The Purity Myth (25 page)

While street and work harassment have been talked about for as long as feminists have fought back against them, disdain for women in public spaces has taken a new turn in today’s tech-savvy world. The Internet is the new pub- lic space, and a similar trend is emerging there: Women who dare to trans- gress are being punished.

When women are harassed online—as they often are*—the excuse is

* A 2006 University of Maryland study showed that when an online user appears to be female, that person is twenty-five times more likely to experience harassment..

frequently of the “if you can’t take the heat . . . ” variety. When death and rape threats lodged against technology blogger Kathy Sierra came to light, for example, Daily Kos founder, progressive blogger Markos Moulitsas, said, “If they can’t handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work.”
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But women shouldn’t have to, because the Internet is the new town square—it’s a public place in the same way a street or a restaurant is, and ha- rassment and violent threats there are just as damaging, maybe even more so. As I once wrote in an article about online misogyny for the
Guardian,
if some- one calls you a slut on the street, it stings, but you can move on; if someone calls you a slut online, there’s a public record of it for as long as the site exists.

When I was doing research for that article, feminist blogger Jill Filipovic told me, “There’s a tendency to put the blame on the victims of stalking, ha- rassment, or even sexual violence when the victim is a woman—and espe- cially when she’s a woman who has made herself public. . . . Public space has traditionally been reserved for men, and women are supposed to be quiet.”

Indeed, something as simple as posting a photo online is enough to spark harassment and blame. For young women—many of whom have a public web profile, be it through a blog, MySpace, Facebook, or a Flickr page—this is a daily reality.

When Filipovic complained about harassment she endured from mem- bers of the law school forum* AutoAdmit, the site responded, “For a woman who has made 4,000 pictures of herself publicly available on Flickr, and who is a self-proclaimed feminist author of a widely disseminated blog, she has gotten pretty shy about overexposure.”
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* Which involved talk about how they’d like to rape her, or their wondering how many abortions she’d had.

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The mere act of having a presence—simply existing!—was enough for people to throw blame Filipovic’s way. And with more than four in ten young Americans utilizing social-networking sites, and 86 percent using the Inter- net, Filipovic is hardly in the minority.
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a w o r l d w i t h o u t r a P e ?

This intersection of women, violence, and purity has resulted in more than victim blaming and the idolization of predators like GGW—the pu- rity myth is significantly changing the cultural and political landscape as it relates to violence and women. Women have always been blamed for sexual violence done to them; that’s nothing new. But in an allegedly postfeminist world, where rape and domestic violence are supposed to be universally reviled, arguments that overtly (or stealthily) blame women, or dismiss violence against them, have that much more power. Because who in this day and age would say that rape is a
good
thing? Or that a woman just got what was coming to her? No one; instead, today’s rape apologism comes wrapped in the rhetoric of equality—that’s what makes it different, and so dangerous.

In a 2008
Los Angeles Times
article, for example, reporter Heather Mac Donald wrote that there simply is no rape problem on college campuses. In response to a Harvard woman’s story about being raped while she was drunk, Mac Donald wrote that to hold her “without responsibility requires stripping women of volition and moral agency.”

Though the Harvard victim does not remember her actions, it ’s highly

unlikely that she passed out upon arriving at the party and was dragged away like roadkill while other students looked on. Rather, she probably

participated voluntarily in the usual prelude to intercourse, and probably even in intercourse itself, however woozily.
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This insidious argument about “responsibility” is having an acute effect on the way all women talk about rape. The very notion of what rape
is
is being debated—and not in a progressive or useful way.

Take
Cosmopolitan
magazine, which ran an article about a “new kind of date rape,” written by none other than chastity pusher Laura Sessions Stepp (discussed in Chapter 2). What Sessions Stepp dubbed “gray rape” in her ar- ticle is really just plain old terrible rape, laced with the same confusion and guilt that often accompanies an assault by someone the victim knows. But in- stead of taking it seriously and treating the issue with the gravitas it deserves, Sessions Stepp decided to water it down by naming it this sorta-rape:

It refers to sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what. . . . And it ’s a surprisingly common occurrence. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 5 college women will be raped at some point during

a five-year college career; that about 9 out of 10 times, the victim will know her assailant; and that half of all victims will not call what happened rape.
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Of course,
many
women don’t call their assaults rape, for myriad reasons—perhaps because of the shame and stigma attached to sexual as- sault, or maybe they shy away from the word because they don’t want to admit something so awful happened to them. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t change the reality of what happened—it doesn’t change the fact that someone raped them.

