TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses my own experiences with sexual harassment and rape culture. If articles like this trigger flashbacks or strong emotional responses, please stop reading immediately.
Rape culture is a popular subject of discussion this year and last. In the age of insta-news, more women and their families are being forced to confront a subject that is personal, uncomfortable, and pervasive. The internet is full of stories, rebuttals, and flame wars devoted to this subject as the growing pains of a maturing society finally recognizes that We Have A Problem and women have finally gained enough “equal status” to truly be heard.
I wrote my first story when I was 10 years old. By the time I hit my teenage years, my fiction consisted of a badly written novel and several short stories. One of these shorts was a piece about a female high school student who had a crush on her track coach. I don’t remember what prompted me to write this piece (it might have been the high school teacher who was sleeping with some of my classmates), but this was my first “dark” story. By the end of the story, the girl had been raped by her coach and was seeking revenge. Wanting a review, I gave it to an older male relative who’s literary opinion was highly valued. He had issues connecting with the protagonist and said that this wasn’t really a rape story because the protagonist was crushing on the coach and had “asked for it.”
I carried that review with me for a long time. Even to the point where several years ago, I found myself telling my sister the same thing about one of her protagonists. “If your character is throwing herself at Prince Charming, then no one’s going to be sympathetic when she ends up a victim.” A stupid comment I should never have made. But I grew up in an age where Date Rape wasn’t considered a real problem by law enforcement or the U.S. court system until I’d started college.
I’ve mentioned before that I was bullied as a child. Before puberty, it was rocks being thrown at me, being chased home after school, being hit on the head with school books while sitting in the classroom, and being taunted. “Tarzan” was a particularly favorite taunt. If I’d know the story better, I might have been better prepared to fight back and might even have taken pride in the nickname. As it was, I was just miserable. My peer group made certain I knew how homely and ugly I was, so when puberty struck and the catcalls and wolf-whistles started, I didn’t take them as compliments. It was just another facet of bullying to me, proof-positive that they were making fun of the homely girl in town by pretending that she might be “sexy.” I learned never to look, never to listen, never to jump when someone in that a pickup truck full of grown men driving by as I walked home from school started calling me “Honey” and “Sugar” or making lewd comments.
There was nothing flattering about that kind of attention. I’d been conditioned too well about how my peers saw me. I knew what would happen if I dared believe any of them thought me attractive. The teasing and humiliation would have increased a hundred fold. As a self-defense mechanism, ignoring everything worked pretty well. Much of the bullying ceased (not all of it) because I simply refused to react. One day, when I was in college, my parents saw me coming home from a long walk and didn’t recognize me because I walked like a city girl, shoulders back, head high, confident stride as if I had Some Place To Be. The kind of “self-armored” walk that warned off would-be admirers, my parents said.
I’d been conditioned so well, that when I was harassed by the night manager at a local McDonalds (I worked there as a teenager and this man was one of my three bosses), I didn’t even recognize it for what it was until several years after I’d quit my job. I wish I’d known then what I knew now. I wish work culture in those days recognized the concept of a hostile workplace environment. I’d have burned his ass with one of the other managers by telling them about how he propositioned me on the way to his girlfriend’s apartment (I drove him home after work because his car had broken down) and then gently reminded me on many occasions afterward that he was willing to have sex with me. At the time, I was more shocked that he admitted he had a girlfriend and saw no problems with wanting to have sex with an underage girl (I wasn’t yet 18, folks) while continuing his existing relationship. I never took him up on his offer, but I have always remembered it. And never in a good way.
When I was a teenager, I saw one of the first movies that directly addressed spousal abuse and rape. Made for t.v., because no one trusted it would do well in a movie theater, the movie was a “based on real life” story about a woman who burned her abusive spouse in his bed and then was arrested for murder. This is when I remember the media and politicians and some parents actually starting the rape conversation. About the fight over whether rape only happened with a stranger or whether spousal rape was truly an act of violence or just an extension of one’s marital duties. The advice came thick and fast. “Don’t go out after sunset.” “Don’t walk alone in a bad part of town.” “Watch how you dress.” “Don’t flirt or joke with strangers.” “Always carry pepper spray or an air horn.” “Don’t get into the front seat of a car with a guy, unless it’s one of those new-fangled bucket seats with the parking brake between you and him.”
