An open letter to Feministing
I tried to post a comment at Feministing but, as usual, was bitterly rebuffed by Typekey, which thinks I’m a Soviet spy. So here’s the question I want to ask about this post:
What is the empirical foundation for the claim that “creating a culture which values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape”?
Every study on rape that I’m aware of links it to male dominance and low female status. It’s an expression of misogyny and control, not a case of crossed signals about sexual enjoyment.
Anthropological analysis shows that levels of rape and other male violence on women are strongly correlated to the level of male dominance in a society (Sanday 1976, for example). Repression of women’s sexuality is also a symptom of male dominance, of course, but any correlation between that and rape is secondary. Counter-examples prove the point. The Minangkabau, for example, are quite restrictive of women’s sexuality, but rape is virtually unknown because women in their society have extremely high status (they traditionally refer to their culture as a matriarchy). On the other hand, there have been male-dominated societies where female sexual pleasure was assumed to be normal and good (no puritanical body anxiety at all), but rape was still common because women’s status was very low.
Valuing female sexual pleasure is a good thing. But how is it going to stop rape? The corollary to your thesis would seem to be that men commit rape because female sexual pleasure isn’t valued. And I would really like to know what the evidence is for that.
21 Responses to “An open letter to Feministing”
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Mary Tracy9 says:
THANK YOU!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’ve been feeling that something wasn’t right about this idea but I couldn’t put it into words. I think you have hit the nail on the head. I’ve been suspecting for some time that the girls at Feministing are too eager to show themselves as the “cool kids”, trying to move as far as they can from the “ugly feminist” stereotype and as a result they are (almost) buying this crap about “raunchy and kinky” being empowering and the like.
Don’t know if you’ll agree with this general view of them but still, I am with you on this topic 100%.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:21 pm EST -
The Ghost of Violet says:
My reaction was much sharper to the first call for submissions. I don’t know if you saw the first one, but it was amazing. It included statements such as “empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to ending rape culture,” and promised the book would “fly in the face of conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex.” My response (on another board) read, in part:
When I saw the call for submissions for this a few weeks ago, I went into shock…It didn’t help, perhaps, that I’d just been reading about the rape victims in Congo, some of whom have been raped with 2×4s and maimed so badly their plumbing no longer works. There’s a picture of them in the Times sitting there in the hospital ward, most of them with colostomy bags. Somehow I don’t think “better porn” would have stopped what happened to them.
Conventional feminist wisdom is not that “rape has nothing to do with sex.” Conventional feminist wisdom — which happens to be correct — is that rape is about using sex acts to dominate and abuse women…
The way to dismantle rape culture is to make women human beings. Rape doesn’t happen because of hangups about women’s sexuality. It happens because of men’s sexuality, because men are taught to hate women from birth, because the average rapist is a walking psychosexual trainwreck of misogyny.
The revised call for submissions is much improved, and I’m glad to see it. But I still think the central premise is fallacious. I would really like to know if Jessica, et al, have any empirical basis for their thesis. Because it just doesn’t jibe with what I know about rape or male-female power dynamics across human culture.
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Monika says:
First of all, thank you for blogging on a site that allows one to post a comment without becoming a member.
Now, onto my comment…
I agree that this call out is far too… “optimistic”. I also believe that girl and women empowerment, agency and reclamation (of all forms) are important in protesting the rape culture we live in, and giving us tools and strength to continue our fighting of the patriarchy. Thus, women’s sexuality (and sexual agency) is incredibly important.
BUT that alone will not stop sexual assault.
I would have liked the submission to read something like “creating a culture where women’s needs and desires are important, thereby working towards dismantling and challenging patriarchal perceptions of women, that both men and women hold” or something that makes the links they are trying to make.
This reads like a bad grant proposal.
I am in support of any feminist anti-violence work, even that I disagree with, and I appreciate that the editors revised the call out post-feedback. But they are only setting themselves up for failure if they address the symptoms, versus causes, of sexual assault.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
First of all, thank you for blogging on a site that allows one to post a comment without becoming a member.
Ha! But you do have to have at least one approved comment, as you discovered. Sorry, I had to do that to cope with the cheeto dicks.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
But they are only setting themselves up for failure if they address the symptoms, versus causes, of sexual assault.
Yes, that’s the problem really; dealing with symptoms and leaving the causal linkages unclear.
Consider if the call for submissions said that “giving women the vote [in, say, some country where they don't have the vote] is the key to ending rape culture!” It’s not true, is it? Women’s disenfranchisement and rape culture are both symptoms of women’s low status. Giving women the vote will not end rape, even though suffrage itself is an indubitably good thing.
The way to end rape is to make women human. You could certainly argue that giving women the vote would help elevate them to human status in male eyes and thus eventually, indirectly, lead to a social climate where there was less rape, and in fact something like that is the road feminists in the West have been traveling. But it’s not quite the same thing as saying that women’s suffrage is the linchpin to ending rape culture.
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nina says:
In addition to all of the very valid criticisms, they are only offering to pay $100 for each essay. I make better money than that writing freelance articles for my local, small-town newspaper.
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Victoria says:
Ditto the “I couldn’t put it into words… you hit the nail on the head.” Empirical evidence, what a concept, eh? I really appreciate the specific anthropological examples.
That said, I understand the “optimism” motive in the CFP, to a degree. Would that sunshine and light and boinking with whomever one mutually chooses to boink (in empowering ways! woo hoo!) were the key to ending rape, but that’s painfully naive.
