On Pesky Things like Assault and Rape Culture

Hoooboy the media has been in a tizzy lately! Which, ya know, it fucking should be. Women are talking and the world is responding, for better or for worse.

Talking about rape culture is hard. It should be hard. It's messy and complicated and traumatic and fucked up. On the one hand, I'm so fucking glad we're talking, because women have been pushed into silence for millennia and silence only furthers our continued oppression when it comes to our bodies, our success, our humanity.

And some of the men accused? I like those men! Aziz Ansari is one of my faves! This was my face reading Grace's story:

It's hard for me to think of that man as anything other than funny and harmless, but one woman does feel he harmed her. I don't know what to make of that, but it's important to talk about it, however shitty that talk is. But I swear to you now, if Tom Hanks turns out to have raped someone, I fucking quit!

So, yeah, it's hard to talk about it. It's difficult to know how to feel. It's challenging to have a tough conversation about our culture.

On the other hand, I just think we're missing the mark. What is that mark? FUCK IF I KNOW! But I know that, as I read thinkpiece after thinkpiece from Weinstein to Ansari, very few pieces of writing strike me as GETTING IT. For some good ones, check out:

not that bad
In The Midst Of #MeToo, What Type Of Man Do You Want To Be?
Hey, Aziz — I Was Date-Raped and I’m Just Fine!
Aziz, We Tried to Warn You
Women Are Afraid Men Will Murder Them

But more often than not, all of the equivocation over what constitutes rape or assault or what women should be complaining about and what's "not that bad" just detracts from one very important point: rape culture is designed to control women.

What is rape culture? It's rape, yes, sure. It's also sexual assault and sexual harassment and sexual coercion and stalking and street harassment/catcalling and slut shaming and victim blaming, etc., etc., etc. Do you get the picture? Rape culture is the world in which women and femmes live our lives in a constant state of alertness and survival mode because in order to enforce Patriarchy, we stay in our lanes.

Rape culture IS NOT ABOUT SEX. Rape culture is about power.

Let me back up. Rape, historically, has been a tool of war, of conquering, of assimilation, of slavery. Women were property and so raping them is a systematic way to claim that property and subjugate it. That was the incredibly condensed version of the world from the perspective of women. You're welcome.

So all those things that happen to us as we live our lives, whether date rape or catcalling or workplace sexual harassment keep us under control.

In that light, you can imagine that women, after thousands of years of learning to "behave," that our current landscape might be a tad confusing, for men and women both. How do we even begin to talk about consent when our worldview is clouded by a hue of rape culture? It's like trying to examine a virus under a microscope when the lens is dirty. How can you possibly address fixing the problem when we can't even truly see it clearly?

We're drawing lines in the sand without asking any questions first.

And I get the appeal of that. I have been a victim too. And I don't want anyone to question my experience, especially because over-questioning victims and never perpetrators has been one major tool in enforcing said rape culture. What victim wants to come forward when their stories will be picked apart and flayed alive on the public stage?

But we already have people calling it a witch hunt and complaining about due process, when all victims have ever wanted was some fucking due process!

So why can't we pause for a moment and ask some questions? Instead of equivocating about the differences of what is coercion or just a bad date, why aren't we asking why women feel scared to speak up and say no or leave? Instead of asking why she didn't leave or didn't fight back, why don't we ask why it feels safer to give in to an unwanted sexual act than fight back? Why don't we ask why all women feel scared to make any man mad? There have been many times I consented to sex when I really didn't want to and I know I'm not alone. Why aren't we talking about why we feel we have to do that?

Why don't we ask why we're not teaching boys to practice empathy and be open with their own emotions? I've often talked about a study which showed that boys who learned empathy at a young age are just less likely to harass and rape, simply because they're naturally better at understanding women's body language and social cues.

Imagine that! Patriarchy and toxic masculinity is hurting us all and, when we talk about men who have hurt women, we have to ask why. We have to ask why male rage is killing women. We have to ask why men are infected with so much rage and how do we teach boys to experience emotion in a healthy way? Why don't we explore childhood abuse in men and how maybe that contributes to rage around sexuality? Why aren't we talking about white, male entitlement?

I don't know if coercion is the same as assault. I do know that not all sexual assault is rape. And not all sexual harassment is assault. Yes, the acts are different. The intentions of the acts vary as do the physical and mental pain. But, I hesitate to qualify what is "not that bad" when bad is extremely subjective. It's different for everyone and everyone's pain is valid.

But I think that with the statistics of rape and assault for women, it can't be about rapist whack-a-mole. YES, consequences for rapists and harassers. YES. But, that is just consequences and isn't going to solve the bigger problem which is that our culture trains men to control women's bodies and trains women to resign themselves to it out of survival.

Let me be clear: I am not taking away women's power or women's agency. You all know I am an angry, Hulksmash, Wonder Woman-loving, loud-mouthed bitch! BUT, even the loud-mouth bitches like myself are assaulted and it's so easy to predict what you'll do until you're in that moment. Many of us have abusive and traumatic pasts that can be easily triggered. And every fucking human has survival instincts that you don't even know you have and have no idea what your mind and body do when confronted with situations that can be potentially scary.

It's a good thing that we're talking about rape culture, but we're so stuck on only the acts themselves that I fear we're never going to talk about the whys and changing our culture. We have to tear down the patriarchy if we're ever going to live free from rape culture.