The Purity Myth (24 page)

you girls have to sign a release, and blah blah blah blah, and we’ ll come and get the other two.”
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The other girls will go back into the club, said Moss, while the camera- man takes a single girl to the back of the bus. “I’ve seen it every time now,” he said—as have others. The rape* of an eighteen-year-old girl by Francis, once again on the bus, was actually detailed in a
Los Angeles Times
exposé on the porn empire.

Eventually, [ Jannel] Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans, and climbed on top of her. “I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it . And I keep telling him it

hurts. I said, ‘No’ twice in the beginning , and during I started saying ,

‘Oh, my god, it hurts.’ I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going , and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn’ t keep talking.”
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Reporter Claire Hoffman, who also wrote about how Francis physically assaulted
her
during their interview—pushing her up against the hood of a car, twisting her arms behind her back until she cried—wrote that Francis’s lawyer, Michael Kerry Burke, responded to Szyszka’s story by saying they had had consensual sex, and “though Mr. Francis cannot speak to Ms. Szyszka’s

* The young woman, as far as I know, did not press charges. But her description makes it impossible for me to describe the incident as anything other than sexual assault.

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discomfort during the encounter, other news stories have commented that Mr. Francis is reputedly well-endowed.”*
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Despite these rape accusations, investigations, and unabashed physi- cal assault of women, it’s not Francis, his cohorts, or the company that get talked about when rape, drinking, and “going wild” are discussed in the

media.
†
(In fact, they rarely get punished, either—you’d think that some

of these men would be doing prison time, though none are.) It’s women— portrayed as wild, sexual, irresponsible, and thoughtless. And little atten- tion is devoted to the fact that these women are teenagers being systemati- cally targeted by adults. Adults who have done this more than once. Adults who have the power of money, lawyers, and a society that loves to blame impure women backing them.

What’s strikes me most about the GGW culture is that it’s iconic in contemporary American society—these aren’t just a bunch of frat guys who made a couple of bucks with a handheld camera. GGW is a way of life; it’s a way of thinking about sex, sexuality, and women. Men, especially young men, look to GGW (and other pornography, as discussed in Chapter 4) for cues about what women are like—as sexual beings, people, and, ultimately, objects. As a result, our sexual paradigm centers on coercion, trickery, in- ebriation, and assault. And instead of screaming to the rafters that we’re not going to take it, we wag our fingers at the young women who drunkenly take that trip to the back of the party bus.

* It takes a particular je ne sais quoi to make excuses for a rapist simply by noting how large his cock is.

†
With the exception of pieces like Hoffman’s, which revealed GGW’s and Francis’s true

natures.

w e ’ r e
a ll
“ g i r l s g o n e w i l d ”

You don’t need to “go wild” on camera to be blamed for an assault. Almost any woman can land in the “impure” camp and be blamed for sexual violence committed against her. “Impure” behavior isn’t limited to being sexually ac- tive, either—drinking, staying out too late, or, in some cases, not being white all qualify as well.

Take Cassandra Hernandez, a female Air Force airperson who was raped by three of her colleagues at a party—where, yes, she was drinking. After she went to the hospital and filed a report, the Air Force treated her to a harsh interrogation—so harsh, in fact, that Hernandez decided not to testify against her attackers. Instead of giving her the treatment she deserved, the Air Force charged Hernandez with underage drinking and “indecent acts.”* To make matters worse, Hernandez’s three attackers were offered immunity from sexual assault if they testified against her on the indecent-acts charge. So, in effect, she was charged with her own rape.
21

In the highly controversial Duke University rape case
†
—in which

an African American woman accused three white lacrosse players of rap- ing her—the media almost always referred to accuser Crystal Mangum as a “stripper” or “exotic dancer,” despite the fact that she was also a col- lege student, a mother, a
person.
The narrative became “stripper accuses college athletes,” dehumanizing Mangum. In fact, the media was so en- amored with this storyline that they expanded it to include
all
women

* The military definition of “indecent acts” is hard to come by, but the best one I found was a “form of immorality relating to sexual impurity which is not only grossly vulgar, obscene, and repugnant to common propriety, but tends to excite lust and deprave the morals with respect to sexual relations.”
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†
While the North Carolina attorney general declared the three men innocent, the after-

math of the accusation is ripe for analysis.

