Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

by Kate Harding

we live in a culture that claims to abhor rape yet adores jokes about the prisoner who “drops the soap,”

A culture in which laws and norms prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace have been strenuously opposed by folks seeking to protect that fundamental civil liberty: objectifying and humiliating your subordinates.

“In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.”1

The part we’d prefer not to talk about, the part that’s much less “empowering” than praising the twin pillars of feminine vigilance and martial arts, is that there will still be victims in this scenario.

To an extent, this is merely a reflection of harsh reality. You can’t prevent every crime or catch every criminal. A certain number of murders, muggings, and aggravated assaults will also occur each year, and not all of those offenders will be arrested, charged, or convicted. But the difference is that prosecutors won’t say it’s too risky to charge a mugger because the jury will hear that the victim carried her purse in plain sight, and thus vote for acquittal.

Jurors will not tell reporters, “Based on the evidence presented, we believe she killed him, but she says she didn’t, so we’re at an impasse.”

Rape culture encourages us to scrutinize victims’ stories for any evidence that they brought violence upon themselves—and always to imagine ourselves in the terrifying role of Good Man, Falsely Accused, before we “rush to judgment.”

When it comes to rape, if we’re expected to put ourselves in anyone else’s shoes at all, it’s the accused rapist’s.

Don’t get me wrong—I completely understand why many men feel a visceral terror at the thought of being falsely accused of sexual violence, given how theoretically difficult it would be to prove your innocence. But as it is right now, we behave as though we live in a society where innocent men are accused thousands of times a day, while real rapes are few and far between. We swiftly presume that nearly all people who report rape must have some secret, twisted motivation to lie, while ignoring the strong, straightforward motive an actual rapist would have.

We can talk about how that sort of rape exists, and even about how it’s the most common sort, but when pressed, we’re almost never willing to acknowledge that those rapists exist.

At some point in their lives, one in five women and one in seventy-one men in this country will find out what it’s like to be raped.

Women are no more important than any other potential victims, but we are the primary targets of the messages and myths that sustain rape culture. We’re the ones asked to change our behavior, limit our movements, and take full responsibility for the prevention of sexual violence in society. Anyone can be raped, but men aren’t conditioned to live in terror of it, nor are they constantly warned that their clothing, travel choices, alcohol consumption, and expressions of sexuality are likely to bring violations upon them.

Less publicly, women call each other “sluts” and “whores,” doubt each other’s stories, and help perpetuate the myth that if we always dress modestly, drink responsibly, and avoid dark alleys and dangerous-looking men, we’ll be effectively rape-proofed. We are part of the problem.

If she hadn’t been drinking, it would never have happened. If she’s had sex before, how do we know she didn’t want it this time? Why did she go out wearing that, if she didn’t want to have sex? Why was she there at that time of night? “Date rape” is just sex that a woman regrets the next morning. An attractive guy like that doesn’t need to rape anyone. Oh, no, it can’t be him—he’d never do that.

In practice, we tend not to treat it as a serious crime unless there’s simultaneously evidence of another one. If you’re assaulted badly enough to leave physical evidence, or kidnapped, or murdered, you stand a far better chance of people believing your rape was an unspeakable crime. If the only thing that happens, however, is someone decides to use your body without your consent, well—it’s not like he hurt you. It was basically just bad sex, wasn’t it?

Why are we so ready to believe that the rapist was just a well-meaning young man who got confused by “mixed signals”?

Before we can talk about how much we, as a society, detest rape and believe in severe punishment for those who commit it, we need to agree on what “rape” actually entails. What, specifically, makes it a crime?

If the real crime of rape is the violation of another person’s autonomy, the use of another person’s body against their wishes, then it shouldn’t matter what the victim was wearing, if she was drinking, how much sexual experience she’s had before, or whether she fought hard enough to get bruises on her knuckles and skin under her fingernails. What matters is that the attacker deliberately ignored another person’s basic human right to determine what she does with her own body. It’s not about sex; it’s about power.

