There’s been a brilliant discussion about Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti’s Call for Submissions for ‘Yes means Yes’.Firefly, BlackAmazon, Sylvia, Tekanji, Chris Clarke, Sudy, Magniloquence, and Theriomorph are just some of the people who have written about the original Call for Submissions (and when the discussion became about the criticisms of the proposals there were more fantastic posts Sly Civilian, brownfemipower and Ilyka Damen for a start). The discussions has been far-ranging and it’s well worth tracking through the links, following the trackbacks and reading the comment threads.
So it seems a little ridiculous for me to be responding to a revised call for submissions for Yes means Yes. The debate has well and truly gone beyond that, and some women of colour have, rightly, cried enough. But I stopped blogging in a timely manner a few months back, and I have a tangent I want to dart off in. A tangent much informed by the posts above.
There’s a new sentence in there that’s response to criticisms like Firefly’s:
The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.
The new Call for Submissions lists a potential topic for the anthology as:
Beyond consent: state-sanctioned and institutional rape that even the healthiest sexual culture won’t stop
The most obvious problem with this statement, that I might charitably call a wording problem, is that implies that you could have a healthy sexual culture and still have state-sanctioned and institutional rape. I don’t believe that’s true, and I hope that Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti don’t either. But I think this wording problem reveals a problem with analysis. Institutional and state sanctioned rape are part of our sexual culture. 1 Some stories:
A thirteen year old girl in a logging town walked past a police station. She knew the police officer, he worked on search and rescue with her parents. He called her inside. He raped her.
A woman went to the police to make a report about being sexually abused by a relative. The male police officer interviewed her alone in his car, he put his hand on her knee. Then, years later, he rang her up at 1am, told her he’s coming over and demanded sex. He forced her to perform oral sex and left.
Or, we’ll move to another time and place. A woman grew up in a revolutionary movement in exile. She was raped when she was 13 by the men involved in those movement all friends of the family. She grew up the movement won, or sold out, and one of those revolutionary friends of the family became vice-president. She was at his house and he raped her.
Brad Shipton, Jacob Zuma and the Murapara police officer who still has name suppression all wielded institutional power granted by the state and they were also all acquaintances of the women, or girl, that they raped.
Police officers, politicians, employers, border guards, soldiers, priests, and prison guards* have huge power over so many women’s lives. They can demand sex in a way that makes it clear that the answer must be ‘yes’; they can all ignore ‘no’. They can do this to women they know and to strangers. The more power a rapist has over a woman the easier it will be for him to rape her, the more entitled he will feel to her body.
These are not a side category of rape – our understanding of rape must include an understanding of power. I think that means that rape is, by definition, beyond consent. If a man has the power to force a woman to have sex with him, and is prepared to use that power if she does not give consent, then that limits her ability to say ‘yes’ as well as ‘no’.
I might put things in a different order than they did in the call for submissions. I would also say that until we build a society that doesn’t give men the power to rape, female sexual pleasure is always going to be constrained by the fact that our ‘yes’ may be irrelevant.
There’s a Möbius strip involved, obviously, and I do believe that one of the things that give men the power to rape is the belief that women’s sexual pleasure is irrelevant. But it’s not the only place men get power from, and, most importantly, there are intersections between the different sorts of power men have – they can’t be understood in isolation.
* not intended to be an exhaustive list
- In this post I am writing I am writing about women who are raped by men. I didn’t acknowledge that in the original post. I think the circumstances under which the majority of rape against males happens underscores the relationship between rape and power. But that wasn’t what I was exploring in this post [↩]
i think some of the contention is where you start on that mobius strip…i’ll run with an example of one of the critiques.
As i’ve said elsewhere…a culture of healthy sexual pleasure might not in and of itself stop a prison guard from raping an undocumented woman, but it might make the falsification of consent more obvious.
What this depends on…is if we are looking at the prison at all. Do we, the nation as a whole, recognize the woman as fully human, in order to apply that kind of logic?
By the time “healthy sexual culture” has gotten around to helping in this situation, a whole bunch of other concerns have had to play out. And that indirectness is part of the issue.
Now, not every book needs to solve every problem. But like most marketed items, this proposal contained a good bit of hyperbole. To make it more ground breaking, more authoritative, etc…
Sadly, an overly messianic marketing pitch doesn’t inspire confidence that those other intervening issues that lie between “Yes Means Yes” and justice for a raped immigrant will ever get addressed in a meaningful fashion.
One thing I’d criticize in your post… what about male rape victims?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with focusing a post, or a blog, or a book, on men raping women. I’ve done many posts with that focus.
