100 words for snow — or no words for rape?
In a trial involving an alleged sexual assault, how would the prosecution present its case in a courtroom from which the judge had formally banned the words and phrases “rape,” “sexual assault,” “victim,” “assailant,” etc?
Usually we leave it up to the linguists and philosophers to muse on the crazy relationship between words and their meanings. In the law, words—the important ones, at least—are defined narrowly, and judges, lawyers, and jurors are trusted to understand their meanings. It’s precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently.Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.
Safi’s first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront’s initial language ban—which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they’ll just have to read the witnesses’ eyebrows to sort out the difference.
Aaron:
After reading your description of this case, Stan, it seemed so strange that I decided to read the two articles you link to in order to make some sense of it. Having done so, I don’t think the judge’s rulings were as unreasonable as your summary makes them appear.
First of all, Ms. Bowen can’t possibly testify to having been “raped” or “sexually assaulted” because her whole claim is based on the assertion that she has no memory of anything that happened from the time she left the bar with Pamir Safi to the time, many hours later, when she woke up with him fucking her in his apartment. (Whether the court would find the word “fucking” allowable I don’t know!) By the way, the phrase “sexual assault” is clearly not barred from the trial, since it is precisely what Mr. Safi is being charged with, based not on the alleged use of force but on the claim that Ms. Bowen was too drunk to consent to sex, and that Mr Safi should have known that!
Nothing in the judge’s orders keeps Ms. Bowen from describing what happened as she claims to remember it. It only keeps her from labelling it.
Incidentally, Tory Bowen is, according to one of the articles and as sort of confirmed by a web search, “director of development for the College Republican National Committee”! If I were on the jury, that fact alone would render her testimony virtually worthless.
STAN REPLIES: DeAnander posted this, not me… for starters. And after much struggle by women, the masculinist legal/court system has grudgingly acknowledged that “fucking” an unconscious woman IS rape. If you’d spent half the time googling the question of whether this constitutes rape — legally — as you did trying to play shithouse defense attorney for the perpetrators, and apologist for this sexist judge, then you’d have known this. It’s even on the site “Law for Kids.”
And your dickheaded remark at the end only goes to prove what DeAanader has been pointing out repeatedly for some time now. Leftyboys are just as prone to humiliate and dismiss “enemy” women in explicitly sexualized terms (as women). We might allow that you were merely quibbling over whether she “consented” but didn’t remember, as painfully drawn (and stupid) as that particular quibble might be; but this little enemy-women zinger erases any doubt that your intent is underwritten by your contempt for women-as-women. On the right, black women (eg) are considered “un-rape-able”; and in your phallocentric corner of the left, Republican women are, too.
I hesitate, but only momentarily, to point out that this whole dickheaded hairsplitting routine (a boyz way of “debating”) would quicky go by the wayside if it had been a man who found that a guy had “fucked” him when he was passed out. Try that hypothetical out with yourself as the fuckee, and see what we mean.
22 June 2007, 5:20 amLinda c:
OK – so I’m blond – What the heck is “benign consensual intercourse”.
Oh, I guess it’s a woman’s thing!!! God only knows it runs along the lines of “on your back”.
This started by day off well – I guess I should say – Well pissed off.
22 June 2007, 7:48 amLinda c:
Now that I’ve had my 3rd cup of coffee and am awake, I’d like to make my thought process a little clearer.
In no way does “drunk” and passed out rape – constitute – in any way – what ever the heck “benign consensual intercourse” is.
Rape and/or sexual assualt is just that – a form of degradation on ALL of humanity. An apple is an apple and an egg is an egg.
22 June 2007, 8:21 amtaxigirl:
In a related question, my legal scholars, I would like a little research assistance: when I was an undergrad in women’s studies (so long ago it wasn’t even watered down to “gender studies” yet), I learned that as of 1990 no US Court had found a white man guilty of raping a Black woman. My question is, is this still true?
And were it still true, might there then be a blog post in the making, connecting that factoid to the linguistic gymnastics in the Bowen case with the beheading of Mike Nifong, and the rollback of women’s legal rights more generally – understanding that legal rights exist always, and only, in legal language?
As to the distinction between “fucking” and “sexual assault,” I might suggest that Aaron’s frat-party snickering illustrates why so many women (and men) are afraid to come forward: the distinction between the two is academic – in the sense that one or the other term seems more appropriate depending on which side of such encounter one finds oneself upon.
22 June 2007, 11:40 amDeAnander:
The judge’s action in compelling all parties to use the word “sex” to describe something that allegedly happened when a woman was passed out — to describe as “sex” a woman waking up with a man fucking her — is, to say the least, obfuscatory. Like liberal equality theory (or is it just another instance of same), it renders invisible the lived experience of inequality; and it locates the discourse of the courtroom firmly within the male PoV. Fucking an unconscious woman may be sex for him, but it sure ain’t sex for her. Suppose the perps at Abu Ghraib were on trial and the plaintiffs were instructed that they could only refer to the beatings, sexual humilations, posed photographs, etc. as “fun”. How would that affect the courtroom process? How would that make the witnesses and plaintiffs feel? How would the transcripts read?
When we say “they had sex” — of any couple, whether het or ho, male or female or mixed — we have no idea what happened other than that it (probably) involved some part of one person’s body in contact with the genital area of another person. We have no idea how consensual it was, what the motivations were, who had how much pleasure and whether that pleasure was at someone else’s expense, whether the point was even pleasure in the first place, how they felt about it afterwards etc. We haven’t an ethical clue. “Had sex” covers everything from a terrified teenage prostitute performing fellatio in a john’s car for $5, to a devoted couple making the most tender love with exquisite reciprocal satisfaction and comfort.
For example in media coverage of the Genarlow Wilson case, we repeatedly come across the phrase “he had consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.” I haven’t found any mention in the Librul press so far of whether this means that Wilson was giving oral sex to a 15 year old girl, or that he had convinced a 15-year-old girl to give him fellatio. Doesn’t that make a difference? “Who’s zoomin’ who” could either counterbalance, or reinforce, the power differentials of age, gender, and (implicitly) physical strength in the relationship. To what extent do women/girls — 2nd class citizens, physically weaker than men, indoctrinated from prepubescence in the mandate to be sexual servants — freely consent to providing sexual services to older, more powerful, possibly charismatic and popular men/boys? Well, to what extent do poor Black and Latin@ kids freely consent to join the Army after the recruiters propagandise their schools and n’hoods with saturation advertising? We’re marketing “porn star” label underwear for 7 year old girls, for Chrissakes; the indoctrination starts young, whether it’s about turning girls into whores or boys into soldiers.
I have absolutely no doubt that the Wilson case is the product of US institutional racism, that it’s a clear case of “bonking while Black” as some have suggested. A whiteboy athlete would hever have been busted — just look at public attitudes to the Duke case. At the same time, I also have no doubt that there’s an ethical/power difference between a 15 year old girl consenting to let a 17 year old boy please her orally, and consenting to fellate him. “Had consensual oral sex” obfuscates that difference. And 15 to 17 can be a small or a large difference in maturity/experience/self-confidence, depending on the kids involved. It’s not gender or race — it’s gender and race, every time. Because the guy has been abused by a racist system doesn’t mean that his relations with the girl were wholly innocent of patriarchal BS and male sexual entitlement behaviour.
Then of course we have the quaint but prevalent notion that the only “real” sex is fucking; recently Librul website Alternet ran an article asserting that sexual attitudes of [straight] couples were more egalitarian than had been previously assumed; men and women had about equal enthusiasm for “the act”. Remarkable that in this day & age any liberal/progressive media outlet with half a clue could still refer to “the act” as if there were no other — and as if “the act [of fucking]” weren’t widely known to be less physically satisfying to women than to men, and as if “the act [of fucking]” were not heavily loaded with cultural freight of contempt and loathing for the receptive partner. The perceptions of the writer (and hence the reader) are centred implicitly in male experience, not female experience.
We’ve got a culture here that uses “cocksucker” as a fighting insult, “we’re fucked” as a statement of despair rather than jubilation, “fuck you” as a contemptuous and hateful dismissal, “that’s fucked up” as a statement of hopeless wrongness, “he’s my bitch” as a statement of domination/victory, and so on and so on ad nauseam — and yet we are supposed to believe that “having sex” is somehow culturally neutral and that there is no hint of a power game going on when men persuade or coerce women (or drug women into compliance) to enact these cultural metaphors using living bodies (as the soldiery did at Abu Ghraib)…
I do believe it’s possible for any of these sexual acts/practises to be undertaken with respect and affection/love/friendship, to be truly consensual, etc. — between partners of any gender. But that means fighting upstream against the strong cultural current of misogyny and body-hatred, contempt for the physical and the biotic, and overwhelming scorn and hatred specifically for femaleness; it means mindfulness and careful attention to intersubjectivity and personal ethics. And it means not sweeping it all under the rug by labelling all this cultural sickness “sex” and refusing to look further.
That would be like just calling McDonald’s junkfood “food” and looking no further into the conditions of its production, transport, preparation and consumption. And this is what the judge in this case is trying to do.