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As dangerous as Sessions Stepp’s claim that there is such a thing as “gray rape” is her insinuation that some women are too empowered to be victims. In the above-mentioned
Cosmo
article, she writes, “Even today, she is reluc- tant to call it rape because she thinks of herself as a strong and sexually inde- pendent woman, not a victim.”
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Claims like these, and playing with language without regard for women’s experiences, have real-life consequences. A young woman at Lewis & Clark College who was raped by a fellow student, for example, told a local reporter that she “calls what happened to her something akin to ‘gray rape,’ a term she learned from an article in
Cosmopolitan.”
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She relayed how she was “hooking up” with her eventual attacker when he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“I’m sitting up against the wall on his mattress, and he’s standing over me,” she said. “It started happening, and then he, like, twisted his fingers around my hair and started pulling it and being just kind of violent. I started choking because he was just, like, pushing my head. I started gagging and choking, and I couldn’ t really breathe. . . . And he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, choke on it.’”
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There is nothing gray about this. There is nothing gray about being vio- lent. There is nothing gray about “choke on it.”

But because this young woman read this one article—which was widely reported on by other large media outlets eager to glom on to a trend that says rape isn’t really rape—her ability to name what happened to her was dimin- ished. That’s no small thing.

The language we use to talk about violence is quite literally being taken away from us. In 2004, a Nebraska judge barred the word “rape” from the trial

of a man accused of . . . well, rape. The judge ruled that the language would be too prejudicial. The victim instead would have to use words like “intercourse” and “sex” to describe her attack.*
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When this story first broke, Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick rightly wondered, “Is the word ‘rape’ truly more inflamma- tory to a jury than the word ‘robbery’?”

The biggest indication of this regressive turn is the fact that the same people who are working so hard to blame women for their assaults, or to dis- miss the fact that violence against women exists altogether, are also doing their best to fight against feminism.

Take Naomi Schaefer Riley, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter who wrote that Imette St. Guillen “should have known better.” She not only blamed young women for their rapes, she also blamed feminism. In fact, her article’s subhead was “How feminism wages war on common sense.” Riley argued that feminism makes women think that they are equal to men (the horror) in all things, including drinking. She cited Barrett Sea- man, author of
Binge,
who said that the college women he spoke to “saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar.”

“Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous,” Riley wrote. “But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion—that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.”
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Riley isn’t the only one scapegoating feminists, of course. Mac

* In a heroic move (if you ask me), she refused to abide by the judge’s rule: “I refuse to call it sex, or any other word that I’m . . . encouraged to say on the stand, because to me that’s committing perjury. What happened to me was rape, it was not sex.”

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Donald and Roiphe took similar swipes, and it’s quickly become a calling card in rape coverage. It’s also at the heart of the larger conservative agenda. Conservative women’s organizations like the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), for example, are quick to use the language of empowerment to en- force purity and dismiss rape, and thereby point the finger at feminism as “exaggerating” rape statistics or painting women as victims.

I’ve thought often about why—why?!—anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I’ve come up with— and I think it makes sense—is fear of becoming that “impure” woman. Women who rail against feminism, like those at IWF, work hard to pres- ent themselves as “pure,” whether it’s through promoting abstinence-only education and decrying hookup culture or kowtowing to conservative men’s agenda for women. It’s a survival technique: If they can paint other women as “impure,” then they’re safe from criticism. It’s a lot easier to attack other women, after all, than it is to attack a sexist society. Unfortu- nately, antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women’s behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solve any larger problems.

I truly believe that the drift toward blaming feminism is the most telling shift in this national dialogue. Blaming feminism, blaming
wom- en’s equality,
for rape reveals the crux of the issue. Because it’s not con- cern that’s driving media coverage of women’s drinking too much—it’s sexism. If it weren’t, we’d be seeing dozens of news stories about the epidemic of young men binge drinking, blacking out, getting into fights, and raping women. But in our supposedly gender-equal world, pointing out these inconsistencies and double standards means ruining the uto-