Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (17 page)

For several generations, we have had the medical technology to confine sex-class segregation to history: to make women truly the equals of men, who can have intercourse and engage with the opposite sex without fear of unwanted pregnancy, social stigma and painful death. The technological advances concerned are hormonal and physical contraception and safe medical abortion, both of which are an occasionally painful and traumatic hassle for women who make use of them, but far less painful and traumatic than being obliged to carry a growing foetus for nine months and then push it out through your pelvis.

The technology of sexual and reproductive liberation should have changed the world for women far more than it has. The reason that the relative reliability of condoms, hormonal contraception, emergency contraception and medical abortion is so threatening to men is that it alters the material basis of women’s oppression.

As the basis of biological inequality began to be eroded by contraceptive technology and reproductive healthcare, a frantic backlash began – both against the technology and against the sexual freedom it enabled. Not only was the use of condoms and the Pill unnatural, not only was abortion a sin against God and man, any woman who would make use of such advances was clearly a soulless harlot who should be ashamed of herself. Never mind that most sexually active women and girls use contraception, and one-third of us will have an abortion at some point in our lives. The backlash against women’s sexual autonomy is a backlash against everyone’s sexual freedom, male and female, gay and straight.

Technological advances are meant to benefit humanity, but the notion that women and queer people are fully human seems yet to occur to a worrying proportion of lawmakers. Where women are permitted access to contraception and abortion, that access can’t be made easy – we must never forget that our limited sexual freedom is the gift of powerful men, who can take it away again if we don’t behave. We cannot fight this backlash by being polite. In a culture that wants us cowed and afraid, women and girls must weaponise our shamelessness.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RAPE CULTURE

Structural sexism does not always come from a place of hate. The clearest example of this is the conversation about date-rape, drugs and drinking.

At the time of writing, the debate is raging over whether or not a woman ever has a responsibility to ‘protect’ herself from rape. A great many people, too many to name and shame, have spent time and energy pleading with young women in particular to stop drinking and taking drugs, to stop giving the ‘wrong’ signals to men, to be careful never to walk down strange streets alone. Often, the people making these pleas are good-hearted. They want young girls and women to be as safe as possible. It is for our own good that girls are encouraged never to let down our guard.

But that’s the whole problem.

Down the centuries, women and girls have been told not to do all sorts of things ‘for our own good’. We have been told not to go to work, not to read too much, not to go to school or to university because it would be damaging for us; we are still told not to go out alone, enjoy our sexuality or speak our minds in public because that might provoke violent retribution from the dwindling number of men who believe that women should be silent sexual commodities and nothing else. In Saudi Arabia, the reason given for preventing women from driving is that it might damage their ovaries. If women as a class had always listened to everyone telling us to place limits on ourselves for our own safety, we would all still be stuck in the kitchen.

Right now, a few bouts of irresponsible drinking are practically a rite of passage in many nations – and the rights and wrongs of that state of affairs are another debate entirely. 

Arguing over whether or not it is a woman’s ‘responsibility’ to protect herself from rape prevents us from discussing the real issue, which is when precisely society is going to start placing the blame for rape on the men who commit rape, the criminal justice system which refuses to take it seriously, and the wider culture of silence and shame which allows men and boys to continue raping women, girls and other men with relative impunity.

Telling young women that we are not allowed to make the same mistakes, have the same fun or take the same risks that young men do – risks like getting drunk, going out adventuring or travelling alone – may offer us some protection from predators in the short term. But in the long term it just gives those predators more power. It gives them the power to control women’s behaviour, to keep us fearful, and to make sure we cannot have fun and take risks without the threat of sexual violence. That’s what rape culture is all about, and rape culture is strengthened every time we tell young women to drink less or risk sexual assault.

When our great-grandparents’ generation urged their daughters to marry young or face social purgatory they thought they were doing so in their best interests. A hundred years later, when we tell our friends and children and younger sisters not to stay out late, not to walk in certain areas of the city after dark, and not to go out and get hammered in Hastings, we are thinking the same thing. We tell women and girls these things, not always because we secretly hate them, but because we care about them, we want to protect them, individually, from a world that we know isn’t as equal as we sometimes pretend.

This is what we are fighting when we fight rape culture, not just career misogynists spreading their bile over the airwaves like so much tacky mucus, but the quiet voice inside us that whispers, ‘Not so fast.’ The voice that tells us that if only we stay home and keep our legs closed and our eyes lowered we’ll be safe.

Unfortunately, however, rape culture gets you coming and going. It is precisely about fear, about creating a culture where women are afraid to participate in public life as men do. A life lived in fear of sexual violence, a life where you cannot take the risks that men take without anticipating physical attack or, worse still, being attacked and then blamed for it, is not a life lived freely. It isn’t even going to protect you or those you love: in a recent study, more than half of all rape victims in the United States reported being raped by an intimate partner, a boyfriend, husband or lover.
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Most rapists are known to and trusted by the person they assault. Behaving ‘responsibly’ is not, ultimately, any protection against sexual violence. 

Here’s what is understood when a senior police officer broadcasts a public message warning women not to do something they’ll ‘regret’ on a night out: this is the way the world is.
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We are meant to understand that rape and sexual assault are facts of life and, much as we may disapprove, much as we may want to see rapists brought to justice, there is nothing we can do to combat structural violence. That kind of rape myth is damaging enough when it comes from a friend or a parent. It’s far more harmful when it comes from law enforcement, or from an official government source.

