Friday, January 14, 2011

White Men Can't Rape: A cultural, racial, gender destruction and class-action approach to understanding what rape is and does

image is from here

What follows is from a blog devoted to global politics and philosophy, in part. Please click on the title below to link back. The post that follows was written by one of the contributors to that group blog, and his name is listed as Pablo K. Below his post, I'll offer some commentary.

Intimate Dissidence: Assange, Foucault and (Feminist) Rape Discourse









The issues raised here make me think about how we conceive of rape primarily as an act done by an individual against another individual, and the harm is determined by how the act effects the person making the rape charge. To me, this is a rather apolitical and ineffective, or pro-rape, way of even approaching the issue of rape in the U.S., especially, but across the West and beyond.

I begin elsewhere, and my analysis and understandings of rape come from experience enduring sexual assault, listening to women describe their experiences being assaulted, and reading many writings by radical feminists about rape, including, quite extensively, the work of Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

One of MacKinnon's points about rape-as-sex-and-violence is that to only view it as an act of violence is to not understand why it results in an orgasm for virtually all men who succeed in committing it. Beating up women doesn't tend to produce this effect in male batterers. Nor does verbally denigrating or harassing women. This doesn't make it only-sex or only-violence for the victim. It does, certainly, make it sexual violence for the perpetrator. And sometimes 'just sex' as far as he's concerned, particularly when he finds ways to achieve rape without using physical force, such as by drugging the victim first, into unconsciousness. (See, for example, MacKinnon, "Sex and Violence: A Perspective", Feminism Unmodified.)

Another argument MacKinnon discusses is the problem of resting rape law on the concept of consent. Because there are far too many cases of rape wherein the very initiation of the violent act triggers dissociation or freezing such that verbal objection or physical fighting off is not possible. To require a "no" be spoken to affirm whether rape occurred is simply not to appreciate how domination and threat, and violation and humiliation, all works to silence people. This brings us to the criteria of an enthusiastic welcoming of the act. But even this standard doesn't account for how we feel we need to behave to appease someone who might kill us. If a man shows up with a gun at someone's home doorway, they may welcome him in, to avoid conflict and allow him to take what he wants and leave me alive. Why people thing it is different with rape is beyond me. When I see footage of bank robberies, it sometimes appears as if the teller is loading the cash into the bag rather enthusiastically. (See MacKinnon, "Rape: On Coercion and Consent", Toward a Feminist theory of the State; "Unequal Sex: A Sex Equality Approach to Sexual Assault", Women's Lives, Men's Laws.)

Might we consider a standard of consent dependent on the group of people most targeted being not at all traumatised by sex or gender to begin with? We must add to the conditions in which choice-making is meaningful a social reality in which women are not targeted by men for repeated and systematic unwelcomed and unwanted sexual advances, and a sexual life for women not predicated on being sexually available to men at some point in one's life? Might we add to the conditions for meaningful choice-making the lack of economic coercion? Otherwise we have specific groups of women, such as prostitutes and performers in pornography who, by definition or by the conditions in which she finds herself, cannot be found to have been raped. We must also require that military warfare and racist genocide not be happening, because how can we determine the political nature of an act that occurs in a context of social trauma and political terror?

When I contemplate the horror that is rape, I think about a class-specific act of terrorism against a group of people--terrorism by men against women and girls. That men also rape men and boys doesn't take away from my recognition of rape as an act of terrorism by men against women because men and boys who are raped are made to feel "feminised" by the rape. In prison, someone who is raped may be called the rapist's b*tch--a gendered and derogatory term if ever there was one. When boys are raped, they are made to feel less masculine for having been raped, are made to question the state and status of "their sexuality" meaning their presumed heterosexuality. If they are not heterosexual, before or after the sexual assaults, they are also seen to be "feminised". We might note that when women and girls are raped they are made neither more masculine nor less masculine, nor less feminine for having survived it. What they are made is female in the political sense. They are made into girls and women through both the fear of rape and the reality of it. The fear and the terror, and the harm and the intrusion, all combine to constitute the conditions in which girls and women live and negotiate social and intimate life.