As to Aaron, thanks for unmasking, yet again, the festering misogyny of the male-dominated so-called “Left”. As soon as a woman steps out of your ideological corner (steps out of Daddy’s house and disagrees with him) she becomes “fair game”, eh? News flash, bud: Republican women are also at risk for rape, battery, and all the rest. And nothing — not even being a Republican — justifies such abuse. When you let the lynch mob loose on a Black wo/man or the rape mob loose on a woman of any colour, just because they dare to disagree with you politically, you have lost any moral high ground you ever had — like the “patriots” at AG, the ideology or patriotism becomes nothing more than an excuse to indulge in the misogyny, sadism, sexual power tripping, racism etc.
I think we’re gonna have to put that feature article together. This BS just keeps cropping up.
22 June 2007, 1:42 pmLinda c:
De,
Thanks, again. You did a wonderful job sheding light on what it means to “be truly consensual” – “between partners of any gender”.
As long as there are people such as Aaron – “Patriots carring the sword” – I think you are so right – This BS will keep cropping up.
22 June 2007, 2:20 pmAudrey:
De, you’re spot on with the comment about Abu Ghraib. I can’t help wondering if this judge refers to waterboarding as “having drinks together.”
22 June 2007, 5:10 pmKrl:
While I agree with most of the comments mentioned in the long comment regarding the outrageousness of the case/sexism etc re men on left/sex not being a neutral term etc, I am having a bit of trouble digesting the comments regarding “true” consent. If an age differential of 2 years (we know it was consensual oral because the girl at the footballers trial said so, numerous times in fact) and the fact that society some how “trained” her as a second class citizen to give her self to the popular sports athlete, what stops me from automatically stating that sex between a wealthy man and a poor woman (married or not) is never consensual (or at least extremely unlikely that it is so)? Hmmm… I can make a better case stating that all interracial relationships (particular wm, other female) are not “really” consensual based on the power differential and societal influences which are significantly more powerful than a 2yr age difference, a gap in wealth, or being a popular jock. How does one balance the fact that each woman is an individual with her own thought process with the the fact that said thought process might itself be compromised/flawed (in the sense that it has been infected with the equivalent of a Trojan virus- a naturalized/transparently ordered view which dehumanizes/subjugates said woman long before or in tandem with the first attempt by a man in the flesh)?
Does one tell a woman- don’t do that , because you don’t “really enjoy it”? Can a woman be raped without knowing it? (Not speaking of drugs/loss of consciousness) I.E. she has a sexual encounter she believes is normal but it somehow is not due to false consensuality ? I am being earnest and these questions are not related to the case. One can be exploited without knowing it, one can even be poor without knowing it (personal experience on that one) but can one be raped without knowing it? Can rape (any sex with false or compromised consensuality) occur when both parties involved (rapist and person being raped) do not know that there is a rape involved? The last few questions came from the rather disturbing sexualization of girls via clothing and the like (while in other countries soldiers et al of empire have been doing it physically).
On a side note with regards to the term “cock sucker”, that is more a male-male power slur than one tied to gender (Fellatio was predominantly a Male/Male activity back in all those places people like to call the birth places of Western Civilization…the catcher and the pitcher were often differentiated by class etc). I cant recall a woman ever being called a cock sucker although in present society (one decidedly less open about male on male relations) women can suck cock as it were.
22 June 2007, 7:20 pmAaron:
I never said that it was OK to rape Republican women. I DID say that a person’s being a serious Republican political activist would greatly diminish their credibility with me. The same would apply if a male leader of the College Republicans were charged with sexually assaulting a woman — especially a woman who, like the accused man in this case, is apparently non-white.
I would also point out that any pro-male bias of the court system in this case is likely to be counter-balanced by the race and political connections of the accuser, since most judges and jurors, unlike this writer, would likely give more, rather than less, credibility to a person for being an officer of the national College Republicans.
22 June 2007, 8:57 pmPeter Santina:
It’s always awkward to watch the “left”–always “concerned” about the prison-industrial complex and the privatization of prisons–suddenly confronted with a real person accused of a crime.
The presumption of innocence is a bourgeois value of an American legal system that lacks any kind of attachment to actual social justice. However, when contrasted with the quick-to-hang mentality of the left when these accusations are made, the presumption of innocence seems to be an amazing, absolutely necessary value—especially for the thousands of innocent people accused of crimes.
The legal principle behind the ruling is this: it’s up to the JURY, not an ACCUSER, to determine whether a crime was committed. Do you really believe that a simple accusation should suffice to send someone away to prison for life? Do you really believe that there should be no test of the evidence, no cross-examination of the accusation itself, no opportunity for a supposedly-unbiased jury of “one’s peers” to evaluate the claim?
Until it’s proven beyond any reasonable doubt to 12 jurors, it’s not rape. Once that happens, it is. To the victim/accuser, it’s different. But a legal system should never operate as a weapon of war against those accused of heinous crimes; it should create a process to determine the truth and the appropriate solution. It’s as simple, and as common sensical, as that.
[MODERATOR: when was the last time any man served a life sentence for rape? The average sentence in the UK for example, is about 7 years, and most offenders don't serve out their full term; the CJS in the UK is considering shortening, not lengthening, sentences for rape.  Stats from the US indicate longer sentences for officially declared rapists, but the conviction rate in rape cases is pretty low and many are downgraded to "sexual assault" which carries shorter sentences and earlier paroles. You're more likely to get a life sentence in the US for possession of recreational substances...]
22 June 2007, 9:36 pmMark:
Since reading it some time ago, I’ve thought this list
http://bitingbeaver.blogspot.com/2006/10/repost-of-old-favorite.html
should be posted in every establishment serving alcohol along with other public health warnings.
Every once in a while the media will decide to report about men putting date rape drugs in women’s drinks at local bars here where I live. Of course what’s never mentioned is that alcohol is itsself far-and-away the favorite date rape drug of choice.
23 June 2007, 11:34 amMark:
Addendum: My apologies for using the term date rape when I should have just said rape.
[MODERATOR NOTE: I appreciate the afterthought, but I'm not sure "date rape" is a useless or invalid term -- it does indicate something about the strategy or MO of the rapist, just like "gang rape": the rapist pretends a convivial social interest in the targeted woman, flatters her with social attention, gains her trust and then betrays that trust with either forcible or drug-assisted rape. This betrayal is part of the cruelty of the crime. It may be a useful term in that it undermines the myth that all rapes are committed by strangers jumping out from behind bushes in the park (though men do hunt, ambush and rape women w/whom they have no social connection, that is not the most common or everyday MO). I guess the term is counterproductive to use if it feeds (and I suspect it does, alas) the notion that "date rape" is somehow better than, or less bad than, "regular" (actually less common) stranger-rape... it might help if we had a specific term for stranger-rape, so that it was not the default unmarked category. -- DeA]
23 June 2007, 11:36 amDeAnander:
Argh. sorry, I realise on re-reading that this sounds rather like “date rape is just like gang rape” when what I meant to say is that date-rape is a method or MO, and so is gang-rape — the modifier in each case tells us something about how the raper planned and executed the crime.
23 June 2007, 5:49 pmDeAnander:
I was at a party tonight with some friends one of whom is an ex-defence-attorney, and brought up this “activist judge”
issue. She thought it over and said that if all the facts and history of the trial were known, it might make a little more sense than appears in the soundbite version; in some cases the prosecution attempts to bias the jury by repeatedly referring to the defendants as “murderers” for example, when guilt has not yet legally been established; so a judge might — if he felt that the prosecuting counsel or expert witnesses were attempting to bias the jury in this way — instruct them to stop using such language.
However, she said, the judge should not be allowed to instruct the court to use any specific language — he could ban language considered manipulative or prejudicial, but he should not be allowed to mandate the use of any particular term — such as “sex” in this case — which would be prejudicial to an equal degree in favour of the defence. The article quoted doesn’t make it clear (iirc) whether the judge actually mandated use of the term “sex”, or whether the author merely jumped to the conclusion that this was the only remaining terminology. The plaintiff, for example, could say clearly (unless the judge attempted to limit her speech even further), that she did not consent to being penetrated, that it hurt, that she was angry and astonished to find herself in this situation, etc. Such circumlocutions seem rather onerous, but if the judge wanted to be a stickler about prejudicial language he could insist that “rape” is a legal definition or verdict and therefore, like “murder”, should not be used in testimony or summing-up. (“You may not say that the defendant stole your wallet, that is a matter for the jury to decide.” “Well, he took it out of my pocket and ran away very rapidly; perhaps he was planning to return it, but it didn’t look likely.”)