However, when you contextualize your post with the critiques of “Yes Means Yes” — nearly all of which criticize YMY for discussing rape in a way that leaves some classes of rape victim out of the discussion — I find the lack of acknowledgment of male rape victims to be… problematic.
Also problematic is not acknowledging male rape victims in the context of discussing institutional rape (at least in part, I know that’s not the main focus of your post). In the US (which is the only country I’ve read a lot of research about rape for), I’m pretty confident that a large portion of people who are raped while being subject to institutional control are male. (I realize that this is only a “related issue” to your post, not the main topic — talking about institutional rape is not the same thing as talking about institutional power, although they are related. But at the same time, prisoners of both sexes are raped by guards.)
I hope my history of writing about rape, on this blog and elsewhere, will give me credibility when I say: I’m NOT saying that every discussion of rape must focus on men equally, and I’m NOT trying to derail a conversation about harm to women and turn it into one about harm to men. Nor am I suggesting that this post should have been about male victims, or equally about male victims.
My argument is that this particular post, because of the specific context it was written in, would have been better for some acknowledgment that male rape victims exist (even if it was just in a footnote.)
Getting an early start on the misogynist’s bingo card, I see…
I do believe that one of the things that give men the power to rape is the belief that women’s sexual pleasure is irrelevant. But it’s not the only place men get power from, and, most importantly, there are intersections between the different sorts of power men have – they can’t be understood in isolation.
Thanks for that breakdown of those issues, Maia. Your post led me to a real epiphany!
I think that rape, in this instance, accords with many other ways that oppressive forces remove all agency from people. In many ways, the ‘Yes Means Yes’ CFP implied that sexual agency is there for women, if only we get up and claim it. It doesn’t acknowledge the varied obstacles to claiming that agency; it assumes that the devaluation of female pleasure is a universal obstacle for women to claim sexual agency.
And it may be because I watched a documentary about it last night, but I think the rapes of men are important to include in this critique, not least because sexual humiliation and violence have been used so extensively as “interrogation techniques” in the ‘war on terror’. Instances of female soldiers acting as interrogators of male detainees, and using sexuality to undermine their sense of self by playing on the madonna/whore dichotomy, or the use of “homosexual acts” to feminise male detainees, emphasise how homophobia and male rape reinforce patriarchy and the rapability of women. Moreover, when soldiers, some of whom are female, are blamed for having “individual peccadilloes” which inform this torture (as with Abu Ghraib), rather than the high-ranking male officers, there is a huge class and race issue, as well as a gender issue, with the whole situation. Which is something I think the ‘Yes Means Yes’ CFP (both versions) were trying to get at, but didn’t quite achieve.
This is, of course, a war in which, while the bodies of men (the majority of whom have been sold out by more powerful warlords) are tortured and raped in all kinds of elaborate ways, the bodies of women are dismembered and discounted as “collateral damage” — their bodies literally not being counted in casualty lists because it’s assumed that women are not combatants and therefore meaningless.
If a man has the power to force a woman to have sex with him, and is prepared to use that power if she does not give consent, then that limits her ability to say ‘yes’ as well as ‘no’.
I think that part of that power is social, in the sense that a rapist will be enabled to rape without consequences in a society which values him over people who are raped — so things like cross-examination, media discourse, stigma, the virgin/whore dichotomy, which all undermine the agency of raped persons and limit the accountability of rapists for the harm they cause.
I’m not against feminist exploration of sexuality as power, not at all. I think that breaking down the virgin/whore dichotomy and creating a culture in which women are entitled to sex on their own terms can contribute to that. But like you said, the causal chain is something of a Mobius strip. But I think that also means centring rape survivors and their needs on a community level. That requires the stigma of rape to take a sideline to the needs of survivors, as well as the public accountability of rapists.
I think many of the impediments to a “healthy sexual culture” are institutional. For instance, the racism and sexism embodied in the myth of Asian women’s sexual submissiveness arises from American military operations in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Women who did sex work around military bases were stigmatised by their communities at the same time as being exploited by the military-industrial complex.
A similar dynamic is in evidence in relation to the refusal of Japanese president Shinzo Abe to accept responsibility for the rape of “comfort women” during WWII. Women’s sexuality is being shunted around like a political football to serve the needs of a military-industrial complex.
I really doubt that the highly individualistic, atomistic focus of this anthology can handle these issues.