The law, if it were to deal with rape for what it is, would treat every rape as a class action suit, by women against men, by a terrorised and socially and sexually subordinated group (women, girls, females), by a ruling class of terrorists (men, males, and sometimes boys). In this way we move beyond the liberal individualism that civil liberties exist to protect and into the realm of civil and human rights, necessarily founded a class-based analysis of harm. Hate may or may not be present in the mind of the rapist: he may be more callous and oblivious to any taken woman's humanity than actively loathing of her being; if pornography does its job to infuse misogynist propaganda-as-sexiness into the man's mind and body, he may not realise that his roughness or callousness is being registered by her as negative at all. And if she feels hated by him after the assault, and he claims to love her, and explains in a court of law that there was some miscommunication, whose subjectivity and truth matters more to a jury and judge?

We know that the courts are notoriously lenient on white men with money and even more notoriously punitive to men and women of color who are poor. So if the rapist is white, male, and rich, he's likely to be found innocent or to make a plea deal to keep himself out of that awful prison system where all those poor Black and Brown people are systematically placed. This says nothing at all about whether he's committed an act of sexual violation. It only tells us that, by and large, legally speaking, rich white men can't rape. We also know the courts cover their eyes not only to rape as patriarchal atrocity on the class level, but to rape as part of racist-misogynist atrocity against women of color on the cultural level. (See especially Andrea Smith, "Sexual Violence as a Tool of Genocide", Conquest.)

To pretend any rape is only impacting one person traumatically is to not understand the political meaning and function of rape. I hope the law will attend to this as a culture- and class-based act of domination and group destruction of women based on sex at least, but also often on race. What a court empowered to make justice structurally and socially real must stop protecting time and again are the rights, power, liberties, and entitlements of a ruling class of rich white men, or white men, or men, to terrorise, violate, and dominate a subordinated class, women. The objective here is not to dismiss the harm done to any individual by any given rape, but to comprehend and apprehend it as a cultural-social-political act, not a primarily individual-psychological one, even while it is that too.

1 comment:



Yet again another attempt this time by Narnia Bohler-Muller to make the claim that men's deliberate and calcuated sexual violence perpetrated against females because we are female is not male sexual violence against women. Instead it is x, y or z and always the focus is on men's interests and men's rights.

On no account must men as a group and/or as individuals be held accountable for their continued violence against women.

The widespread belief that men must continue their pseudo sex right to women is one of the central tenants of male domination over all women and girls. This is why all too commonly rape is not seen as 'rape' but just normal male heterosexual expression. We can disregard how female survivors feel/react because women are not human and hence their only value lies in servicing men's sexual demands.

This is why the law continues to narrowly define what is and is not 'rape' because women must not be accorded the legal right of sexual ownership of their bodies or even the right of sexual autonomy.

As MacKinnon rightly says, why does rape commonly result in orgasm for the male rapist? Answer is because most male rapists target women they know and these men believe it is their innate right to have sexual access to the woman and a man does not have to consider the fact his target is a human being - instead she is a disposable sexual service station, existing solely to serve his penis and sexual demands.

Rape becomes not rape but just a disagreement or 'miscommunication.' Many men believe that women exist solely to sexually serve them and therefore any woman who denies them sexual access to their body has to be forced. But this is not rape - not it is just enactment of male sex right to women.

Where does this view of women as men's disposable sexual service stations come from? Why the widespread belief that men are the default human and women are what? Not human of course.

So this is why whenever yet another well-known male has been charged with rape by a woman immediately the focus is on her and never his actions/claims/behaviour. It is imperative men's sex right to women must never be curtailed or challenged because only men must be the ones to define what is and is not rape. This is why male on rape is viewed as far, far worse than male on female rape because the first is real rape but the second is 'not rape' just normal male sexual domination over women.

Which is why there is the widespread belief that raped males lose their maleness and become 'women.' What does this say about women's human status? Answer women don't have a human status - they are just men's disposable sexual service stations!

Women continue not to be accorded the right of sexual autonomy because this right is for men only and because it is male only this means men are the ones who define what is and is not rape and whenever a male rapes another male he has supposedly turned the male victim into a 'dehumanised female.' Never, ever must the focus be on how male sexuality continues to be promoted as male sexual domination and control over another person who is seen as having no rights and guess who this person is primarily? Why she is that dehumanised sexual service station of course - not a female human being.

Men because they are male do not have to accord women any sexual rights or autonomy, instead the focus is always on men's rights,men's interests and men's right of sexual access to any female.