Several responses to this article and our discussion of it have emphasised very strongly the presumption of innocence as a foundational value of our “justice” system, and at least one has proffered the usual accusation that feminists want to throw men in prison w/o trial just on hearsay or allegation. I would offer a counter-argument or at least another perspective on the presumption of innocence: that in patriarchies, including our own, all women are presumed guilty of lying about rape (the archetypical sin in the unwritten masculinist code of conduct for women), guilty of being sluts, guilty by virtue of being women. Whatever the judge’s intention in the case or the specific circs, there is more than a whiff (to me) of a prejudicial assumption that the plaintiff is lying, i.e. a failure to assume the innocence of the plaintiff, who becomes a kind of defendant in a trial for the crime of falsely defaming a man’s reputation (a crime which, statistically, occurs very very seldom as compared to battery and rape of women which occur on a daily or hourly basis nationwide). The “women always lie about rape” meme is a prejudicial or bigoted meme just as unfounded and persistent as “all Black men secretly plot to rape White women” — and not unrelated to it; both are about the defence of (white) male sexual prerogative and a claim of property in women’s bodies.
Another example of the peculiar bias of the legal system, its ability to conceal and disregard real-life structures of power and control, comes from another case which was discussed at the same dinner table this evening: many years ago in LA, a woman brought charges against two men who had assisted her with a broken-down vehicle, taken her home, then invited her out for coffee. After having a cup of coffee they drove her to a remote location and “had sex with her” (whatever that means). She testified in court that at the point where they drove her to the remote location instead of taking her home again, she started to think that they might be the Hillside Strangler (who at that point was uncaught and still active), and became so frightened that she thought the only way to get out of the situation alive was to cooperate. For this reason she did not protest or struggle, but went along with their agenda. One of the folks at the party had been on the jury, and related that no one on that jury doubted her testimony — no one doubted that this had been, in fact, a rape — and they were all very uncomfortable with the verdict they returned; yet they felt that there was little option under the law as written, which offered them no way to define the kind of coercion involved in this instance.
The jury was bound under law to find a not-guilty verdict in the case, because state law required that in the absence of a weapon, uttered threats, active protest or resistance, or diminished responsibility (drunkenness or drugging of the victim) what happened was “not rape”. Had she been drunk she might have claimed diminished capacity to consent; if they had threatened her overtly she might have had a case; but because she was scared enough to be co-operative, they did not have to utter threats. Even though she was alone in a car in a remote location with two men, in a town where an uncaught serial killer was making regular headlines, the imbalance of power and control and the degree of fear involved in that situation was not sufficient to make the law recognise coercion, i.e. rape.
The legal system does not recognise that “random” violence against women (daily stories of abductions, rapes, murders, etc and high profile serial rapist/killers) create an atmosphere of terror which can be as incapacitating as drunkenness or drugs, an atmosphere in which men who do not actually murder or torture women may benefit from the activities of those who do, by the diminished resistance of individual women targeted for “seduction”.
Many analysts have noted that the purpose of torture is not to gain information; information gained under torture is usually useless. The real purpose of torture is to terrorise a population, to keep everyone aware of what the ruling class or occupying force can do with impunity to you or anyone you know. The real purpose of lynching, aside from the circus of sadism it provided for individuals in the mob, was to establish an atmosphere of terror — a literal immediate daily fear of torture and a ghastly death — in an entire community of Black people, so that they would not offer any “uppitiness” to the White overclass. And I would submit as a footnote to this vexing case from years ago, that violently misogynist pornography plus the persistent tradition of serial rapist/killers are not as aberrant or fringey as they may seem; they create an atmosphere of terror in which individual women are constantly aware of what men can do to women and get away with it so that any individual woman in a potentially dangerous situation can never be certain whether saying No will be suicidal.
In point of fact, female resistance — verbal and physical — is statistically associated far more strongly with a successful escape than with lethal escalation of the assault; in other words, saying No and resisting as strongly as possible is almost always the better bet. But the atmosphere of terror remains, and the law does not recognise that it exists and may diminish the capacity to consent. How the law could recognise this, in what form of words, is an interesting question. We do recognise situations in which the imbalance of power and control is so grotesque as to make sexual activity implicitly rape: it is automatically an offence for adults to commit sexual acts with children, and there is a somewhat slippery category of “statutory rape” covering sex with minors who are not quite children, but not considered adults. Where an objectively verifiable advantage of force exists, as between an able bodied and functional man in his prime and a disabled, very elderly, mentally deficient, drugged or drunk “fuckee”, the law usually (not always) would find penetration to be rape. But the law is notoriously bad at acknowledging socially structured power (as we’ve discusssed at great length in other threads) and good at pretending — like theoretical economists — that all human beings are uniform “rational actors” of like capacity, unaffected by unwritten social laws and campaigns of terror.
A misogynist science fiction novel was once written — I have mercifully forgotten its title — depicting a “dystopian future run by feminists” in which men were required to get a written consent form from women before sexual activity could take place. The author was obviously a right-libertarian attempting to satirise the litigious culture, bureaucratic intrusion into the most intimate aspects of life, etc. But he was also, whether intentionally or not, exposing something about the assumption of male sexual prerogative; that this was in his estimation the most absurd, wacky, ridiculous, hilarious and outrageous dystopian concept he could come up with — that men might actually have to make sure that there was genuine verifiable consent from their female sexual partners. How outrageous, eh? how unthinkable. How absurd.
It would certainly simplify cases such as the one currently vexing the judge in our story… I am not all that fond of the intrusion of paperwork and bureaucracy into every detail of private life, but I think it’s illuminating to examine our instinctive sense of the absurdity of this notion, of men actually having to ask for and receive formal consent for sex with women, some kind of release form such as would be required for using a person’s photograph in a magazine article for example. The apparent absurdity seems to suggest a bit of shakiness in our belief that consent is really required… an interesting thought experiment, anyway.
24 June 2007, 2:54 amLWM:
I suppose DeAnander was being socratically ironic because (I don’t know whether DeAnander is male or female and it only matters if I’m going to use personal pronouns – Eh, language) surely DeAnander knows the Inuit do not in fact have one hundred words for snow. I just thought everyone else should know. I think D’s last post makes sense. Celeb or high profile cases tend to give us all a distorted view of the criminal justice system and this has become a high profile case because of this apparently strange and newsworthy development. We would need a good legal mind to get in that courtroom and find out, to the extent that we might, what is actually going on.
During my Criminal Justice studies, I had the great privilege of learning from this great professor. I have always been lucky to have a knack for selecting great teachers.
24 June 2007, 7:18 amDick:
It could have been that both Ms. Bowen and Mr. Safi were drunk that evening. Who bears the responsibility for whatever happened then?
It’s quite possible that Ms. Bowen was concious but in a blackout when she consented to sex with Mr. Safi.
It’s happened to me personally more than a few times that I’ve gotten blind drunk, blacked out and then later “come to” while driving through a strange city, talking to someone I’ve never met in a bar I’ve never been in, or having sex with a woman I vaguely remember being introduced to the night before. I had called a cab to take me home. When the cab got there, she told me to send the cab away, and she would drive me home. That’s the last thing I remember before “coming to” while having sex with her at about 10 o’clock the next morning. Did she rape me? Maybe she refused to take drive me home and instead drove me to her house. Maybe I said no, but she refused to take no for an answer. I honestly don’t know because I wasn’t really concious, although I was obviously physically doing things during that blackout.
[Moderator Note: let's do a thought experiment here. Suppose the person that you woke up with was a guy, not a woman. And suppose he was anally penetrating you when you woke up. Would you feel that you were equally responsible for being fucked while unconscious, and how would your feelings be different from those experienced when waking up "having sex with" (presumably a euphemism for fucking?) a woman? When this sort of thing [allegedly!] happens between men, plenty of juries would regard it as extenuating circumstances for murder (i.e. the Gay Panic Defence). This is another example where “having sex with” erases gendered power in the same way that liberal contract theory erases gendered power (cf earlier discussions of Pateman et al) — where there is blank denial of the physical, emotional, and biological differences between being the fucker and the fuckee in this situation. It appears that (most) men do not even want to think about the sense of physical violation, the possibility of mild to extreme pain, the risk of pregnancy if no precautions were taken (and why would you expect any guy who would fuck an unconscious woman to take sensible precautions?), etc. It is simply not possible for a woman to “rape” a man in the same sense, except with a dildo or other similar object. While we might reasonably question the wisdom (for anyone) of getting that plastered, fact remains that someone was doing something to, and in, someone else’s body, actively violating someone else’s boundaries; and if that other person — the one whose physical borders were being transgressed — was clearly out of it, staggering drunk, etc. then using their body in this way is inexcusable. If you wouldn’t want a drunken woman to rape you with a broomstick while you were blacked out, then you shouldn’t think it OK to stick your dick into a woman’s body when she’s blacked out. And yes, that does mean actually having to take some responsibility for ascertaining the mental and physical condition of a sex partner before doing anything transgressive… am I suggesting that guys should actually take more responsibility than women? well, only if they are bigger, stronger, and fond of penetrating other people’s orifices (that describes a majority of the adult male pop, I should think); but then I also think motorists should drive more carefully than cyclists, ‘cos they can do more harm. I think it’s called “socialism”…?]
http://www.daclarke.org/PowerBlame.html (some supplemental reading)
24 June 2007, 8:18 amAudrey:
I wish I knew where the idea that drinking alcohol = consent originated.