But if the real crime of rape is sullying a pure woman with the filth and sin of sex—making her “damaged goods” in the eyes of other men—then of course it matters whether she was a virgin, and what kind of situations she willingly “put herself” in, and whether she deliberately risked further physical injury to demonstrate her refusal.

Psychology’s dominant explanation for this extensive and continued sexual violence against women is “miscommunication theory.” This theory has been described [by psychologist Mary Crawford] as “The bandwagon of the ’90s,” and is widely used to explain date rape, stranger rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. . . . As applied to sexual violence, miscommunication theory is used to argue that rape and other forms of sexual abuse are often the outcome of “miscommunication” between partners: he misinterprets her verbal and nonverbal communication, falsely believing that she wants sex; she fails to say “no” clearly and effectively.

Human beings do not have to say the word “no” to be understood clearly in any number of social situations—but when it comes to sex, rape culture tells us that only “no” can possibly mean no. Them’s the rules.

Frith and Kitzinger assembled some focus groups of men and women and did experiments that demonstrated this point. In fact, men have no trouble understanding indirect refusals. Along the way, they also found that young women “characterized explicit refusals of sex as having negative implications for them.” In other words, women rightly perceive that they’ll come across as rude bitches if they refuse a man in no uncertain terms.

researchers led by Kathryn Graham of the University of Western Ontario observed 258 “aggressive incidents involving sexual advances” at Toronto bars and clubs. About one-third of incidents involving male aggressors and female targets (which were 90 percent of all incidents observed) were rated as “intentional aggression.” That is to say, “the initiator engaged in sexual actions that he knew were unwanted.”

Aggression by the remaining two-thirds of initiators was rated as probably intentional—that is, initiators probably knew that their actions were unwanted and unwelcome by the target, but they may have misperceived the situation, despite the invasiveness of the act or refusals by the target. For example, one man seemed to be genuinely surprised when the female target did not find it humorous when he grabbed her blouse and peeked down it.4

The problem is not that some guys don’t get it; it’s that some guys don’t want to hear it. And some guys do it precisely because they like watching women get flustered.

These are things our society normalizes: Women feeling the best way to protect themselves is to walk away and let a predator keep doing his thing, because further confrontation isn’t likely to produce any outcome besides more stress. Men thinking they’re entitled to grope women who are moving their bodies, or wearing revealing clothing, or simply existing in a bar or club. Men knowing they can get away with it, because yes, the broader culture supports—or at least, does precious little to discourage—this behavior.

It was a well-meaning effort to foreground consent, but with its emphasis on verbal permission, it didn’t quite track with how human beings actually behave. Generally, people can tell if their sexual partners are enthusiastic about what’s happening without asking in so many words, and we all know it.

The rules we’re taught are simple: Consent can be conveyed effectively by moans, gestures, movements, eye contact, and facial expressions. If things are going well, expecting people to verbalize that they want the sex to continue is absurd! Conveying a lack of consent, however, must involve desperate hollering, a good-faith attempt at martial arts, and preferably video documentation of same. Expecting people to understand more subtle messages that someone wants the sex to stop—such as “I’m not feeling it tonight” or “I really need to get to sleep” or “Please stop”—is asking too much. What, is the guy supposed to be a mind reader?

But there’s an equally plausible and far more troubling explanation for this insistence that a momentary pause is an unreasonable burden to put on a person having sex: to wit, that those objecting have a good reason to expect their partners, given a window, would verbalize their lack of consent. It’s not that they don’t want to risk killing the mood; it’s that they benefit from the misconception that consent is a murky, complicated thing. If we, as a society, actually expected people to be 100 percent certain they had enthusiastic consent from all sexual partners, then we might not be so quick to accept “She wanted it” as a defense. And where would that leave folks who like to rape?

