I am on record as saying that I dislike many of the uses of the expression “rape culture”. Mostly what I dislike is how it’s overused to the point of trivialization and dilution of meaning. I deeply (and I mean, deeply) dislike words like “rapey”. It simultaneously dissolves the gravity of rape and turns the word into a “cutified” neologism that trivializes it. Sexist and/ or misogynist actions can be part of how rape culture asserts itself within our communities but they are not “rapey”. Songs are not “rapey”. They can be offensive. They can advance the normalization of rape culture but your ears or your politics cannot be raped. An email can be threatening and even illegal (if it contains threats, for instance) but your computer will not live with PTSD after receiving it. What I am trying to say is, language evolves and I fully understand the need to come up with new words to describe our realities. However, I am not on board with language use that trivializes the severity of rape.
I am also not onboard with whitewashed and non intersectional approaches to rape culture. Case at hand: London School of Economics (LSE for short). Now, LSE has a long standing history of being awful. Let’s review some of their worst contributions to social science of the past couple of years:
– LSE researcher writes a disgusting diatribe about how Black women are “ugly”
– LSE students play a drinking game called “Nazi Ring of Fire” that required them to “salute the Fuhrer”
– LSE publishes a study about the “myth” of Women’s ‘double shift’ of work and domestic duties claiming women “prefer” low paid jobs to actual careers. Also, women want to “marry up”.
So now, this stronghold of intersectional feminism is back at it again, this time with LSE Law’s Inaugural Event in its ‘Debating Law’ series. The event featured four panelists and if I have to sum it up based on this account published on Feminists @ Law website, it was a victim blaming extravaganza. There were calls to “study the behaviors of victims”; Barbara Hewson, one of the panelists, referred to rape as “an ideology of sexual victimization”; and this gem:
In response to a question about the importance of consent, Hewson said the feminist idea of active or enthusiastic consent turns consent into a failure to take care, and therefore makes rape more about negligence than criminal law.
Chief Crown Prosecutor for CPS North West England, Nazir Afzal was also part of the panel. According to the account, he disagreed with the above remarks and had this to say:
Afzal argued that rape is about control and power rather than sex.
This, this is at the core of my problems with many white feminist analysis of rape culture. This idea that rape is not about sex. The statement above comes from a man so I won’t even engage that context. However, this is a common idea I’ve often seen pushed as an explanation of rape culture. I agree wholeheartedly that rape is about control and power but it is also about sex. It is about sex especially, specifically in how often Women of Color are victims of rape. For the past five hundred years, Women of Color have been seen as simultaneously oversexualized and not human. Black and Latina women have been stereotyped as sexually available and “eager temptresses” whose bodies were supposed to be at the service of male sexuality. When a Latina child like Cherice Morales was denied justice, even in death, it was all about sex (and of course, sex supported by the power afforded by a white supremacist, heteronormative patriarchy). However, to say that rape is never about sex is a disservice to centuries of our histories and the ways our bodies have been commodified and made sexually available. It is a white washed erasure of the normalization of the sexual violence that the women in our communities have had (and continue) to endure on a daily basis. I will not argue that rape is about control and power but we cannot deny the way white supremacy has sexualized our bodies while pushing the idea that we “want it”. During slavery, Black women could not be raped. During the conquista (and in certain parts of South America, even now), indigenous Latin American women could not be raped. The sexual violence was not considered rape because only white women were acknowledged as “human” and hence, only white women could be raped. The sexual violence suffered by Women of Color was merely “sexual availability”. Those rapes were about male sexual gratification; power and control were just the tools to achieve it. That is the history we have to contend with. To deny us the way our bodies have always been at the service of this male gratification is to deny us the possibility of liberation.
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