If you want to be sure you aren’t confusing views of women that drink with views on raping unconscious people, I’d suggest switching alcohol and bars with anesthesia and operating rooms. If you woke up from surgery to find the surgeon fucking you, would you really have to stop and wonder whether you were being raped or whether it was consensual?
I’m trying to picture how the first comment to this post would look under those circumstances: “Ms. Jones can’t possibly testify to having been raped or sexually assaulted because her whole claim is based on the assertion that she has no memory of anything that happened from the time she entered surgery with Dr. Smith to the time, many hours later, when she woke up to find him fucking her in the operating room.â€
26 June 2007, 12:57 amDeAnander:
I suspect the idea that drinking alcohol == consent comes from the patriarchal dichotomy of Good Woman / Bad Woman (Virgin/Wife vs Slut/Whore); being drunk or dissolute is Bad-Woman behaviour, therefore any woman who is seen drunk in public has declared herself fair game, placed herself in the Bad Girl category. Also probably from the cultural norm that men are always supposed to be on the make, always seeking opportunities to fuck anything that stands still long enough; therefore for a woman to let her guard down in any way, to be too trusting or to impair her judgement by drink or drugs, is taken as implicit “consent” to male aggression. I mean, this is the masculinist culture that thinks “weakness is provocative”, ya know…
Take it one step further and you have the burqa mandate: men’s “irresistible urges” are understood to be so ungovernable that sensible women shroud their entire bodies in black cloth so as to avoid “causing” any trouble. For a woman not to do so marks her as a Loose or Bad Woman and she is, guess what, fair game.
Whereas of course, when a guy gets drunk and rents a prostitute and she rolls him for his wallet, we are all supposed to feel sorry for him and think what a bitch she is, taking advantage of the poor guy like that. Double your standards, double your fun!
26 June 2007, 1:22 amDick:
First off, who is now trying to restrict the language used to describe what happened? I don’t know if I could rightly say I was fucking her, since I was on the bottom. And I was the one in a blackout, not her. She was sober as far as I could tell.
26 June 2007, 1:42 amI wouldn’t have reacted any differently if it had been a man and I was the fuckee instead of the fucker. (I assume from reading your thought experiment, that the fuckee is the one being penetrated and the fucker is the one penetrating.)
I’ve never been in that particular situation, but I have been in the following situation:
Me and a buddy are stranded in Nashville. Last bus to Fort Campbell left an hour ago. 2 guys tell us we can sleep at their house and they’ll drive us to Cambell in the morning.
We’re already drunk. At the house we smoke some weed. I fall asleep on the living room floor. I wake up with one of the guys sucking my dick. I’m a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Assigned to the 101st Airborne. Gay Panic? Naaah. I smiled and suggested, “we go to the bedroom, because my buddy isn’t as open minded as me.”
I don’t think it’s ok to “…stick my dick into a woman’s body when she’s blacked out.” The problem is, how do I know she’s blacked out if I’m blind drunk?
I don’t. So, I shouldn’t get drunk. I don’t anymore. At least, I haven’t in the last 16 years.
I don’t know if I would agree that men should take more responsibility than women. But I will certainly agree that most men should act more responsibly than most men do.
I’ve been following (well, trying to follow) your posts about men’s treatment of women for a couple of years now. I agree with a lot of you points, but sometimes think you put an unfair burden on men. But, seeing as how women have been shouldering an unfair burden for far too long, maybe that’s not really unfair.
DeAnander:
I have to confess the scenario startles me — guess I don’t personally know any women quite that determined — but the woman-on-top aspect does, imho, change the dynamic quite a bit (making her the active participant/initiator, and invalidating at least some of my interpretation). I thought I’d read somewhere that extreme intoxication impaired guys’ ability to maintain an erection, though? anyway, I still think there’s a pertinent difference between the experience of waking up being penetrated by an aggressor — especially this experience for a woman — and the scenarios described here.
I think for example that if the average woman woke up in a strange place with a stranger performing cunnilingus on her — parallel scenario — she would not just smile and suggest a more private venue. she would probably be much more frightened/angry. I can imagine that some, very self-confident men might respond as per the anecdote — because men are conditioned from earliest youth to know that the fellator is subordinate, that there’s no threat implicit in that situation. let’s just say that there’s a long historical tradition of women being raped, whereas there’s not a long historical tradition of men having their dicks bitten off, for example, or judges and juries blaming men who have their dicks bitten off. for the average woman in a patriarchal culture (and find me one on the map that isn’t), random sexual touching and intrusiveness from a stranger — particularly a male stranger, but also any known male friend or family member — indicates danger, indicates the potential for rape, for public disgrace, forced pregnancy, all kinds of risk and trouble.
fellatio offered to (or even performed w/o consent on) a guy (so long as it’s not adult/child) seems to pay tribute to his manhood and status, rather than to erode or threaten it (as anal or oral rape would definitely do). here’s a clue: when the sadists at Abu Ghraib wanted to torment and humiliate their male captives, they didn’t send strapping young male soldiers into the cells to inflict fellatio on them — even though this probably would have been very upsetting to the prisoners.
in other words I have a feeling that waking up with some other guy’s dick in your mouth, rather than vice versa, would have been a very different experience — despite being equally “gay” … and this gets us back to definitions of “gay”, pitcher vs catcher, how “real (straight) men” can continue to define themselves as straight so long as they only pitch and never catch, blah blah blah. in the “waking up with determined woman on top” scenario, pitcher and catcher have been almost neutralised into equilibrium and I guess a guy might react either way, either feeling his manhood and dignity threatened, or not… but if someone made him a “catcher” while he was out cold, I think that would be a different kettle of fish.
thing is, there are afaik no sexual acts involving the female body that patriarchal culture has not encoded as acts of dominance, adolescent voyeurism, humiliation, etc. even cunnilingus is not seen as a tribute to female power, a form of goddess-worship, or anything that would make a woman feel so empowered or secure as not particularly to care if some stranger were doing it to her w/o permission. women are not, in the popular imagination, recipients of sexual services; they are providers. even cunnilingus is presented in pornography and the popular imagination either as a kinky weird voyeuristic thrill (something gross that your friends might dare you to do), or as a mere prelude to fucking and declaration of intent to fuck (or rape, if the woman is unwilling).
the phrase “a rape culture” is not just rhetoric; women grow up in a rape culture, in which any sexual overture might be the first sign of a planned rape, in which it may not be safe to leave your drink unattended for 30 seconds, in which you may get blamed for being in the wrong place or wearing the wrong clothes, yada yada. one of the first things little girls get taught is to be afraid of “strange men,” and less fortunate little girls have already learned to be terrified of an abusive male relative. the spectre of male sexual aggression and predation haunts women’s lives in patriarchal culture from the earliest age. I’m not sure any male experience parallels this other than, perhaps, the fear of going to prison and becoming the target of the same male sexual predation…. men who were molested in youth I think would know the feeling of terror and panic at unwanted touching; more fortunate men might not be able to imagine it at all.
well, it’s late and the brain needs a recharge…
“how do I know she’s blacked out if I’m blind drunk” kind of goes to the heart of the matter.
how do you know she’s over 16 if you’re blind drunk? or if she’s mentally ill, or if her husband is coming home any minute now and liable to shoot the both of yez?
maybe we need a new social misdemeanour category: FUI?
26 June 2007, 3:12 amJames M:
We’ve got a culture here that uses “cocksucker†as a fighting insult, “we’re fucked†as a statement of despair rather than jubilation, “fuck you†as a contemptuous and hateful dismissal, “that’s fucked up†as a statement of hopeless wrongness, “he’s my bitch†as a statement of domination/victory, and so on and so on ad nauseam — and yet we are supposed to believe that “having sex†is somehow culturally neutral and that there is no hint of a power game going on …
A friend-of-the-family sent me the following link some months ago, with the subject line “Hope it makes you laugh out loud as it did me…” It’s “mildly” NSFW, I would say … some discretion advised:
http://thorlinks.com/mediaview/2329/Couple_Gets_Kinky_Presidential_Style
I’ve seen no more explicit rendering — done by lefty-boys in an specifically political context — of the sexual power-game mindset De refers to. The fact that this cultural trope is reproduced so thoughtlessly, without the slightest examination, by the “liberal” makers of this video, and passed along by this acquaintance of mine (who I consider to be a generally high-quality individual) as something I’m supposed to find humorous, is pretty illustrative of some things we’ve been discussing here.
I didn’t have the heart or the time (and probably the intellectual ammunition) to explain to this acquaintance all that was wrong (and so telling) about this video … I just sort of feigned amusement over email while shaking my head in private. But methinks that now some sort of mass broadcast of the message to lefty-boys might be in order …
26 June 2007, 1:36 pmDeAnander:
it occurs to me that women might not feel a need to get drunk in order to express sexual feelings, if this were not such a rape culture… just a stray afterthought. people often get seriously drunk (as opposed to having a social drink for the mild buzz) to get their courage up for an emotional/social ordeal of some kind, or to mute an unpleasant memory… what does it mean that excessive drinking is so closely associated with sex, in both male and female minds?
