assaulted,” Vice President Joe Biden says in a press conference. The year is 2014. A presidential task force has just released the
results of a study on sexual assault on college campuses. I know these numbers are inaccurately low, since estimates predict that only 13 percent of women who are raped report the assault to authorities. The rest keep silent out of fear they’ll be shamed, fear of retribution, fear of invasive, inappropriate, and insensitive questions. “It’s a parent’s worst fear when you drop your daughter off at college,” the vice president says to his audience. “You say a little prayer for one thing: that your daughter will be safe. You pray that your daughter will be safe.”
The White House’s 1 Is 2 Many campaign launches with a PSA that stars Benicio del Toro, who is seated in a black leather wing chair in front of a fireplace in a wood-paneled room. “We have a big problem,” he begins, “and we need your help.” The problem, we are told by an A-list roster of celebrities like Dulé Hill, Seth Meyers, Daniel Craig, and Steve Carell, is sexual assault. The PSA encourages men to speak up, to act, to become part of the solution to the problem only they can name.
The message is important and necessary, although it may be somewhat undermined by its spokespeople. Daniel Craig, for instance, is best known for reprising the role of James Bond, a character whose reputation for seducing women is topped only by his reputation for disposing of them. “If I saw it happening,” Daniel Craig says in the PSA, tilting his head to one side, “I’d never blame her. I’d help her.”
Del Toro continues: “If I saw it happening, I’d speak up.” It’s uncanny, really, because his characters don’t show this same moral fiber. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for instance, it’s Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke who speaks up, who acts, who intervenes when he finds his lawyer, Dr. Gonzo, sequestered in a hotel room with an underage “religious freak,” having plied her with LSD on the plane in order to more easily pressure her into sex once they reach the hotel. In the PSA, del Toro looks directly into the camera: “If she doesn’t consent, or if she can’t consent, it’s rape. It’s assault.”
Which is the real message? The franchise or the PSA? The paycheck or the community service? If our role models tell us they in fact have high respect for women and we all should too, how should we understand the roles they play that reinforce the opposite message: that a man’s value is determined by his virility, by the number of women he’s slept with, by his disregard for a woman’s body, her autonomy, her age? Do they mean it when they say that women matter? Do we matter or do we not?
* * *
I was fourteen the first time a man raped me. It was February, Valentine’s Day, and he wore a baseball cap, stood with one hand plunged deep into his jean pocket; the other held out a bottle, offering a drink. We stood in a liquor store parking lot beside the highway. Where did I tell my parents I would be? He was a few years older than me. Tall, like a man, I remember thinking. What did I know? He was on the basketball team, over six feet tall. His mustache and chest hair appeared in earnest patches. He took a drag of his cigarette, blowing the smoke over one shoulder. He never took his eyes off me. What did he see? I lifted the bottle to my lips, tipped it back, and took a drink.
In the morning, my thighs were purpled with bruises from his sharp pelvic bones, a rust-colored stain on the sheet beneath me. My arm was sore at the shoulder, my lips swollen, full and smashed-looking in the mirror. I bent over the toilet while the night returned to me in heaves and waves: our lips met once, and then again, and then he was clawing and desperate. I wanted to move away from him, from what was approaching and unstoppable, and let a “no” fall from my mouth—then a string of them dripping like pearls. Afterward he dressed and slipped out the door. The bile in my stomach surged, acid and cinnamon and sweet.
When people heard what had happened they explained it back to me: “Slut,” they said. “Liar.” “Whore.”
* * *
That was ages ago, and very little about our situation has evolved. Then, as now, people will ask questions: What was that girl doing there in the first place? What clothes did she wear? To whom did she talk? At which jokes did she laugh? How did she hold her hand while she was laughing? Did she touch her tongue to her teeth? Did she cross or uncross her legs? What else had she done with her body that day? What about the previous day? What about the weeks or months or years before? What messages did she send, because he must have gotten the wrong ones. He was behaving as boys do, as men do. Men have needs. What did she expect? Then, as now, a community will coalesce to protect him—a chorus of accomplices, of friends, of parents and mentors and law enforcement officers, of district attorneys and judges, of lawmakers and teachers and neighbors, of celebrities and colleagues and football coaches and babysitters—who validate and corroborate and shield the man from the reach of the terrible consequences we might inflict. They have so much more at stake than only him.
