What exactly is rape culture?
In the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Senate hearings, and the 2018 Governor General’s fiction award fiction going to Sarah Henstra for “The Red Word,” the term “rape culture” is increasingly finding its way into mainstream discourse. But what is rape culture, exactly?
First: the male sexual predator’s behaviour is often minimized because he’s otherwise “a good guy,” or forgiven because alcohol and/or youth were factors, or explained away by emphasizing his victim’s behaviour as somehow inviting assault.
We make excuses for these predators, because rape has been normalized as an unfortunate, occasional outcropping of masculinity. The responsibility, therefore, falls on girls and women to somehow avoid rape, much in the same way it’s a person’s responsibility to dress warmly for cold weather.
After a woman accused Jacob Hoggard — lead singer in the Canadian pop band Hedley — of sexually assaulting her in his hotel room, a friend of mine said, “Well, what was she expecting?” Perhaps she was expecting that she could make out with him, and if she wanted to stop there, he would allow it. This is too quaint an idea for rape culture.
So we train girls and women in rape avoidance. In his book “The Macho Paradox,” Jackson Katz, a longtime gender educator, recounts what happens when he asks men in an audience what they usually do to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted. After an uncomfortable silence and a joke or two, a man usually puts his hand up and says something like, “Nothing. I don’t think about it.”
Then he asks the women what they do, and hands go in the air immediately:
Hold my keys as a potential weapon.
Look in the back seat of the car before getting in.
Carry a cellphone.
Don’t go jogging at night.
Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don’t put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured.
Own a big dog.
Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man’s voice on my answering machine.
Park in well-lit areas.
Don’t use parking garages. Don’t get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route home from work. Watch what I wear.
Don’t use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don’t wear headphones. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime.
Don’t take a first-floor apartment. Go out in groups.
Own a firearm.
Meet men on first dates in public places.
Make sure to have a car or cab fare. Don’t make eye contact with men on the street.
Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.
Katz’s anecdote demonstrates the depth and inequity of rape culture: women are being raised with an exhaustive list of things they should do to protect themselves from being raped. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t really work (there are 460,000 sex assaults in Canada every year, and 97 per cent of rapists walk free) because it doesn’t solve the real problem, which is that men even consider rape in the first place. How does it become an option in their minds?
In order to crack the foundations of rape culture, we have to recognize it even in unexpected places. A couple of months ago, my 13-year-old son looked up from what he was reading — a dystopian sci-fi novel called “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife,” in which women are sex and reproduction slaves. “Once again,” he said resignedly, “another book where the men are evil.”
I can’t watch “The Handmaid’s Tale” series. I just can’t. Nor have I watched “Westworld,” in which men are let loose in a theme park to rape and beat human-looking female robots. I won’t read “Vox,” in which women are only allowed to speak a few words a day. Nor “An Excess Male,” nor “Before She Sleeps,” nor “Hazards of Time Travel” ... all recent dystopian novels about widespread enslavement of women. Many have called them feminist texts because they warn us about the fragility of women’s equality, and the necessity for vigilance over protecting women’s rights. But I often wonder if these stories are part of rape culture, because they presume that men will do such things, as if it were normal and natural — inevitable, even. In our cultural imagination, as soon as the current cultural order is dismantled, men take control and brutally subjugate women.
As I write this, my six-year-old son is cuddling with his 12-year-old sister on the living room sofa while they listen to the musical “In The Heights” (his choice). He’s reaching up to honk her nose, and she’s laughing and pinching his toes. He chortles and wraps his arms around her waist. What is the distance between this and manhood? What kind of terrain will he travel?
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communication; her work has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for 25 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.