Article: 72703 of soc.men Newsgroups: soc.men Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!gatech!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!umn.edu!moby!eric From: eric@moby.micro.umn.edu (Eric Forbis) Subject: "Date Rape's Other Victim" article pt.1 Message-ID: Summary: Rape crisis feminists are subverting their cause Keywords: rape men feminists law Sender: news@news2.cis.umn.edu (Usenet News Administration) Nntp-Posting-Host: moby.micro.umn.edu Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: Under Grad Workstation Lab. Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1993 19:41:06 GMT Lines: 154 New York Times Magazine June 13, 1993 Date Rape's Other Victim Katie Roiphe [Katie Roiphe is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Princeton University. This article is adapted from her book, "The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus," to be published in September by Little, Brown.] One in four college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. I remember standing outside the dining hall in college, looking at the purple poster with this statistic written in bold letters. It didn't seem right. If sexual assault was really so pervasive, it seemed strange that the intricate gossip networks hadn't picked up more than one or two shadowy instances of rape. If I was really standing in the middle of an "epidemic," a "crisis"- if 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped- wouldn't I know it? The posters were not presenting facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims-- women offended by a professor's dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across. This portrait of the delicate female bears a striking resemblance to that 50's ideal my mother and other women fought so hard to leave behind. They didn't like her passivity, her wide-eyed innocence. They didn't like the fact that she was perpetually offended by sexual innuendo. They didn't like her excessive need for protection. She represented personal, social, and intellectual possibilities collapsed, and they worked and marched, shouted and wrote to make her irrelevant for their daughters. But here she is again, with her pure intentions and her wide eyes. Only this time it is the feminists themselves who are breathing new life into her. Is there a rape crisis on campus? Measuring rape is not as straightforward as it might seem. Neil Gilbert, professor of social welfare at the University of California at Berkeley, questions the validity of the one-in-four statistic. Gilbert points out that in a 1985 survey undertaken by Ms. magazine and financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, 73 percent of the women categorized as rape victims did not initially define their experience as rape; it was Mary Koss, the psychologist conducting the study, who did. One of the questions used to define rape was: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs." The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's "judgment is impaired" and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape. As Gilbert delves further into the numbers, he does not necessarily disprove the one-in-four statistic, but he does clarify what it means-- the so-called rape epidemic on campuses is more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon. It is more about a change in sexual politics than a change in sexual behavior. Whether or not one in four college women has been raped, then. is a matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical fact. That rape is a fact in some women's lives is not in question. It's hard to watch the solemn faces of young Bosnian girls, their words haltingly translated, as they tell of brutal rapes; or to read accounts of a suburban teen-ager raped and beaten while walking home from a shopping mall. We all agree that rape is a terrible thing, but we no longer agree on what rape is. Today's definition has stretched beyond bruises and knives, threats of death or violence to include emotional pressure and the influence of alcohol. The lines between rape and sex begin to blur. The one-in-four statistic on those purple posters is measuring something elusive. It is measuring her word against his in a realm where words barely exist. There is a gray area in which one person's rape may be another's bad night. Definitions become entangled in passionate ideological battles. There hasn't been a remarkable change in the number of women being raped; just a change in how receptive the political climate is to those numbers. The next question, then, is who is identifying this epidemic and why. Somebody is "finding" this rape crisis, and finding it for a reason. Asserting the prevalence of rape lends urgency, authority to a broader critique of culture. In a dramatic description of the rape crisis, Naomi Wolf writes in "The Beauty Myth" that "cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a situation among the young in which boys rape and girls get raped as a normal course of events." The italics are hers ["as..." in italics in original]. Whether or not Wolf really believes rape is a part of the "normal course of events" these days, she is making a larger point. Wolf's rhetorical excess serves her larger polemic about sexual politics. Her dramatic prose is a call to arms. She is really trying to rally the feminist troops. Wolf uses rape as a red flag, an undeniable sign that things are falling apart. From Susan Brownmiller- who brought the politics of rape into the mainstream with her 1975 best seller, "Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape"- to Naomi Wolf, feminist prophets of the rape crisis are talking about something more than forced penetration. They are talking about what they define as a "rape culture." Rape is a natural trump card for feminism. Arguments about rape can be used to sequester feminism in the teary province of trauma and crisis. By blocking analysis with its claims to unique pandemic suffering, the rape crisis becomes a powerful source of authority. Dead serious, eyes wide open with concern, a college senior tells me that she believes that one in four is too conservative an estimate. This is not the first time I've heard this. She tells me the right statistic is closer to one in two. That means that one in two women are raped. It's amazing, she says, amazing that so many of us are sexually assaulted every day. What is amazing is that this student actually believes that 50 percent of women are raped. This is the true crisis. Some substantial number of young women are walking around with this alarming belief: a hyperbole containing within it a state of perpetual fear. "Acquaintance Rape: Is Dating Dangerous?" is a pamphlet commonly found at counseling centers. The cover title rises from the shards of a shattered photograph of a boy and a girl dancing. inside, the pamphlet offers a sample date-rape scenario. She thinks: "He was really good looking and he had a great smile... We talked and found we had a lot in common. I really liked him. When he asked me over to his place for a drink I thought it would be O.K. He was such a good listener and I wanted him to ask me out again." She's just looking for a sensitive boy, a good listener with a nice smile, but unfortunately his intentions are not as pure as hers. Beneath that nice smile, he thinks: "She looked really hot, wearing a sexy dress that showed off her great body. We started talking right away. I knew that she liked me by the way she kept smiling and touching my arm while she was speaking. She seemed pretty relaxed so I asked her over to my place for a drink... When she said 'Yes' I knew that I was going to be lucky!" These "cardboard" stereotypes don't just educate freshmen about rape. They also educate them about "dates" and about sexual desire. With titles like "Friends Raping Friends: Could It Happen to You?" date-rape pamphlets call into question all relationships between men and women. Beyond warning students about rape, the rape-crisis movement produces its own images of sexual behavior, in which men exert pressure and women resist. By defining the dangerous date in these terms- with this type of male and this type of female, and their different expectations these pamphlets promote their own perspective on how men and women feel about sex: men are lascivious, women are innocent.