* * *
Twenty-one years later, a few months after that first reading in the library at the university where I work, I am standing at the bottom of an outdoor amphitheater in Portland, Oregon, where the seats are filled with people. I feel certain the man who kidnapped and raped me when I was twenty-one is among them. I am planning, after all these years, to tell everyone what he has done. He’s here, I think. He has come to shoot me with a gun. But nothing, not even that, will prevent me from speaking.
And here I am, alive, still speaking.
* * *
“Maybe none of this is about control,” Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale. “Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.”
* * *
“Power,” says Foucault, “is a set of relations between two persons.”
* * *
“Power,” says Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.”
* * *
“Power,” says Hannah Arendt, “belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.”
* * *
We all know that men have power as a group, but I want to be clear about something: women as a group do too.
* * *
Before Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured fourteen others in Isla Vista, California, he had a long history of expressing hatred and violence toward women. He planned the crimes, and his premeditation is documented in YouTube videos he posted days and hours before the shootings, citing rejection by women as one of his motivations for the slaughter. In one of the videos he says, “I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.”
When women on Twitter begin pointing out that these attitudes of sexual entitlement are consistent with a broader, misogynistic, sexually aggressive culture, men on Twitter get defensive and assert that “not all men” are misogynistic or aggressive or homicidal. One woman—I wish I knew her name—begins tagging her tweets #YesAllWomen in response to the “not all men” argument, to make clear that, no, not all men are homicidal maniacs, but, yes, all women live in fear of those who are. Within days, millions of women everywhere in the world are tweeting their experiences of fear, intimidation, and harassment. At one point, there are as many as fifty thousand tweets a minute, each sharing an experience of everyday misogyny.
The backlash against #YesAllWomen is harsh, with women being trolled, harassed, insulted, and threatened. It happens again, years later, with #metoo, as women reveal they have been blacklisted, fired, sued. The threats and punishments are intended to silence us. In this, they must fail.
* * *
The phrase “speak truth to power” applies here. Often considered an eighteenth-century Quakerism, a form of pacifist resistance against King George I of Britain, the phrase actually first appears in a letter from civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who was in fact a Quaker and who wrote a letter in August 1942 to the Quaker leadership urging them against providing spiritual support to troops being deploye
d in World War II. “The primary social function of a religious society,” Rustin writes, “is to ‘speak the truth to power.’ The truth is that war is wrong. It is then our duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society.”
As I see it, to speak truth to power means to struggle against various silences: the official silencing of a criminal justice system that claims to protect us but instead renders us mute; a cultural silence that seeks to discredit us before we even open our mouths; and the smaller, private silences we have sometimes imposed on ourselves. It is this last kind of silence I have found to be the most dangerous.
* * *
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Philomela does not end with Tereus cutting out her tongue. For a year, she remains imprisoned, weaving a tapestry that depicts the crime she suffered at this war-king’s hands—threads of deep purple on a white background. When the tapestry is finished, Philomela gives it to a servant, communicating to him through gestures to deliver it to her sister, the Queen. The servant obeys, not knowing what message the tapestry contains. The Queen understands the message, rescues her sister, and takes her back to the castle in secret. The two sisters conspire together to kill Tereus’s son, Itys, and serve him as dinner to the King. While feasting away, Tereus asks after his son. At this climactic moment, Philomela reveals herself, disheveled, disfigured, smeared in blood, and throws Itys’s head into Tereus’s lap. As he begins to understand what has happened to his only son, he flies into a rage and chases the two women out of the castle, through the woods, and into a field before the gods finally intervene and turn them all into birds.
The Reckonings Page 7