My father, as part of his “how to act at parties” lecture, made me swear never to pick up a drink once I put it down or accept a drink from another person’s hand. He knew about roofies, even though date rape drugs weren’t common back then. He worried about what someone else would do to me and would do anything to defend me. But a product of the era that raised him, he still gave me all that advice on how to avoid sending mixed signals and protect myself because “boys can’t control themselves.” Words that translate (in modern speak) as “it is solely my responsibility to keep myself safe.” I knew my father would protect me. He made frequent jokes-that-were-not-jokes about what he would do to any boy or man that threatened me, so I would understand I could come to him if something happened.
And yet he became another, albeit unwilling, source from which I learned that “silence is golden.”
Here’s another incident I did not recognize but later felt guilty about until I finally realized it was not my fault. In college, I went to a convention with a group of friends. A pair of the comic artists guests were friends of mine. One afternoon, I volunteered for babysitting duty, taking a trio of kids to the hotel pool while their parents stood in an autograph line. The kids wanted to say hi to our artist friends, so we stopped there on the way to the pool. I was wearing a cover-up over my swimsuit and, as a joke to two good friends who did not see me as anything but a goof, I pretended to flash them in response to an on-going in-joke. We had a good laugh, but as I bundled the kids over toward the elevator, a pair of con-goers decided to chase us down. I didn’t see what was happening until I turned around in the elevator and found one of the artists had bodily thrown himself between the elevator doors. Apparently the con-goers had taken that faux-flash (which they had not seen from the front) as some sort of invitation and decided to invite themselves along for a little party, despite the fact that we didn’t know each other and I had three kids in tow.
At a later job, a male co-worker once rubbed my back during a staff meeting (without invitation or permission). I was wearing khaki pants and a loose polo shirt. There wasn’t anything remotely inviting or sexy about my attire. I had made no jokes, I hadn’t posed at all. I was concentrating on a work problem when he came up beside me and just started rubbing my back as he interjected himself into the conversation. My male boss (who saw it out of the corner of his eyes and then asked me about it) fired the idiot the next day. That job, a small privately owned business, had a no-tolerance policy for that sort of thing. It was the first time I’d seen such decisive action in any environment. Lots of people talk the talk, but how many walk the walk?
The act of protection from someone who witnessed the event and told me that This Was Not Okay gave me new perspective. Because he was right. Silence is not healthy. We do not learn from silence and in remaining silent, we engender and encourage the misdeeds of others. Only by speaking out, only by standing up, can we change the conversation. But even that has its price, and far too often it is the victim that pays that price.
So where does the discussion start? Many people say it starts with teaching boys how to respect girls. But what then is respect? Many of the people I know confuse “respect” with “gender roles.” What some see as harmless children’s awards ceremony others see in a different light. Girls are meant to look pretty, attract boys, and marry well. Boys are meant to pursue girls, show off their physical prowess, and prove their manliness. By defining these gender roles, one might be encouraging later teachings that form the basis of rape culture.
Literature doesn’t help with these perceptions. It’s a fact of life that rape is used as a tool of war to break women (and humiliate their families), but lately I see a lot of authors using and perhaps overusing this fact in their books. Female heroes are denigrated by their villainous counterparts, called “slut,” “whore,” and threatened with sexual violence. Movie characters do much the same thing. And in real life, when women dare to touch the glass ceiling or form an opinion someone disagrees with, many people respond with threats of rape and physical violence as if this is a proper method of disagreement.
So why is it women are treated to threats of sexual violence in both fiction and real life, where “manly” men are not? And has anyone else noticed the increasing prevalence of such sexual threats against openly gay men? It says something about how cultures view women when the act of humiliating other men (gay or straight) is to assign them the social status of a woman as part of that culture’s social stigma.
A series of culture wars are being fought in our lifetime. The Civil Rights battle of the 1860′s and 1960′s is not yet finished. Gays and Lesbians are fighting their own disenfranchisement. Women are still struggling for equal pay and equal jobs, only recently obtaining the right to go into combat. And on top of it all, we have the Rape Culture battle, just hitting its stride.
All these battles have one thing in common: a struggle for respect and decency. And all of these battles can be won the same way, by teaching our children about respect and decency. But we should not teach them how to be victims. We should not put the onus of other people’s behavior on our children’s shoulders. Every individual should take responsibility for decisions made, good or bad, instead of blaming others behavior for our own lack of self-control. The first step to changing the discussion is to speak out. So this is me, speaking out. Will you speak out too?