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kiuku says:
This is so ridiculous. Male sexual pleasure doesn’t stop men from raping other men, in jail, for instance. Men’s violence against women acted out in sex and what is commonly called “men’s sexuality” or so-called “heterosexuality” is a play-acting of men’s dominance over women in society. The familiar and disturbing motifs in so-called men’s sexuality and heterosexuality is simnply the sexualization, the fetishing, and the pleasuring of dominance. Men do not even have an authentic sexuality in our dominance culture, how do they expect women to get one?
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linda says:
The symptoms and causes of rape are pretty much the same thing, the flip side of one another, aren’t they? And how, if at all, does violence against women more generally, domestic violence and abuse, for example, different from rape. Both are act of violence against women. Thus, will valuing female sexuality and pleasure diminish domestic violence? Probably not, for the same reason that giving women the vote will not stop rape. Rape and domestic violence have much more to do with a misogynist masculine imaginary that demeans women as subjects. Is the cause not misogyny? Better perhaps to accept feminist redefinitions of rape not as an aggressive form of male sexuality (which inadvertently and dangerously posits rape as an uncontrollable biological urge) but as act of violence against women that is expressed sexually.
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Debs says:
“Valuing female sexual pleasure is a good thing. But how is it going to stop rape? The corollary to your thesis would seem to be that men commit rape because female sexual pleasure isn’t valued. And I would really like to know what the evidence is for that.”
So would I! Thanks for this post. Somehow I don’t think the evidence we’re waiting for will be very forthcoming…
It’s just too convenient. Some people won’t take a stand against porn because they don’t want to be seen as ‘anti-sex’ (which is an utterly ridiculous notion anyway), so they talk about all this sexual empowerment rubbish, contradict themselves, can’t provide any evidence for anything they say; and all because they don’t want to be the ‘uncool’ kid making waves.
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sam says:
It angers me that feminists who believe female sexual pleasure is an integral part of women’s wellbeing support men’s rights to dictate and direct the sex prostituted women must experience.
It’s psychologically devastating for a woman to endure unpleasant sex acts she doesn’t want, or doesn’t want right then with that man, and have to speak lies aloud about how good it was, her ears hearing her voice betray her body.
However unfounded by the evidence, you’d think feminists who personally locate women’s emancipation in women’s sexual pleasure would recoil at the idea that prostitution is acceptable.
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orlando says:
I’m really curious about the specifics of which cultures in the world display the highest and lowest incidence of rape, but have no idea where to go for reliable information. Violet, would you consider giving us a more detailed brief on this? Because it would be so useful for confronting those who try to tell us that men are most likely to rape women who are going around behaving as if they’re free, autonomous individuals.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Violet, would you consider giving us a more detailed brief on this?
Yes, I’ll dig into my books and post something.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
I don’t think the idea of “enthusiastic consent” is a bad one at all. I’m just questioning the linkage to rape.
I imagine that the idea for this is based on observing how rape is excused in certain cases of acquaintance rape: if the woman wasn’t actually screaming “no” at the time, then obviously there was no way the rapists could have known she didn’t want to be raped. Jessica, et al, are thinking (I believe) that if we make enthusiastic consent the benchmark, it will shut down that line of argument.
And maybe it will — in the courtroom. But the “I didn’t know she didn’t want me to shove a lit cigarette inside her vagaina” argument is a defense ploy, not the actual reason for the rape. That’s the rapist’s defense: how could I have known she didn’t want to be raped with a pool cue? She was drunk, she’d come to the house, she was just lying there unconcious on the pool table — how could I have known it wasn’t cool?
But you see, I don’t believe the rapists are really confused about whether it’s okay. I don’t believe they really think, “gosh, she’s not screaming ‘no,’ it must be all right to shove this pool cue up into her anus and put a lit cigarette in her vagina!” I think they know perfectly well that the woman doesn’t want it: that’s the whole goddamn point.
So while “enthusiastic consent” as a benchmark could remove a standard rapists’ defense, would it actually stop any rapes? I think that depends on whether you believe in deterrent effects. If rape is easier to prosecute, will rapists think twice before committing the crime? Maybe. I hope.
But when I read the call for submissions, I get the sense that Jessica, et al, have something else in mind. As if they really think that better sex + more communication = less rape. And this, I think, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what rape is.
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kiuku says:
I don’t think consent needs to be modified. I think calling it enthusiastic consent depreciates the value of the word consent and what we should consider consent. It should be enthusiastic if it is actually consent. Calling it enthusiastic consent will make MRA’s and rape apologists go beserk.
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kiuku says:
Calling something Enthusiastic consent gives the impression that the other stuff was consent, it just wasn’t “enough” consent..and that is how the rape apologists and MRA’s would play that. If there is no consent there is no consent. There is no confusion here, as Violet pointed out. Rapists know what they are doing.
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kiuku says:
I had an idea to write a satirical essay submission “from” a rapist entitled “It’s not rape if she enjoys it”
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Laurelin says:
If I was feeling malicious (which I am), I would link this take back the porn nonsense (you can’t ‘take back’ something that was never yours to begin with) to the other aim stated in the post: ‘Bringing men back into the conversation, making men co-leaders in the movement to dismantle the cultural dynamics which support and encourage rape’. In other words: ‘you get to keep your porn, if you help stop (some) rapes. Deal?’
Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.
No. I imagine a world without rape. As feminists, we must not settle for anything less. -
Laurelin says:
the last sentence shouldn’t be in italics, coz that’s me, not feministing.
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The Ghost of Violet says:
Fixed it.
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tenderhooligan says:
I, too, couldn’t understand Feministing’s argument when they first presented it, and unfortunately since then, I’ve not had time to go back to it in depth. Largely, though, I agree that their refuting of ‘traditional feminist wisdom’ on rape is misplaced.
Thank you for writing this open letter. I wish you’d received a response here.
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