I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape

by Robin Warshaw

in 12 of the male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definitions of rape or attempted rape.

In fact, the research in the Ms. survey shows that women who have been raped by men they know are not appreciably different in any personal traits or behaviors than women who are not raped.

behavior is so common in our male-female interactions, rape by an acquaintance may not be perceived as rape,” says Py Bateman, director of Alternatives to Fear, a Seattle rape-education organization.

A significant number of teenage girls suffer date rape as their first or nearly first experience of sexual intercourse (see Chapter 8) and most tell no one about their attacks. Consider Nora, a high school junior, who was raped by a date as they watched TV in his parents’ house or Jenny, 16, who was raped after she drank too much at a party. Even before a girl officially begins dating, she may be raped by a schoolmate or friend.

Women especially often need to find a reason why the rape happened to a certain woman and why it could not happen to them. But there are no hard and fast reasons. Witness the experiences of these four very different women, who represent the four most common categories of acquaintance-rape victims: teenagers, college students, young single working women, and older women.

The man is taught to look upon his actions on a date as a carefully constructed strategy for gaining the most territory. Every action is evaluated in terms of the final goal — intercourse. He continually pushes to see “how far he can get.” Every time she (his date) submits to his will, he has “advanced” and every time she does not he has suffered a “retreat.” Since he already sees her as the opponent, and the date as a game or a battle, he anticipates resistance. He knows that “good girls don’t,” and so she will probably say “no.” But he has learned to separate himself from her and her interests. He is more concerned with winning the game. Instead of trying to communicate with her, he attempts to pressure her into saying “yes.” Every time she submits to his will, he sees it as a small victory (getting the date, buying her a drink, getting a kiss, or fondling her breasts). He plays upon her indecisiveness, using it as an opportunity to tell her “what she really wants,” which is, in fact, what he wants. If her behavior is inconsistent, he tells her that she is “fickle” or “a tease.” If he is disinterested in her desires and he believes that she is inconsistent, he is likely to ignore her even when she does express her desires directly. When she finally says, “no,” he simply may not listen, or he may convince himself that she is just “playing hard to get” and that she really means “yes.” With such a miserable failure in communication, a man can rape a woman even when she is r...

Indeed, many men only ask a woman out after they’ve decided that they’d like to have sex with her, whereas many women view dates, especially the first few dates, as opportunities to socialize and learn more about the man.

conditioning helps produce “safe” victims—women who react with denial, dissociation, self-blame, and rejection of their own misgivings as acquaintance rape threatens, who cannot fight back during the rape or report it to the police afterwards, and who, often, become victims again later.

Women who were sexually victimized as children or adults but who had not resolved their feelings about those incidents may now suffer a strong reaction to the earlier victimizations as well as to the present one.

For some women who have been raped by men they know, rape-trauma syndrome does not emerge until years later, much the way that posttraumatic stress disorders have been shown to emerge a decade or more after the fighting ended for Vietnam veterans. “I put such a tight lid on all my feelings that I didn’t have to deal with any feelings. They were all buried very, very deep,” says Connie, a 35-year-old Illinois woman who was raped at 19 by a man she met at a local hangout.

and comfort shut to them. The reason is simple: Acquaintance-rape victims aren’t believed or are blamed for what happened, even by those who are close to them.

What differentiates men who rape women they know from men who do not is, in part, how much they believe the dogma of what most boys learn it means to be male—“macho” in the worst sense of the word. Some researchers describe this variable as the “hypermasculinity” factor. Others have dubbed the men who embody this behavior “male zealots.”