Thanks everyone for your comments.
sly civilian – I think what’s most important, to continue to use my analaogy is that we acknowledge we’re on a moibus strip. Like you say, if a discussion doesn’t acknowledge the other power structures that give men the power to rape women, besides our ideas about sex, then there’s no way to look at the piece as a whole.
Amp – I’ve put a footnote in and when I was writing this post, I did think a couple of times – ‘it’s not just women who are raped, should I include that here?”. Obviously you’re not a point on the anti-feminist bingo card.
But I don’t think I agree that because I was mentioning institutionalised power I have an extra obligation to mention rape against men. To me that kind of collapses everything back down that I was trying to tease out – into ‘aquaintance rapes’ vs. ‘rapes with instiutional power’ where rapes in prison are the same as the cases I outlined.
Firefly – Your post was central in my writing about those cases in that way. Just a few things your comment made me think about: I think your points about war are really important, and that we need to look . What does rape in war time tell us about women who are raped by their sexual partner and vice versa. What does the way power work here tell us about the way power works here. Not because we can’t ever talk about one without the other, and definately not to fit them into a grand unified theory of everything, but because there are always inter-connections
Rape in times of war shows us lots of things, but shows us that anyone can be a rapist, given enough power over another person, and enough belief that the other person is inhuman. That as long as Abu Grahib exists there will always be many Lynnie Englands, and as long as prison exists there will always be rapist guards. Like you say, we need structural solutions to these problems. Although I find it also blame individuals (which isn’t usually part of my politics) and say ‘couldn’t you just stop?’ There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, that’s about demanding accountability from rapists. But it’s not enough by itself, we need to also attack the many sources of power that gives one person the ability to rape another.
Not to deny Ms. England her agency, but it bothers me that I can easily name Lyddie England but had to look up Charles Graner’s name. Graner was in charge of the MPs who were charged with torture at Abu Ghraib, so it seems unjust that England is the one who is iconically associated with torturing prisoners. I feel I should be able to tie this back in to your larger point, but my mind is failing to assemble to argument.
I went through exactly the same though process Charles – except I didn’t even bother to open a new window to find his name.
I think there are probably several different things going on there, including gendered dynamics. But also I think by attaching the blame to the lowest person in the chain of command that sells the idea it’s individual people being ‘bad’ rather than a systemic problem.
Sly Civilian says: “Do we, the nation as a whole, recognize the woman as fully human, in order to apply that kind of logic?” and Maia says: “Rape in times of war shows us lots of things, but shows us that anyone can be a rapist, given enough power over another person, and enough belief that the other person is inhuman.”
I think this is a very important point, who is human and therefore deserves rights. I was always under the impression that the Bill of Rights was asserting the rights of all people, worldwide, not just in America. In other words, although it was crafted in the US and is guiding principles within US borders, there was a belief that all people in all countries should have these rights, whether the other countries recognize that or not, and when they are within our borders we are assuring them that they will be treated the same as US citizens because they do have these rights. But in practice I see that we have fallen away from that ideal. Now more and more Americans are fine with stripping non-Americans of any rights, which is why there is so little outrage over things like Abu Ghraib or the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. They aren’t human and therefore don’t have any rights and we don’t really have to care all that much. Anyway, back to the subject at hand, this was one of the problems with the initial call for submissions, because this kind of thinking has seeped into liberal and feminist discourse too. It was about “our women”, and that’s what made it so easy to not only ignore, but completely forget any other women. What I mean about “our women” is women like Friedman and Valenti, the default white middle class woman. Any other woman isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve rights.
Charles:
Did you remember Sabrina Harman?
It is unjust that England, rather than Graner or Harman “is iconically associated” with the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. In my opinion, this is because of the visual impact of the photos of her. Unlike Harman’s, they show her full diminutive body.
But for those photos, I believe that the involvement of female perpetrators directly in the abuse at Abu Ghraib would have been whitewashed from history, just as the female perps in the Balkan rape atrocities were whitewashed.
“You can only say yes if you can say no.” Hear! hear! Or as I argue at some length in reenchantmentofsex.com (on the basis of personal experience and in direct contradiction to the presumption that women cannot effectively resist male sexual aggression), if my “no” is a word without force, then how much force does my “yes” have? How much meaning can it have to myself — how easy (the next morning?) to wonder if I really meant it or if I was simply “submitting” — if, when push comes to shove, I don’t have any real choice.
Please note; I’m not saying that sexual resistance is necessarily successful . . . or dismissing the existence of real rape victims . . . only rejecting the notion that just because he can beat me in a wrestling match, I am any man’s sexual prey. It ain’t necessarily so. And, yes, it makes a huge difference.
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