26 June 2007, 3:20 pmDick:
I think it means we’re a bunch of people who fear one another. I know that’s the case with me. I was afraid of strangers, and especially fearful of strange women when I was younger. I don’t understand where that came from, because I’ve got 5 sisters. I should have learned better how to relate to women.
27 June 2007, 4:18 amI learned quickly though, that alcohol is a social lubricant. The problem was, for me anyway, if a little is a good icebreaker, a lot must be a great icebreaker.
It just went downhill from there. Socially, but not sexually.
DeAnder wrote that she thought alcohol inhibited the ability to maintain an erection. It was just the opposite with me. Since I quit drinking, I have problems maintaining an erection.
Something else she wrote made it more clear to me what the underlying factor is here. Threat. I’ve never felt threatened by sex in any form that I’ve experienced it. It’s always been pleasant and excitng.
The social encounters that lead to it are, however, quite a different story.
DeAnander:
I’ve never felt threatened by sex in any form that I’ve experienced it. It’s always been pleasant and excitng.
I doubt that we could find many women — one in 10,000? one in 100,000? one in a million? — who could honestly make the same statement. which makes it a statement of privilege, sad to say. “I’ve never felt threatened by sex” — lucky guy, but not just lucky, also guy.
Sorta like I, as a white person, could honestly say, ‘I’ve never really felt threatened or discriminated against on account of my skin colour.’ well lucky me, eh? billions could not say the same, and the relationship between my fortune and their misfortune is not just dumb luck.
We aren’t just “people who fear each other” (that erases gendered power yet again) — women fear men, and for good reason. The social fear (of rejection or ridicule) that men feel on approaching women for a date or a sexual overture, is not imho comparable to the fear of ending up a police statistic. Reading those statistics (try D Russell’s Femicide in Global Perspective) might help to explain the other point of view…
27 June 2007, 12:12 pmCharles:
Then of course we have the quaint but prevalent notion that the only “real†sex is fucking; recently Librul website Alternet ran an article asserting that sexual attitudes of [straight] couples were more egalitarian than had been previously assumed; men and women had about equal enthusiasm for “the actâ€. Remarkable that in this day & age any liberal/progressive media outlet with half a clue could still refer to “the act†as if there were no other — and as if “the act [of fucking]†weren’t widely known to be less physically satisfying to women than to men, and as if “the act [of fucking]†were not heavily loaded with cultural freight of contempt and loathing for the receptive partner. The perceptions of the writer (and hence the reader) are centred implicitly in male experience, not female experience.
^^^^^
CB:
I don’t agree that it has been proven that in general heterosexual intercourse is less physically satisfying to women than to men. That’s a widely “known” campus legend ( sort of like an urban legend but it’s out in the “burbs” on campus).
STAN: Yes, I fake orgasms all the time. Charles, there is such a wealth of empirical data available on the web within like ten seconds on this that I can’t beleive you even said such a thing.
27 June 2007, 2:57 pmDick:
Imho it is comparable. Although the physical danger involved certainly is not.
The experience of being fearful is the same, regardless of what the source of the fear is. The intensity of the reaction is pretty subjective, wouldn’t you say? I pretty much felt like rejection would kill me. Not very realistic, but still very real.
In the end it comes down to feelings.
[Moderator (DeA): I've experienced extreme romantic anxiety, and also very painful rejection. And I've also experienced an imminent threat of rape. I can assure the reader that these are quite distinct types of fear and that if you have ever experienced both, you couldn't confuse one with the other... ever. Are there any other jesuitical contortions Dick can come up with to "prove" that there is no such thing as male privilege and it's all in women's heads -- all "just feelings"? If there are, I invite him to kindly post them elsewhere, 'cos I'm done with him here. Like talking to a brick wall...]
27 June 2007, 5:36 pmDeAnander:
Ah, but on this subject Charles is apparently a Freeper: all that empirical evidence from the reality-based community is just a bunch of Librul Lies… after all, so much of it comes from actual empirical research, which is undertaken often by educated people associated with research institutes (campuses and the like) — and that makes it, like the theory of evolution, just one of those darned ivory-tower University Librul shibboleths, probably associated with latte-drinking, sushi-eating, and possibly even Volvo-driving.
I couldn’t be more surprised if Charles had outed himself as a Creationist. But perhaps outing himself as a Freudian is even more depressing:
just one among many refs:
BTW, that was written 30+ years ago, and is one of the most famous documents in 2nd wave feminist history thanks to the enormous sigh of relief it elicited from millions of female readers. What planet has Charles been on for the last 3 decades?
But enough of that irrelevant “campus legend” stuff — heck, what’s reality or physiology got to do with it? Let’s put it very simply: if fucking were just as much fun for women as for men, then men wouldn’t have to bribe, wheedle, coerce, threaten and/or beat women into submitting to “the act”; and “fuck you” wouldn’t mean what it does.
27 June 2007, 6:03 pmAudrey:
I don’t agree that it has been proven that in general heterosexual intercourse is less physically satisfying to women than to men. That’s a widely “known†campus legend (sort of like an urban legend but it’s out in the “burbs†on campus).
The obvious first question is the definition of “heterosexual” intercourse, since that refers to an attraction to the opposite sex, not a specific physical act.
That aside, I’m not sure it’s been proven that in general “heterosexual” (penis-in-vagina ?) intercourse is more physically satisfying for men than, say, having their elbows licked. That might be an urban legend. Elbows are kinda close to the penis, after all. Close enough, I say.
27 June 2007, 9:37 pmDeAnander:
BTW, my buddy rootless comments
27 June 2007, 11:41 pmNil:
“if fucking were just as much fun for women as for men, then men wouldn’t have to bribe, wheedle, coerce, threaten and/or beat women into submitting to “the actâ€; and “fuck you†wouldn’t mean what it does.”
This is a very good point, but has, I’d gamble a lot, very little to do with the biology or physiology or sex, and everything to do with the culture of patriarchy.
“I’ve never felt threatened by sex in any form that I’ve experienced it. It’s always been pleasant and excitng.
I doubt that we could find many women — one in 10,000? one in 100,000? one in a million? — who could honestly make the same statement. ”
I think that right there is the most educational exchange in this thread, profoundly true. There’s nothing _wrong_ with not having ever felt threatened by sex, of course. It’s a state we should wish for everyone. But DeA is absolutely right that it’s a state that few women could attest to. And it’s _that_ that’s got a lot to do with the first true quote, nothing about physiology or the mechanics of penetration or the ‘clitoral orgasm’. That few women could make that same statement is a symptom of the profound sickness of our culture, that few _women_ and more (but surely not all, I’m not sure even most) _men_ could make it is a clue as to the nature of that sickness–male supremacy. (Not the only sickness we’ve got certainly, but a big one).
[Moderator note: this will require a longer response, but in the short term I will just ask why the H Nil puts "clitoral orgasm" in scarequotes -- as if he didn't believe in it. Exactly how physiologically ignorant is our male readership? How about we start putting "penile orgasm" in scare quotes from now on... after all, there's a lot to be said for that elbow theory.]
28 June 2007, 6:48 pmStan:
Being one of those socialistic types, I’m as keen to deny biological roots for social problems as the next person. But one of the points that has to be made – the one that goes to the heart of the difference between the NOW feminism we see caricatured in the popular media and the radical feminism that Andrea Dworkin warned wasn’t “the fun kind” is that the latter doesn’t see the need to deny morphological, endocrinological, and other biological differences between men and women in order to demand that men quit beating down women in all those well-known ways.
I’m sure Nil’s heart is in the right place, but I see the left constantly copping to liberal feminism… which wants to pretend that if it weren’t for patriarchy, there would be no difference even in how women experience desire (which remains, then, a phallocentric standpoint).
Guys, women don’t need to be in a constant state of sexual receptivity, or to experience (even egalitarian) sex the same way some of us may, for us to treat them as if they were as valuable as we are.
Radical feminism is the weird notion that difference does not have to be accompanied by hierarchy.
From now on, I want you all to call me… Loretta. I want to have babies.
(Remember that one?)
28 June 2007, 7:56 pmDeAnander:
Guys, women don’t need to be in a constant state of sexual receptivity, or to experience (even egalitarian) sex the same way some of us may, for us to treat them as if they were as valuable as we are.
more to the point, treating women as equals and stopping the endless abuse will not result in women being in a contant state of receptivity — nor will our clitorides miraculously relocate nearer to the cervix (or, as one notorious pornographer revoltingly fantasised, nearer to the uvula) after the Revolution. morphology and neurology of the species Homo [sic] sap. [sic] will remain pretty much the same — despite the oft-iterated fantasies of leftyboy anarchists that the successful Revolution will lead to some kind of worldwide (and strictly phallocentric) orgy.
28 June 2007, 8:31 pmRequired:
“From now on, I want you all to call me… Loretta. I want to have babies.
(Remember that one?)”
No, what’s it from? I want to applaud DeAnander who’s been scorching this whole post. You’ve explained things in a very insightful yet clear manner. I’ve been reading about Liberal analysis making oppression/power structures invisible for a while but never really understood completely what that meant. Your posts have helped much.
