Several years ago, the world was shocked to learn that Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old woman living in a small town in the south of France, had for a decade been drugged by her husband and raped by at least 70 men that he recruited online. It was, by almost all measures, a uniquely horrifying case. But less than two years after Pelicot’s husband and his accomplices were found guilty, we are now finding out how not-unique crimes like his are. A blockbuster CNN exposé published last month investigated the international network of websites, chat rooms and Telegram channels on which men trade tips and offer advice to one another about how best to render their wives and partners unconscious — and on which they document themselves, often via livestream, raping them.
The use of the phrase “rape culture” was, it turned out, what was required to make mainstream media outlets see that its history of sympathizing with young male perpetrators with bright futures was no longer acceptable.
The men who do this are threading an unnervingly specific needle: They don’t want the women they drug and assault to know that they are being drugged and assaulted, which is why they often use the waking hours following assaults to gaslight their victims: One of the women who spoke to CNN spoke of waking up while her husband assaulted her; he insisted that she was on too much medication and had imagined it.
They do, however, want to be seen. They want to prove that their victims are genuinely unconscious, so they perform “eyelid checks” to show their audience that nothing is being faked. They want to make their assaults interactive, so they take suggestions and instruction from their viewers. The slack, unmoving bodies of their wives and partners are props in a performance that they put on for other men.
In Camille Paglia’s first book, “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” she wrote floridly of the importance of honoring maleness in its natural state of savage, brutal beauty: “Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it.” Refusing to honor the ungovernable, animalistic essence of maleness, Paglia claimed, was bad for society. For culture. For civilization. And feminism was such a boner-killer, she wrote, given that it “does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.”
Over the years, this quote has echoed in my mind. I was reminded of it when the high-school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, documented themselves raping a passed-out classmate, joking about her, jeering at her. Steubenville was the first truly mediated rape case to play out on a national stage: The way it was reported, discussed and processed by the residents of Steubenville made it a case study of rape culture, a concept that until then had been mostly isolated within academic writing. And the use of the phrase “rape culture” was, it turned out, what was required to make mainstream media outlets see that its history of sympathizing with young male perpetrators with bright futures was no longer acceptable.
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I was reminded of it when Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was released, only to be waved away by the then-candidate as “locker-room talk” and all but erased mere weeks later. I was definitely reminded of it during the clown show that was Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when I was just one among legions of women haunted by Christine Blasey Ford’s reference to “the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two [men], and their having fun at my expense” — a memory encoded, “indelible in the hippocampus,” that rang terribly familiar, calling back to adolescences pocked with unpleasant experiences that were just a joke. The sexualized humiliation of women (and other men, for that matter, particularly if they were perceived to be insufficiently masculine in appearance or manner) was unbecoming but broadly tolerated: an unremarkable marker of boys-will-be-boys socialization in which men performing their status to signal kinship with other men. “He was a sloppy drunk,” a fellow Yale graduate said of Kavanaugh. “He was more interested in impressing the boys than impressing the girls.”
When I wrote about Kavanaugh at that time, I was thinking mostly about the pop culture of my youth in the 1980s, which coincided with the advent of VCRs and movie rentals. Movies about teenagers were, inevitably, stories about sexual humiliation that involved young men invading young women’s privacy, distributing their passed-out bodies to nerds like door prizes, tricking women into sex while others watched. I got a lot of emails following that piece: Some were from women whose own hippocampi bore indelible marks even 50 or 60 years after the fact. A few were from men who confessed how long it took them to recognize the impact of the bras they’d snapped, the rumors they’d spread and the entitlement to the bodies of their peers they’d had. And more than a few were versions of this: “Rape culture doesn’t even exist, you stupid c*nt.”
But it does. It always has. Rape culture is an assemblage of ideas, beliefs and received wisdom: That male sexual aggression is natural, that heterosexual sex is something that men enact on — rather than with — women; that women make themselves rapeable by flirting or drinking or wearing revealing clothing. Guardian columnist Moira Donegan characterizes rape culture as “a whole complex of attitudes: attitudes about women’s status, attitudes that eroticize inequality or violence, attitudes about sexuality that reference, naturalize and glamorize rape even when they do not themselves amount to or grant permission for actual forcible sexual penetration.”
Those who contest its existence often do so because of how it sounds to them: Accusatory, broad-brush, man-hating. Take the Threads user who just the other day responded to what he saw as an excess of discourse around the CNN exposé with a bizarre suggestion that rape is only a problem for women who think it’s a problem. His post suggests that the women he sees “living beautiful lives, raising amazing families, and loving great men” haven’t read the CNN article because “their world is not organized around harvesting reasons to hate men. They are living. They are building. They are loving.” (“It’s giving ‘the Covid cases will go down if we just stop testing for it,” replied another user.)
Rape culture is an assemblage of ideas, beliefs and received wisdom: That male sexual aggression is natural, that heterosexual sex is something that men enact on — rather than with — women.
The criticism of the phrase, Donegan reckons, has centered on the fact that “it implicated people who were not committing rape in a kind of moral responsibility for rape.” But she believes that’s actually the term’s strength: It doesn’t suggest that everyone is a rapist, but it underscores that rape is a logical outcome in a society where half the population is treated as not fully human —treated as currency that powerful men share with other powerful men; treated as not deserving of full autonomy; treated as collateral damage in battles for status and supremacy.
In fact, we are all implicated in rape culture. That’s what the “culture” part means: It’s endemic, entrenched, so much a part of the worlds we live in that recognizing it can be a challenge. Women are not immune to perpetuating it: Teen girls laughed along with their male peers in Steubenville about a passed-out girl being “so raped right now.” Plenty of women doubt other women’s stories of rape because they know the accused, he’s never been like that with them, and they just can’t picture him being like that. The former attorney general of the United States flat-out refused to acknowledge the line of Jeffery Epstein’s survivors who appeared, in person, at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on oversight that followed the DOJ releasing files in which the names of Epstein’s victims were unredacted.
There has to be a language that can be used to talk about the fact that Telegram channels with tens of thousands of users exist for men to use as a space for performing masculinity and domination over the women they claim to love, to whom they portray themselves as loving husbands. There has to be a frame for the frequency with which men enact violence on the bodies of women to connect with other men. The phrase “rape culture” makes people uncomfortable — but so would any other term that means the same thing. Because yes, it is uncomfortable. That’s the point. And there is no way to read the CNN investigation, or accounts of the Pelicot trial, or the experiences of women exploited and humiliated by powerful men and not be reminded that, as a society, we have long treated sexual violence against and humiliation of women as if it is normal — either because we believe it is, or because the cost of speaking up about it is too steep.
“I no longer engage with people who want to have an argument about whether rape culture is real,” a friend who, like me, has a teenage son, said after I apologetically texted her a link to the CNN piece. “Not in my actual life, not online, not anywhere. But I do want the people, because it’s not only men, who argue that it isn’t to sit with themselves and ask ‘If you know that you would never rape anyone, why is it so important to you [that] rape culture doesn’t exist?’”
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