Rape and Activism

To its great credit, feminism has long fought to bring the issue of rape out of the shadows and into the public mind. Only recently has rape been properly understood as an atrocious crime, a brutal violation of a woman's right to personhood. Today, thankfully, such statements are truisms.

In order to achieve this laudable goal, however, feminists felt they had to redefine rape. The act itself ceased to be the gratification of a man's sexual desire on a woman's unwilling body and became instead a simple matter of power, an evil assertion of control. As a result, a semi-feminist organization like Take Back the Night can claim, in the first line of its mission statement, that "rape is a hate crime," presumably against women as a gender. The activists who manufacture these kinds of formulas have effectively desexualized rape, in order to politicize it. They have tamed it, sterilized it, made it digestible, in order to rally the troops. But the fact remains that all sex is to some degree a matter of power. And therefore, rape is to some degree a matter of sex.

How else can we explain the prevalence of date rape? A man and a woman meet to enjoy an inherently sexual situation, which culminates in sexual violation. The marchers who protest rape on the grounds that it is "motivated by the same prejudice that fuels racism" fail to understand that the real issue is consent, not bigotry. Accusations of bigotry reduce easily to slogans and chants. Consent tends to resist so simple a reading. Yet if we are to understand the phenomenon--indeed, the epidemic--of rape and sexual assault, we have to take an honest look at the complicated relationship of sexuality and mutuality.

First, we must be frank, even at the risk of offending. We must admit that aggressiveness in a man is, on the whole (though certainly not always), a more or less attractive quality to a woman. It is still the guy who generally (again, not always) has the obligation to "make the first move," if he hopes for some eventual romance. He still buys the drink presumptuously, he still leans in for the kiss. We may lament the clichÈ, but even at a progressive campus like Columbia's, we can hardly deny its validity. And so, we can hardly deny that from the very start of most sexual relationships, the man is encouraged, at least in part, to ignore a woman's agency.

Let us say that in our hypothetical story, the woman turns down the drink and spurns the kiss. Has she not clearly expressed her agency? Is not the man bound to respect her decision? Well, if he is a gentleman, certainly he is. But an infinite number of examples, as can be witnessed as often on TV as on the steps of Low, bear out the unpalatable but inarguable reality that the more aggressive the guy's persistence, the more likely the girl's accommodation. Of course, every woman has the right to change her mind. But might it be that the man's very forcefulness is precisely what moves her? Again, this paradigm does not hold for every particular circumstance; yet it is frequently true, and we must come to grips with it.

Our couple enters a room with a bed, drunk after many a drink. Touching, groping, easing each other into ever profounder intimacies. Yes it is trite, yes it is clichÈ, but it is also happening. Now, suddenly, the girl turns cold. I'm not ready, she says. Not tonight. No. But how many times, he asks himself, has she said no before? At every step, she hesitated, she contradicted herself, why is this no absolute? If "No means No," why did she give way to the kiss, he asks, why did she finally accept the invitation to "my place"? He rapes her.

Of course, he has committed what I hastened to call, at the beginning of this article, an atrocious crime: he deserves our harshest condemnation, our strictest punishment. We must not apologize for rape, as many letters to the editor will accuse me of doing here, for trotting out these "misogynist tropes." But we must, in spite of our loathing, attempt to understand the nature of his evil. He is a monster partly formed by all the simplistic propaganda of the contemporary discourse, which would have him believe that the world of sexuality divides so clearly into "yes" and "no," that the complex, confused, and mostly unreadable woman on his bed is little more than a figment of his drunken imagination. In fact, the propaganda of groups like Take Back the Night would have him believe that sex has nothing to do with it.

So next year, when we march against rape, maybe we should try to understand what we are screaming, if we want people to listen.

David Sauvage is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and comparative literature.