[Moderator: Stan refers to the Monty Python sketch that is part of their classic flick "Life of Brian," a takeoff on Bible movies. The Judean People's Front, a spoof of sectarian left groups, is sitting in the arena watching the Roman games and arguing about theory. One of their members, whose name is Stan -- no relation -- decides that he wants to be a woman, that everyone now has to call him Loretta and he wants to have babies. here's a transcript. I think Stan brings this up here to make the point that denying morphological differences between the sexes in our own species is as silly as trying to exaggerate those morphological differences into some kind of Manichaean dualism. Anatomy may not be destiny, but in some cases morphology certainly is politics: there's a half of our species that can get pregnant, lactate, give birth, etc., and there's a half that can't do any of the above, but can impregnate the other half... and that -- thanks to genital morphology, neurology, etc -- can, and sometimes does, get off on fucking an unwilling/unconscious victim, a watermelon, or a sheep as an alternative to, say, making love with a respected/loved partner with some kind of reciprocity, mutual caring, fairness, etc. And DeA sez, thanks for the kind words.]
29 June 2007, 1:06 amAudrey:
This set of comments is still weighing on me:
I’ve never felt threatened by sex in any form that I’ve experienced it. It’s always been pleasant and excitng. The social encounters that lead to it are, however, quite a different story.
…
The experience of being fearful is the same, regardless of what the source of the fear is. The intensity of the reaction is pretty subjective, wouldn’t you say? I pretty much felt like rejection would kill me. Not very realistic, but still very real. In the end it comes down to feelings.
I didn’t respond immediately to this because I was speechless (understatement) at the assertion that the fear of asking a woman out is in any way comparable to the fear of getting raped.
If you’re considering asking a woman out and panic sets in – you can make a decision to walk away. You have control over the situation, meaning that if the fear becomes more than you can cope with, you can bail. This is not the same as experiencing an infinite amount of fear with no escape button.
If you don’t walk away from the situation, then you can have that big sense of relief and/or accomplishment when it’s done. Or, as described in the quote above, if you can work through the fear and threat stage (the threat being … not getting to put your penis in a woman?), then the potential outcome is “pleasant and exciting.â€
That is not the sort of terror we face when we can’t figure out if we’re going to get out of a situation alive, when our choice to bail doesn’t exist. The aftermath – relief, accomplishment, pleasant excitement, or even embarrassment and humiliation afterwards, is not the same as PTSD from actual trauma.
For anyone to equate those situations – and worse yet state that it all boils down to just feelings – is infuriating. I’ve got one friend who was in a neck brace with a dislocated limb after a rape. I’ve been in meetings at work and found out afterwards that one of the women there was still bleeding during the meeting itself from being raped the night before. Another woman I am close to sat in a chair by her door, night after night, with a butcher’s knife in her lap after being raped, in case he came back for her. To have that reality reduced to “it’s all just feelings, yours are no different than mine if I go to a bar and nobody wants to talk to me†like it’s no big deal if women live under the threat of rape because we all have stress in our lives … really, I don’t know how to articulate the right response to that.
I am trying to figure out if this attitude extends to relating to men as well, or if it’s only women who have the weight of their experiences dismissed in this way. Would a man ever speak that way to a combat vet who’d seen his friends get killed in front of him and woke up each day not knowing if he’d survive? I can’t imagine anyone responding to that with “Oh, man, I know just how you feel … last night I thought about calling a girl, but then I chickened out.”
29 June 2007, 11:44 amRequired:
Word, Audrey.
29 June 2007, 11:27 pmDeAnander:
Audrey, as usual, is right to the point.
The fear of rejection (a risk taken voluntarily) and the fear of broken bones, bodily violation, etc being inflicted on you willy nilly, are not imho to be compared, any more than a nasty skin lesion from a brush with poison ivy can be compared to finding — say — a Karposi’s Sarcoma on one’s arm.
30 June 2007, 2:17 pmMichael:
A few words in defense of my fear as a man.
First I’d like to state that fear of sexual abuse and rape isn’t somthing that belongs only to women.
My own personal history;
When i was in 2nd or 3rd grade a 4th or 5th grade boy from my school disapeared. Five days or so later his body was found naked. He had been strangled. While I did not know, intelectualy, about sex, sexual abuse or rape at that point but I was well aware that there was somthing sinister about the fact that his body was found naked.
When I was in middle school I was walking home from the bus stop near my house. A car full of teenage boys pulled up a said somthing to the effect of ‘we’re going to kidnap you and rape you.’
In Air Force Basic training one of my fellow enlistees accused one of our TIs of raping him. We were assured that the situation would be ‘taken care of’ and at the same time admonished to keep quite about the whole thing.
Going into the D.C. jail in 2000 during the IMF/WB demonstrations we were told by one of our jailers that ‘there are a thousand angry (n-word)s up there just waiting just waiting to rape you.
When a women hears these stories they may be amazed or disgusted that I might compare my fear to what they expierience every day but I will submit to you that in the context of my own mind (the only context i willever really know) they were very real and did have, and probably continue to have on a sub to semi conscious level, a very real impact on me.
I understand that the possibility of a man being raped is statistically insignificant compared to that of a woman but I would submit that statistical insignificance is not the same as non existance. If one discounts the expierience because it is statistically insignificant one is also discounting real people with real expieriences. I would also contend that if one discards men who have been raped and men who have feared rape (and are willing to acknowledge that fear) one also discards potentially valuable allies in trying to communicate the nature of rape and the fear of it to men who have not expierienced those things, or have chosen to surpress those fears or memories.
Regarding the fear of rejection, one of my major fears and in this I would like to establish that i’m expressing my own feelings, not trying to explain or defend Dicks statements.
Yes part of the fear is ‘not having a palce to put my dick’ but I would express it in terms of a fear of failing in the primary biological imparitive of reproduction.
The greater part of the fear of rejection comes froma different place. I was socialized to believe that heterosexual pair bonding was the norm of society and that every normal, well adjusted, healthy and worthy person would form such a pair bond and in so doing take their proper place in society. If I fail to form this pair bond then I fail in all of these areas, I fail to be a worthy member of my tribe. If I fail to be a worthy member of my tribe I may be excluded from that tribe. To the extent that humans are social beings this is a threat to ones very existance.
I can compare this fear to a womans fear of rape and I must compare it because how can I hope to understand anything if I can’t compare it to somthing that is in my field of expierience. I understand that others might be offended by this but it is how I feel.
If I might be permited an annalogy;
I spent my teenage years in mid Michigan. People who wanted to ski downhill and did not have the money or time to leave the area had to content themself with a place called Mount Brighton was/is a covered landfill that was let us say 800 feet tall.
I now live in Seattle. Mouint Raineer tower over everything in the area. Let us say it is 14,000 feet tall.
If one were able to take ‘Mt.’ Brighton and set it next to Mt. Raineer one would be able to judge how insignificant the one is compared to the other. While this is true in the context of Mid Michigan Mt. Brighnton still seems very large.
If a man could take his fear of rejection (Mt. Brighton) out of the context of his own expierience and and place it next to a womans fear of Rape (Mt. Raineer) he might be able to understand how insignificant it is. It is, however, the nature of our minds that we only have the territory we have. Disney movies and science fictions novels aside we cannot switch places.
I beleive that it might even be useful to allow and even encourage such comparisons if we wish to change the rape culture.
I have more I wish to write but have run out of time. I hope no one is hurt or offeneded by what I had to say. If so please let me know.
Yours in peace, Michael
STAN comments: I’ll leave it to others to deconstruct some of the more painfully drawn rationalizations here; and I’ll validate that some men – under certain circumstances – definitely do have occasion to fear rape. We have talked here at some length about prison rape (of males, women are raped frequently in prison, too) and what that means in the context of patriarchy. The rape of men is almost always conceived of by the perpetrator as a means of humiliating a male by making him like a female. But fear-of-rape for the vast vast majority of men (and this in no way invalidates or minimizes the experience of individual men and boys who have been subjected to the threat or act of rape) is a decidedly abnormal situation for men. The fear-of-rape is a nearly constant feature of almost all women’s existence in patriarchal society… in other words, the norm. What I find peculiar here – again not as a way of invalidating the experience of any victim of sexual predation and assault – is that when the egregious ininital incident (the judge prohibiting the use of the word “rape” in a courtroom) which served to reinforce the system of patriarchy in which all women are imbricated and disadvantaged from birth, has been pulled back (as it always seems to be, by men into a discussion of ‘competing victimhood’ by men… one that tacitly puts an equal sign not only between contingent circumstances, but between the structural conditions between men and women in a decidedly unequal society.
30 June 2007, 2:22 pmNil:
Of course I believe in the existence of orgasms from clitoral stimulation, if anyone is concerned with what I believe about women’s orgasms.
But wait, you guys really believe that as a biological fact, women just enjoy hetereosexual sex less than men? And you’re saying that to suggest otherwise is a symptom of ‘liberal feminism’?
I dunno. Let’s accept (because it is true)
* Many, many women in our society, much of the time, are pressured into having sex they would rather not be having.
* Many women in our society who have hetereosexual sex have unsatisfying hetereosexual sex.