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on college campuses. One ABC News article on the case reported on the “The ‘Lacrosstitute’ Factor”:

They’re on every college campus where sports teams succeed: groupies who want to date athletes—or at least have sex with them. . . . At Princeton

University, where the men’s lacrosse team is regularly ranked as one of the

best in the nation, the women are known as “ laxtitutes” or “ lacrosstitutes.”
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Apparently, calling women whores isn’t beneath even the most main- stream of media. And it’s not just the press that uses women’s sexuality against them when discussing sexual violence—it’s the courts, too. In California, for example, a police officer who ejaculated on a woman he’d detained at a traffic stop—and threatened to arrest her if she took action against him—was let off even after admitting what he’d done. Why? Well, the victim was a stripper on her way home from work. In officer David Alex Park’s 2007 trial, Park’s defense attorney argued that the woman “got what she wanted,” and that she was “an overtly sexual person.”
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The jury (composed of one woman and eleven men) found Park not guilty on all counts.

Similarly, a judge in Philadelphia ruled that a sex worker whom mul- tiple men had raped at gunpoint hadn’t been raped at all—she’d just been robbed. The victim, a twenty-year-old woman who worked for an escort ser- vice and obtained clients via Craigslist, had agreed to certain sexual acts with the defendant for a set amount of money. But he lured her to an aban- doned piece of property and pulled a gun—then more men started showing up. When a fifth man was invited to assault her, he instead helped her get dressed and leave because he saw that she was crying. But municipal judge

Teresa Carr Deni insisted that what happened to this woman wasn’t rape— it was “theft of services.”

“I thought rape was a terrible trauma,” Deni told a
Philadelphia Daily News
columnist. “[A case like this] minimizes true rape cases and de- means women who are really raped.” Women who are
really
raped. You can’t get much clearer than that—a sex worker just doesn’t classify as one of these victims.
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But a woman need not be a sex worker to be blamed for her rape; hav- ing any sexual history at all can do the trick. Under the purity myth, the only women who can truly be raped are those who are chaste—and given how limiting the purity myth is, and how few women actually fit into its tight mold, the consequence is that
most
women are seen as incapable of being raped.

A woman who has had sex? Well, she’s done it before, hasn’t she? Not rapeable. A fat woman? She should be
happy
that someone would want to rape her.* Had a few too many beers? Take some responsibility for yourself!

This whole not-rapeable theme is especially true when it comes to wom- en of color, who, as I’ve written previously, are either hypersexualized or de- humanized to the point that they’re hardly even considered women, let alone “pure” women.

The rates of sexualized violence against women of color in the United States are far higher than those regarding white women. In fact, violence against white women is actually declining, while it continues to increase among women of color. Between 2003 and 2004, the incidents of intimate-partner violence involving black females increased from 3.8 to

* I’m sad to say this is a sentiment I’ve seen oft repeated in the blogosphere when women writers are attacked. The “rape as a compliment” theme never seems to get old.

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6.6 victimizations per one thousand women. And the average annual rate of intimate-partner violence from 1993 to 2004 was highest for American Indian and Alaskan Native women—18.2 victimizations per one thou- sand women.

Naturally, it’s not possible to prove that these increased rates of violence in particular communities are a direct result of society’s positioning women of color as impure. But a society that portrays them as such absolutely contributes to a culture of violence against them—women who transgress purity norms are punished, and women of color transgress simply by not being white.

Again, all women who suffer under the purity myth are at risk—and the victim-blaming trend is extending far beyond only physical assaults. Women who are harassed—at work, on the street, or even online—are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted. Just by vir- tue of being out in public, we’re overstepping certain boundaries. (Consider how often a harassed woman is faulted for being on the wrong street at the wrong time of night, or told that she was too flirtatious in the office.)

But it makes sense; this is what the purity myth is all about. Pure women aren’t out at bars or on the street; they’re not in public life—they’re home, where women should be.