What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape

by Sohaila Abdulali

Rape is no different from any other trauma in that way—you can’t make it unhappen. No matter how much you heal, you can never be unraped, any more than you can be undead.

In the US, seven out of ten rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.6

Telling doesn’t always come with a reward: comfort, closure, justice. Sometimes, women tell but everyone acts as if they said nothing at all.

So, when you’ve just been violated so comprehensively, of course it makes sense to hold your pain close where nobody can make it worse.

As Heather told me more and more details of her gang-rape and its aftermath, I heard something very familiar in her voice. I know it well, because I have it myself: a way of telling the story in a smooth arc, matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. It’s what we do to keep it slightly at arm’s length, and it’s a great coping mechanism. It is also rather curative—the more often we tell it, the more manageable it gets, because no matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear. Finally we are left with a sanitized version, with the requisite sprinkling of horror, but nothing to make you too uncomfortable. And we are always making sure not to give you more than you can handle. We are protecting you.

Do women ever lie about being raped? I’m sure some do. But false allegations are extremely rare.7 Women can be psychopaths, too, and liars and opportunists. But anyone who thinks lying about rape is the default for the victims is delusional.

It’s an astounding, insidious motif all over the world—if you can’t take it on the chin (or in the vagina) and get over it quietly, you’re a wimp.

this is a country where the belief that it’s better to die than be raped runs deep—rape victims are called zinda laash: living corpses.

The world can be so foul, so malign. So ready with its ragged, glistening teeth to devour the most vulnerable.

All the victims who hear the past icily whispering in their ears when rape comes to the forefront in the media deserve compassion.

In the US, for all the spilled ink, we don’t have too many passionate Twitter debates about the fact that Native Americans are more than twice as likely to be raped or otherwise sexually assaulted as any other race.22

In New Zealand, Maori women are twice as likely to be sexually abused as children as women of other races.23

In the US, more than ninety percent of people with developmental disabilities are sexually assaulted.

Jaclyn Friedman, a sexual consent educator in Massachusetts, has the wisest words for this, capturing the real worth of parsing out consent: “Affirmative consent changes the morality at the core of sexual interactions.”34

When Egypt’s legislative branch, the Shura Council, was questioned about the mob sexual assaults on women in Cairo during the Arab Spring, General Adel Afifi of the council said, “Women contribute one hundred percent in their rape because they put themselves in such circumstances.”

I call it the Lose-Lose Rape Conundrum. It unwinds like this. If you talk about it, you’re a helpless victim angling for sympathy. If you’re not a helpless victim, then it wasn’t such a big deal, so why are you talking about it?

I don’t think we need to worry too much about the imminent avalanche of ruined men falling from on high. Plenty of them get passes. You need look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“You don’t want to challenge people’s defenses too much,” Sean told me. “If you help them to feel safe, they will open up. Defenses are necessary. They keep people intact. They’re a scaffolding.”

In every culture, we cling to prescribed expectations of masculinity and femininity, usually to everyone’s detriment. This is why trans people are so threatening, and so necessary.

Sharia law requires the eyewitness evidence of four grown men to prove rape.

“Rape is not sex. If you hit someone on the head with a rolling pin, it’s not cooking.”

We’ve all been there—with the guy who just doesn’t get it that We. Are. Not. Interested. Or just doesn’t care because he’s too drunk or too disrespectful or he’s been taught all his life that Dick Conquers All.

We raise our children with such unclear standards that they don’t even have the tools to recognize rape when they see it. We really have a problem if we think it’s easy to confuse sex with rape.

“Imagine how different the world could be if girls and women could be the subjects and not the objects of sex!” Jaclyn said.

violence and desire are often uncomfortably intimate with each other.

In addition, many coping or self-medicating behaviors among trauma survivors are centered on the mouth. Too much drinking, too much smoking, too much sugar, too much eating, grinding teeth—all these directly affect your teeth and gums. So trauma and dental hygiene are bound together in dangerous ways.

In every community, large or small, the person in charge sets the tone. Family culture, school culture, national culture: we look to our leaders to figure out how to think, and what to prioritize. When the president of the country boasts about assaulting women, he might as well be issuing a licence to men that this is an acceptable way to act, and to women that being attacked and dehumanized is their due.

Flowers grow in shit. Donald Trump helped fertilize #MeToo. His election, the Women’s March, the groundswell of rage that grew out of watching his administration’s contempt for anyone but themselves—all this acted as fertilizer for #MeToo.

And I’m not generally a rageful person. It’s just that there is a raw ember of anger in me, usually buried under all my perfectly genuine good cheer and faith in humankind, and sometimes it flares up. I wonder if all survivors have it. It’s anger at the sheer callousness and carelessness of men who rape. Carelessness about someone else’s feelings, carelessness about another human being’s integrity. So careless that you would send a rose the next day, maybe not even knowing that what you did was wrong, or that you have now made another person’s life so much more difficult—for what? Do you even remember later?

Until rape, and the structures—sexism, inequality, tradition—that make it possible are part of our dinner table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes.

…You do not lose innocence when you learn about terrible acts; you lose your innocence when you commit them. An open culture of tolerance, honesty, and discussion is the best way to safeguard innocence, not destroy it.

The woman who does not rebel against patriarchy will be complimented on her beauty, on her femininity, on her loyalty (as a daughter, a wife, a secretary); she will be praised for her endurance, her good sense, her domestic skills, her maternal devotion, her sexual appeal, her caring sacrifice.

people are amazingly skilled at pretending everything is normal when it is not.

The fact that you have confused feelings about the person who hurt you doesn’t make you guilty. It makes you human.

while women make up thirteen percent of the jailed population, they represent sixty-seven percent of the victims of sexual violence by prison staff.

This is not dramatic. It’s just tedious and energy-sapping. Reading about things like the “Cognitive Triad of Traumatic Stress” makes it seem like trauma is always highly colored. But sometimes the reality is closer to the opposite: a draining of color, a detraction from living fully, and an enslavement to weird patterns.

Nobody is immune from rape. But everybody has different tools in his/her/their bag to either cope with it, or to make coping that bit harder. Stones in your pocket make it easier to drown.

Thordis said, “How will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it?

Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different. —Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

Having a child really brings home the reality that there is indeed something much worse than whatever happened to you—someone hurting this small, magnificent person who depends on you.

she had to learn to overcome “the moment of speechlessness, of neuromuscular lockdown”96 that we all know so well when we are suddenly put on the spot.

Men, if you say you’re a feminist, then fuck like a feminist. —Samantha Bee

Zorba the Greek called the totality of life “the full catastrophe.”