* The contemporary idea that all women should be enjoying sex all the time–and should be having sex with any man who wants it and _should be enjoying it_–it surely just as much, or perhaps more, repressive and abusive than the previous pressure that instead said good women should never enjoy sex.
* And of course, that men need to learn how to relate to women as equals in a _non sexual_ way, and most men now are not able to do this.
Okay.
So, but despite all this, don’t women _still_ deserve a healthy and happy sex life? I guess a valid argument is the lesbian seperatist one that it’s not possible for a woman to have such hetereosexually. That’s pretty much the only place I see your argument leading. It’s an argument that can be made. Not being a woman myself, I certainly respect any woman that decides that.
I’m still not going to believe it’s some kind of general fact of biology though, that women just can’t enjoy hetereosexual sex. I mean, we just described all the ways in which our culture makes sex and sexuality into a violent act against women—does it really seem likely that women’s attitudes toward sex is unaffected by this? Or are you suggesting, that it’s not society, but that _biologically_, hetereosexual sex is _neccesarily_ a violent act against women?
I doubt you would make such a claim; the danger there is in somehow excusing men for _their behavior_ which is in fact what makes sex a violent against against women, not their genes.
30 June 2007, 3:34 pmDeAnander:
Hmm… somehow I don’t see acknowledging that male and female genital sexuality are unfortunately asymmetrical as leading directly to lesbian separatism (though that argument has indeed been made, and sometimes by separatists themselves). after all, if a woman can be a perfectly adequate lover for a woman, then so can a man
and if men are inadequate lovers for women, it’s not because of some kind of physical inability, but because of enculturated notions of entitlement and selfishness.
“enjoying heterosexual sex” is one of those obfuscatory phrases again. does “heterosexual sex” mean making love with a person of the other biological sex? or does it mean penis/vagina copulation only, and all other sexual activities between two persons are somehow “not heterosexual” even if heterosexuals do — and enjoy — them?
whether penetrative sex is a violent act or not depends on the feelings of the receptive partner (or victim, if it is indeed a violent act). on the positive scale: for the receptive partner it might be “so-so” as physical stimulation goes, but still very pleasant and intimate and endearing because of the joyfulness of pleasing a beloved Other; it might be pleasant and stimulating physically, but not quite sufficient for orgasm (if that’s the point, and we could question whether that is or should be the whole point), hence a perceived need for what is dismissively called “foreplay”; or in some cases (probably a minority based on empirical, anecdotal, and clinical evidence) it might be sufficiently stimulating for orgasm.
now for the negative scale: it might be merely boring and tedious, something one puts up with to humour the other person (I’d say the relationship is in trouble right there, if one person is meekly accepting a service role of this kind); it might be boring and tedious but endured for material gain or other advantage, like a kind of boring job; it might be painful or uncomfortable but endured to humour the other person or to gain material or social advantage (take for example the popularity in Africa of “dry sex” in which men want women to induce vaginal dryness in order to increase male sensation, and many women go along with this in order to get, or keep, a male partner — which in turn ties into patriarchy and the many motivations for getting and keeping a male partner other than love and affection, like protection, assistance in earning a living, etc); it might be painful or uncomfortable or humiliating, but endured because of physical threat or financial desperation (which is just a form of physical threat mediated by money); it might be painful, uncomfortable, humiliating, and endured under direct physical duress, as in a gun to the head, a knife to the throat, being restrained by one or more predators, being tied up, being drugged or Tazed, being weaker or smaller than a violent attacker, being disabled, etc. … and in the worst case it might be painful and traumatic, leading to lasting physical damage, disability, or even death. [I'm not even talking about psychological effects, PTSD, nightmares, flashbacks, the power of even a "non-brutal" (ha!) rape to destroy a woman's pleasure in her own body, disrupt her sleeping habits for years, make her unable to trust anyone intimately for years or possibly forever, destroy her partnership or marriage, etc]
)
the point is not that women “can’t enjoy” heterosexual copulation; the point is that heterosexual copulation can be — and commonly is — stolen or forced, and yet still result in a high-quality orgasm for the male doing the penetrating. in all the cases I’ve listed above, the male partner (or predator in the more negative cases) can walk away having experienced orgasm, a big neurochemical reward hit in the brain, and whatever other physiological and psychological benefits accrue from ‘successful’ intromission and ejaculation. the experience is inherently asymmetrical. women’s clitorides are not located in their vaginas, but men’s primary orgasm-producing nerve clusters are located in the penis… and not all the wishful thinking in the world changes the ontology or neurology. the clitoris is the homologous structure to the penis, developing differently in the fetus as it becomes gender-differentiated. the nerve clusters that would end up in an oversized, erectile penis in an adult male end up in a smaller (but still erectile, though not so showy) structure in the adult female. this is freshman physiology, and I don’t really understand why there seems to be such resistance to accepting the morphological reality. (though I have some theories, as we shall see
many sexual experiences are asymmetrical, and that’s not necessarily evil: no one pretends that, for example, a male or female lover offering cunnilingus to a female partner is likely to have an orgasm as a result. it is a “gift” activity (when it isn’t perverted by porn culture into some kind of “gross-out” game, voyeurism, or a control fantasy); it’s quite clear that A is giving pleasure to B. and it can be quite a vicarious thrill — and/or very sweet, intimate, and bonding — to participate in such an intimate act of pleasure. fellatio likewise… but here we should really pause and note again the cultural/political significance of the very popular porn flick “Deep Throat,” which offered porn consumers the bizarre contrabiological fantasy of a woman whose clitoris is located in her throat: this film (it has been claimed) inspired a wave of more-than-usually brutal oral rapes, and a wave of coercion of female by male partners to perform an extreme sexual act. Linda “Lovelace” who starred in the film, later reported that her then-husband (and pimp) was an habitual abuser:
Boreman claimed her first husband forced her into pornography at gunpoint. They divorced in 1973.
Their relationship disintegrated into a life of violence, rape, prostitution and pornography, according to her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, and her testimony before congressional committees investigating pornography.
Boreman said she was never paid a penny for “Deep Throat” and her husband only was paid $1,250, though the film grossed a reported $600 million.footnote
but if you google for “Deep Throat” today, you are likely to find only starry-eyed sentimentality for the “good old days” of the porn industry and what a liberating event the film was for everyone. there is a somewhat interesting discussion over at Snopes in which the participants argue about the ethics of distributing (and watching, and getting off on) a movie that documents the coercion and rape of an abused wife. you’ll find all the stock liberal tropes somewhere in this thread
at any rate, my point here is that Deep Throat sold a Sci-Fi Z-movie fantasy (The Man With Two Heads!) of a woman who was, gee whillikers, somehow miraculously mutated morphologically to get her deepest satisfaction from being fucked in the throat by a well-endowed male; a practise that in real life would inflict enormous physical stress and the risk of permanent damage or suffocation. the idea was — just like liberal contract law — to obfuscate a power relationship by pretending that the colonised or exploited party is so constructed, by God or Nature, as to enjoy and welcome their exploitation. sound familiar? the Iraqis will greet us throwing rice and flowers.
while the insistence on the primacy of the vaginal orgasm — as promoted by Freud and greeted eagerly by patriarchy-fans of all flavours — is not quite so extreme as this bizarre fantasy, it is still fantasy; and it still serves an obfuscatory purpose. (notice that the Freudian fantasy had its own bizarre and extreme political/social results, like the genital mutilation of women to “make them normal”). it constructs a fantasy in the mind of the person receiving a sexual gift or service that no gift is being given, because the provider or giver is (allegedly) getting off on it just as much as the receiver. thus all “true accounting” of reciprocity, gift exchange, gratitude, etc. is erased. if men believe that all women find copulation just as orgasmic as men do, then they feel no obligation to offer any reciprocal lovemaking, to learn anything about the reality of the female anatomy and neurology, or even to feel a moment’s gratitude for a woman’s assistance in getting them off.  and if a woman fakes a climax, they easily believe it and look no further, nor bother to learn any of the physiological indicators that might suggest a fake. nor — and this is crucial — need they feel any guilt or shame for rape, if they believe that penetration is inherently just as pleasant and erotic for the “catcher” as for the pitcher. more than one rapist has claimed — to his friends, in court, to the press, and even to his victim’s face — that he knows she just loved it, it’s what women want, they’d all be better off for a good f*ck, blah blah.
awareness of the troublesome sexual asymmetry in us hairless chimps is not recent. throughout human cultural history — not just ours — there’s an implicit acknowledgement that copulation is not as physically satisfying for women as for men; at the very least, men need to learn how to “last longer” in order to give a woman even a running chance at an orgasm. even in “innocent” low-tech cultures such as the Bushmen — with a very high Gini coefficient and very little patriarchal structure — acknowledgement is made that men should bring gifts to women in exchange for sex (could the roots of prostitution lie this deep?) and that a good man should “do extra” to make a woman physically satisfied and happy. in the more enlightened cultures of the Mediterranean, experts (often religiously affiliated) offered lessons for both men and women in how best to please a partner, in preparation for marriage. sophisticated persons in e.g. Crete’s golden era would have laughed Freud out of the temple.