2010 paper “Young Heterosexual Men’s Use of the Miscommunication Model in Explaining Acquaintance Rape,” psychologists Susan Hansen, Rachael O’Byrne, and Mark Rapley reaffirmed Frith and Kitzinger’s findings that “young men . . . can and do display a sophisticated understanding of subtle verbal and nonverbal means of communicating sexual refusal.”

despite a strong and growing body of evidence against it, “the miscommunication model has been adopted by many contemporary rape prevention programs.”

to the implication that rapists are likely to be arrested, tried, and convicted (most rapists know damn well they won’t be),

When we try to reduce the frequency of rape, this is too often the kind of thing we spend money on: messages to men explaining what they already know, and messages to women that avoiding assault is a matter of constant vigilance, uninterrupted sobriety, and a degree of assertiveness that we know will instantly mark us as arrogant bitches.

“A crucial upshot of this rhetorical strategy,” write Hansen, O’Byrne, and Rapley, “is that the onus for the clear communication of sexual refusal is placed squarely on young women’s shoulders.”

if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?”11 “Drawn into” it. These young men took advantage of a girl on the cusp of puberty, abused her trust, brutalized her body, and we’re all supposed to wonder how they were somehow suckered into doing it?

“These boys,” she said, “have to live with this the rest of their lives.”12

criminal defense attorney Matthew Kaiser, who wrote: “When my son goes to college, I want him not to risk his future whenever he has sex after a party. And, based on the cases I’ve seen, I’m more concerned for my son than my daughter.”15 Kaiser is more concerned that his son will be accused of rape—a problem he can almost certainly avoid by only having sex with conscious, enthusiastic partners—than about the one in five chance that his daughter will be raped. He is more concerned that his son will have sex with a partner who suddenly wakes up and decides, “Hey, after breakfast, I’m going to charge that guy with rape!” than he is about the one in five chance that his daughter will be raped. Father of the year, right there.

Still, the fact that Taylor felt the best strategy for keeping his client out of jail was to paint an eleven-year-old child as the aggressor should give us pause. To say the least.

If we can’t even agree that an eleven-year-old gang-rape victim wasn’t on some level asking to be abused, what hope is there for other victims?

No matter how much we as a culture claim to despise rape and rapists, we just can’t seem to shake the feeling that certain types of people, who engage in certain types of behavior, deserve on some level to be assaulted.

“Rape myths vary among societies and cultures. However, they consistently follow a pattern whereby, they blame the victim for their rape, express a disbelief in claims of rape, exonerate the perpetrator, and allude that only certain types of women are raped”16

“To believe that rape victims are innocent and not deserving of their fate is incongruous with the general belief in a just world; therefore, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, rape myths serve to protect an individual’s belief in a just world.”18

“Understanding the Predatory Nature of Sexual Violence,” David Lisak cites a study in which 120 college men admitted to a total of 483 acts that met the legal definition of rape. Forty-four of those were one-off crimes. The other 439 rapes were committed by 76 serial rapists, who “had also committed more than 1,000 other crimes of violence, from non-penetrating acts of sexual assault, to physical and sexual abuse of children, to battery of domestic partners.”

Maybe rape is really traumatic for a young virgin, but for someone who’s had lots of sex before, what’s one more dick in the hole? But again, the problem is not the sexual aspect of rape, but the willful rejection of another person’s right to decide who may touch, let alone enter, their body. Being penetrated without your consent is a big effing deal.

The fact is at least one in five women and one in seventy-one men will be raped in their lifetimes.

The fact is most rapists are known to their victims.

The fact is rapists rape deliberately and repeatedly, not because they like sex, bu...

The fact is the world is not just, and every day, people with friends and loved ones and jobs and kids and fine reputations commit violen...

The fact is no one de...

“We always go to those parties as a group, and we never leave anyone behind.” Jensen points out to them that “leave no one behind” is the language of soldiers going into battle, not teenagers going to a party.