Here’s what we must begin to say to today’s young women, all over the world. Rape does not have to be a fact of life. It is not your responsibility to be cautious, to restrict yourself, to be quieter and better behaved so that men don’t rape you. If you choose to live your life in fear of male violence, nobody will think any less of you – the fear is pertinent and legitimate, and sometimes there are grave consequences for women who talk too loudly and flirt too much and take too many risks. But here’s the thing: there are also consequences for those who don’t.

To live in rape culture is to balance the possibility of being at less risk of sexual violence if you dress conservatively, don’t go out and have fun, don’t travel alone and don’t ever upset your partner against the certainty that you will live a smaller, sadder life. It is not about protecting women. It is about controlling women.

An enormous change in consciousness is taking place around consent, and it threatens to change everything. At some point between 2008 and 2014, the collective understanding of what rape and abuse are, and what they ought to be, changed for ever. At some point we began to talk, not just privately, cowedly, but in numbers too big to ignore, about the reality of sexual violence and child abuse, about how victims are silenced. Survivors of rape and abuse and their loved ones had always known this toxic truth, but we were forced to hold it close to ourselves where it could fester and eat us from within. A great many women you know have intimate experience of this. We just didn’t talk about it in quite this way before.

Something has changed. A change in the way we communicate and interact has allowed people who have traditionally been isolated – say, victims of rape and child abuse – to speak out, to share their stories without mediation, to make the structures of power and violence we have always known were there suddenly visible, a thing that can be challenged.

There are people out there, not all of them men, who believe that a conspiracy is going on. When I speak to them as a reporter, they tell me that women lie about rape, now more than ever. They lie to damage men and ‘destroy their lives’. This is despite the fact that the fraud rate for rape remains as low as ever, and despite the fact that popular culture is groaning with powerful men who have been accused of sexual abuse whose lives remain distinctly undestroyed. Men like boxer Mike Tyson, or singer R. Kelly, or filmmaker Woody Allen. Women and children who bring those accusations, however, risk their relationships, their reputation, their safety. Anonymity in the press is no protection against the rejection of family, friends and workmates. We have created a culture and a legal system which punishes those who seek justice so badly that those who do come forward are assumed to have some ulterior motive.

Rape and abuse are the only crimes where, in the words of the seventeenth-century legal scholar Lord Matthew Hale, ‘it is the victim, not the defendant, who is on trial’. They are crimes that are hard to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ in a court of law, because it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’. Nobody can really know, and so naturally we must assume that he is innocent and she is lying, because that’s what women do. The trouble is that in this society, ‘he said’ is almost always more credible than ‘she said’, unless she is white and he is not. 

The rule of law cannot be relied upon when it routinely fails victims of abuse. That is not the end of the conversation. The law courts aren’t the only place where the nature of sexual power, of what men may and may not do to women, children and other men with impunity, is played out. No magistrate can ensure that a young girl like Missouri teenager Daisy Coleman, who came forward last year to describe how she was raped by classmates at a party, is not hounded out of town, along with her family, until she makes attempts on her own life. 

Rape culture means more than a culture in which rape is routine. Rape culture involves the systematic suspicion and dismissal of victims. In order to preserve rape culture, society at large has to believe two different things at once: that women and children lie about rape, and that they should also behave as if rape will be the result if they get into a strange car, walk down a strange street, or wear a sexy outfit, and if it happens, it’s their own fault. 

This paradox involves significant mental gymnastics. But as more and more people come forward with accusations, as the pattern of historical and ongoing abuse of power becomes harder to ignore, the paradox gets harder to maintain. We are faced with two alternatives: either women and children are lying about rape on a massive scale, or rape and sexual abuse are endemic in this society, and have been for centuries. Facing up to the reality of the latter is a painful prospect. 

If we were truly to accept the enormity of rape culture, if we were to understand what it actually means that one in five girls and one in ten boys are sexually abused, it will not just be painful. It will force our culture to reimagine itself in a way that is uncomfortable even to contemplate. As Jessica Valenti writes at the
Nation
, ‘It will mean rethinking institutions and families and power dynamics and the way we interact with each other every day.’
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It will mean looking with new eyes at our most revered icons, our social groups, our friends and relatives. It will involve hard, difficult work. It will change everything. And it has already begun.

The sexual counter-revolution is on, and it’s urgent, and it is about control. It gets excited with ritual sexual objectification of women, sweats over silencing critics of rape culture, and works itself into a frenzy over contraception, abortion and reproductive freedom. We have been lied to. If women and queer people still shackle our desires in shame and silence, we are not as liberated as we think. If sexual freedom is the sole domain of straight men and boys, not one of us is truly free.

We have the technology to liberate women and girls from the shackles of biology. What we do not have, yet, after over a century of fighting for it, is the collective will to make that liberation real. 

The backlash against real sexual freedom – the radical emancipation of pleasure from power – is powerful and sustained. As all human affect collapses into the logic of the market, it is not just sex which has become a commodity, it is intimacy itself.

Real sexual empowerment is not just about the fun stuff. It’s not just about dildos and lacy thongs and pole-dancing classes. It’s about abortion rights. It’s about contraception. It’s about ending rape culture. It’s about creating a world where pleasure and self-expression does not have to be offset with fear of violence and unwanted pregnancy.

We have the technological means to make that kind of sexual freedom a liveable possibility for billions of people. The mechanisms of shame are as important to neoliberal sexual ideology as the illusion of choice. In theory, sex does not need to cost more for cis women than it does for anyone else, in terms of fear of pregnancy, disease or social shame. The fact that it still does is an assault on the sexual liberty and personhood of every human being.