so the idea that women are ideally sexually satisfied by “model-A” missionary (or any other) position copulation is by no means universal. it may have even started with Freud (as noted above) who seems to have invented the vaginal orgasm in accordance with his overall patriarchal theories about women’s nature and place; recall that he also refused to believe in the incestuous abuse of women by their fathers, attributing any testimony to a delusional “syndrome”, the Elektra Complex (corresponds to the Oedipus Complex in men). when his female analysands reported being raped by their fathers, he told them they were imagining the whole thing due to a complex. nice guy, eh?
footnote
we should also note Freud’s (and patriarchy’s) legacy: the still-existing cultural kapu against men learning to please women properly, or bothering to do so; it was noted recently that a male character on the notorious ‘Sopranos’ show was (in the script) derided and mocked by male friends when it was revealed that he was very good at cunnilingus (and was making one or more women very happy); this was considered — guess what — unmanly, sissy, not quite “heterosexual”. it almost made him [gasp] a “fag”. and here we have the nub of patriarchal belief about sexuality: egalitarian or gift-exchange sex is unmanly, where Man is defined by patriarchy as ‘one who dominates/takes and does not give.’ the fact of taking, of enforcing an asymmetrical exchange (whether it be in bed or in neoliberal “free trade” contracts) equals dominance which equals Manliness. notions of equal exchange or limits on kleptocracy are for “economic girly-men” [hat tip to Arnold Schwarzenegger, God's gift to political satirists and anyone else wanting to hear the neolib message without its pretty intellectual gift wrap]. the theory of the vaginal orgasm corresponds roughly to the neolib interpretation of Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage: the Third World is really benefitting equally from “development” (the extraction of its resources in a “trade” system that is by definition and of necessity asymmetrical and unequally advantageous). patriarchal sexuality, which has been called phallocentric (or “dickheaded” by those with a more Anglo-Saxon bent), might as well be called kleptosexuality — a word I made up just last week, but I see that the Urban Dictionary is ahead of me with a much less useful definition — a sexuality based on the valorisation and eroticisation of unequal exchange. when a man under patriarchy tries to be a “fair trade partner” and give as much pleasure to a (female) lover as he receives himself, he’s automatically demoted to “less than a man,” sliding towards patriarchy’s outcast community of “deviants and homos”. porn reveals that it isn’t the specific act that’s at issue: it’s the egalitarian attitude. any sexual act — including acts between women — can be and are shown in porn for men, so long as they are set in a kleptosexual frame (coercion, voyeurism, insult, blending at the gonzo end into overt rape and violence).
I couldn’t agree more that women totally deserve — as much as anyone “deserves” or is entitled to more than survival and justice — a healthy and happy sex life. but part of a healthy and happy sex life is not being compelled (by tradition, by the fear of hurting a male partner’s feelings, by force, by violence) to settle for a less-than-satisfactory sexual praxis, or to fake an orgasm when not actually feeling one. this act of fakery is what men require most often from prostitutes: to compel the subordinated person to pretend to be happy, to force the slave to dance and smile, is the ultimate refinement of domination.
the haunting question for men under patriarchy, as for any privileged class, is an uncertainty about the honesty and genuineness — the authenticity — of their sexual experiences with women. the price of power is the loss of authenticity, much as the price of microcontrol is the loss of robustness and diversity; the traditional power of men to compel women to submit, or to “fake it,” persists enough that unless the connection with a partner is very strong, very genuine, very honest, deeply trusting, the paranoia of aristocracy (does my butler really respect me, or just pretend to because I am his livelihood?) must endure.  racism has the same corrosive effect on relations between dominant ethnicities (Anglos in our culture) and deprecated ethnicities; whitefolks with Black, Chican@, FirstNations friends have to wonder, “do my friends really like me or are they just nice to me because of my skin priv?”…. only an end to the rape culture can remove that taint of inauthenticity for the general population. only a very high-quality and special relationship (a “separate peace”, a private or collective TAZ), one where honesty and intersubjectivity are valued more highly than gender roles and “safe” conformity with cultural norms, can remove it for those of us living in Patriarchy Version 2007.0
but of course industrial capitalist culture specialises in substituting the cheap/easy inauthentic experience for the genuine article. profits are higher, less time must be invested, it’s more “efficient” than artisanal or commensalist or convivial (or sustainable!) production. two generations of men have grown up on totally inauthentic packaged porn — patriarchal cartoon sex, the junkfood of sexuality, a sexuality modelled on Taylorist industrialism for the production of maximal male orgasms with minimal investment — and now I sometimes fear that, like kids fed McDonalds’ cr*p from infancy, they are no longer capable of understanding what real food tastes like, or enjoying it if they happen to come across some. and women are, like it or not, being dragged along with the cultural drift; the pressure is now on bigtime to renounce a feminist analysis, embrace porn, dress like a hooker, and fake it with a determination and enthusiasm never before required; not just asked to fake an orgasm by ordinary copulation, it appears that young women today are under pressure to provide fellatio on demand, to submit to anal penetration, etc — and to like it, or pretend to like it, or risk being “totally uncool” and ostracised by their peer groups. I’m not aware of any similar pressure on young men to provide sexual pleasures for their girlfriends or risk social ostracism, but perhaps younger readers can correct me on this or expand our view of contemporary youth culture?
30 June 2007, 4:49 pmDeAnander:
BTW, rootless chimed in on this topic a while back, and I forgot to post his comment:
I expand on this: legitimate legal opinion is that for prosecuting counsel repeatedly to refer to the defendant(s) as “rapist(s)” or “murderer(s)”, repeatedly to refer to an exhibit as “the murder weapon” or “his rape kit”, is prejudicial and can lead to an unjust decision in a case where — as we are so often reminded — a man’s life/future is at stake!
and yet we are repeatedly told — often by legitimate legal opinionators — that there is no measurable harm in the ubiquitisation of a pornographic culture that repeatedly refers to all women as “bitches,” “hos,” and other fuck-object labels, repeatedly opines that the only purpose for women’s bodies is men’s sexual satisfaction, that women enjoy being dominated, etc. … and women who challenge this prejudicial atmosphere are routinely described as “feminist anti-porn harridans,” “prudes,” “censors,” and so forth.
somehow, outside the courtroom, this doesn’t lead to an atmosphere of prejudice in situations where — as amply documented — women’s lives and happiness are at stake. or so we are told.
like I say, “double your standards, double your fun.”
30 June 2007, 7:38 pmDeAnander:
one more afterthought… the analogy that leapt into my mind when wrestling with Nil’s text was this: in a culture that practises slavery, let’s say one where the Long Ears pretty consistently force the Short Ears to labour on plantations or dragging blocks of stone around for Long Ear profit and pleasure… surely the burning question is not “Are Short-Ears really not capable of enjoying sculpture or gardening???”
before the Short-Ears can even find out if they enjoy sculpture or gardening, the Long Ears have to stop pushing them around.
30 June 2007, 8:05 pmDeAnander:
YIKES. when I wrote in the more enlightened cultures of the Mediterranean, what I meant was “more enlightened than some other cultures in the Mediterranean, such as the [expletive deleted] Attic Greeks for whom women existed only as private or public property”. I did not mean that the cultures of the Med were “more enlightened” than the Bushmen. actually, I’d be tempted to assert that the !Kung are/were more enlightened than most of what we laughingly call Western Civilisation — when was the last time they massacred anybody, released persistent toxins into their environment, started a world war or built a rape camp?
apologies for a poorly written transition.
30 June 2007, 9:33 pmLinda c:
DE,
Thank you for this. I am going to set my 20 yr. old daughter down tonight and make her read this – before she marries her intended (in a few weeks).
It also gives me A LOT to consider as I raise my 8 yr. old son.
Linda
2 July 2007, 3:39 pmDeAnander:
@LindaC
wow. I somehow had never envisioned myself as a writer of prenuptial advice
I would be interested to know what a 20-y.o. woman thinks about these things, whether she says e.g. “Oh for heavens’ sakes Mom, everyone knows all that, how dumb do you think we are?” or whether she is surprised by (or even annoyed by or hostile to) the information/argument. thanks for the kind words…
2 July 2007, 8:57 pmLinda c:
De,
I finally got a response. At first it was “Oh for heavens’ sake” but then it turned a bit hostile. She informed me that if women weren’t so “panzy assed” they would tell the men in their lives what makes them happy sexually. Then she admited the “fear factor” for women.
I took it from there. I told her that this is the way men are being raised. This has been passed down from generation to generation and it is where a lot of the sexual aggression, rape, assault, etc… has evolved from. Maggie agreed with that and added that “today” it’s all about being “tough, rough, and manly”. Sad thing to say about our “up and coming”.
She is a strong young lady and informed me that if todays women were confident enough with their own bodies and comfortable enough with who “they are” they will have no problems letting their men know what they need from them sexually. But she also acknowledged that a lot of times men just “don’t have a clue” – because of what society has given them to draw from.
In the long run she said to tell you that you “are right” and that “Freud was a lunatic” – she has studied his works.
5 July 2007, 2:38 pm