Not-Rape

Right before Christmas Latoya Petersen over at racilious wrote a heart-breaking and wrenching essay about the "not-rape" epidemic. Not-rape is a term she uses that is has been described in other places as gray rape. Both are ways to try to describe a sex act that is not the held-at-gun-point-stranger-rape but is still a coercive and morally wrong event. All week the various jezebels have been responding including Tatiana and I wanted to share this paragraph:

"And as Peterson's essay illustrates so aptly, there are a million male behaviors that are not so much rape as rape spectrum, or rape-ish, or not rape by degree instead of by kind, an entire constellation of potential violations, that almost every sentient woman has more than enough reason by experience to be afraid of. We are taught to put such extraordinary faith in such ridiculous talismans — I can go jogging if it's still light, I can walk these three blocks if I hold my keys out, I can leave my drink unattended while I go to the bathroom if I put a napkin over it, I can trust him if he's so-and-so's friend — that, if we stopped with the bargaining for a minute and actually thought about the chances we have to take to live as men take for granted or to try and have some semblance of trusting romantic relationships, we might never leave the house again. Refusing the fear — walking home alone when the buses have stopped running, doing anything at all alone after dark to make the point that you can — doesn't feel entirely liberating, either. It mostly feels stupid. (I still do these things, sometimes, because if I'm going to feel putting-a-napkin-on-my-drink stupid, I might as well occasionally feel walk-home-drunk-alone stupid.) How to contend with this fear is, I am convinced, the major question of 21st century womanhood."

Bold is mine. What Petersen and Tatiana and all of the Jezebels and really any modern woman are attempting to figure out is how to be alive in this day and age. There is such judgment attached to rape: "she shouldn't have been drinking alone." "She shouldn't have opened the door." "She shouldn't have been out so late." "She shouldn't have dressed like that." If you actually think about it, it is impossible to live fully in the world without breaking the rules of how-to-not-get-raped. If you are out, you are lucky if a boy will even walk you to the train station and then its probably because he wants kisses (let alone accompanying you all the way home with out the expectation of sex.)* I am a solitary person and sometimes I don't want to be out and about with a posse. I like dressing pretty and wearing make-up and will scream at you if you cat-call me on the street (not helpful, I know, but it makes me feel better.) And yet all of these are things that if I were to press charges against an assailant would be used against me in court. I know this because it has happened to other people. My knee-high boot wearing/ drinking alone/ walking home late habits are asking for it.
And what is so frustrating to modern day feminists is that there's not really anything we can do about it. Its cultural, not legal. We can not rally and protest the way our grandmothers did to get suffrage. Its long slow work with lots of backsliding and infighting. Is girls gone wild good or bad for modern feminism? How about burlesque? Jezebel? Nothing is really clear except that we live in a culture where rape is, if not acceptable, common and commonly perpetrated and elicits very little outrage unless it is held-at-gun-point-stranger-rape. The very fact that to talk about other, more common forms of rape we have to give it a new name "not rape" "gray rape" is horrible. But I don't really know what else we can do. Put our faith in ridiculous talismans I guess. And hope that luck is on our side.


*Not that I think men should be required to walk their friends home. I'm just stating that not-walking-home-alone is rarely an option.