Just Sex?

The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape

Nicola Gavey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429811432
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the award-winning Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape, Nicola Gavey provides an extensive commentary on the existing literature on rape, analysing recent research to examine the psychological and cultural conditions of possibility for contemporary sexual violence. Just Sex? argues that feminist theory on sexual victimization has gone both too far and not far enough. It presents the reader with a challenging and original perspective on the issues of rape, sex and the body, incorporating new material on sexism, misogyny and digital culture, as well as debates over gendered analyses of sexual violence.

The second edition has been updated and expanded to be extremely timely and relevant, with the most recent high-profile rape cases – the Stanford rape case and the Belfast rape case – being tried in the media and online. The rise of the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement makes this book incredibly useful and necessary to those who are working within the area of sexual violence.

This will appeal to academic readers studying psychology, sociology, and criminology, as well as those looking into cultural influences on society. It will also be very useful to those working in the professional sector on prevention and with people who have been subjected to sexual violence.

PART 1

Rape in a different light

1

Rape as a social problem

And the rape story is turned into a story of everyday folk in everyday life . . .

(Ken Plummer 1995: 73)

Not too long ago rape was regarded very differently from how it is understood today. Despite long-standing recognition of the sparse existence of heinous rape as a serious crime, rapes were more often silenced, denied, minimized or condoned. Crucially, public discourse on rape was sorely missing a woman’s point of view. Since the early 1970s, there has been a marked transformation in Western representations of rape – in psychology, law, media and popular culture. Rape is in many ways still tolerated in our society, but no longer without fierce contestation on multiple fronts. In this chapter I will sketch some of the key elements of this recent history as they relate to my interest in exposing the cultural scaffolding of rape.¹

Rape, in the mind of seventeenth-century English Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale, was “a most detestable crime,” that ought to be “severely and impartially . . . punished with death” (Hale 1736; quoted in Taylor 1987: 75). Yet, he cautioned, “it is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho [sic] never so innocent” (ibid.). This overriding concern for the wrongs of falsely accusing a man of rape, over and above the wrongs of rape itself has, according to Brownmiller (1975), been a constant feature of rape’s place in the Western imaginary (and is, perhaps, more universal). Hale’s pithy edict has had long-lasting influence on legal thinking about rape within systems based on English common law. Echoing the spirit of his concerns, judges were for many years required to explicitly warn juries to be wary of women’s claims of rape (Burt 1991; Estrich 1987). This was necessary, argued influential British legal scholar Glanville Williams (1962: 662), “because sexual cases are particularly subject to the danger of deliberately false charges, resulting from sexual neurosis, phantasy, jealousy, spite, or simply a girl’s refusal to admit that she consented to an act of which she is now ashamed.” So, juries were given formal advice like the following standard jury instructions for California in the 1970s: “A charge such as that made against the defendant in this case is one which is easily made and, once made, difficult to defend against, even if the person accused is innocent. Therefore, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the female person named in the information with caution” (Le Grand 1973: 932).² Women were just not to be believed about rape – or, even if they were, they were just as likely to be blamed for the whole event.

Hale’s influence persisted in spite of strong evidence about the inaccuracy of his claims that rape is easy to report and that it is difficult to defend against (Brownmiller 1975; Le Grand 1973). While the dynamics of who is believed about rape and who is persecuted for rape are thoroughly patterned by race and ethnicity, statistical estimates of the (small) proportion of rapes that lead to convictions hardly support the general notion that rape is difficult to defend against (e.g., see Lees 1997; Mack 1998; Stubbs 2003).³ For instance, one study of all rapes (n=861) reported to a U.S. police department over a one-year period found that only 12 per cent resulted in convictions and only 7 per cent resulted in prison sentences (Frazier and Haney 1996).⁴

Not all rape, however, has been routinely minimized and condoned. Definitions of rape have historically been carefully policed and deployed in ways that allowed strict societal condemnation for certain kinds of rapes (violent attacks by strangers) committed on certain kinds of women (white, “respectable,” and sexually chaste) by certain kinds of men (Black,⁵ working-class, deviant) (see LaFree 1989). Reports of rapes that fell outside these parameters were more vulnerable to being dismissed by police and others as instances of sex rather than rape, or as simply untrue. For much of the twentieth century rapes by fathers or other authority figures were readily explained away by psychoanalysis as pure fantasy – in what is arguably the painful legacy of Freud’s apparent capitulation of his seduction theory (see Masson 1985).⁶ In the early 1970s, Kurt Weis and Sandra Borges (1973: 71) noted that although the legal definition of rape is “clear and simple,” prejudice and stereotype led to a “much narrower ‘working’ definition of rape among the public and police” (see also Estrich 1987; Pateman 1980; Scutt 1976). They claimed that “It is deemed a rape only if the assailant is a violent stranger, if the victim reports the rape immediately after it occurred, and if she can provide evidence of the attack and of her active resistance” (Weis and Borges 1973: 71–2). Even women who were raped in ways that conformed to this narrow stereotype of rape were still vulnerable to being disbelieved or, more probably, blamed for some indiscretion of dress or independence. The relative exception, where racism enters, is in how the rape of white women has been treated when the accused rapist is a Black, brown or indigenous man. In such cases, there is strong evidence that women’s testimonies have in general been treated as more credible. Black men accused of raping white women have been more likely to face more serious charges, and they have received harsher punishments than other groups of men charged with rape (e.g., LaFree 1980, 1989; see also Cermak 2001; Dorr 2001; Estrich 1987; Moorti 2002).

A common reaction to the allegation of rape right up until the mid- to late twentieth century was: “It was not a real rape but a seduction, and if it was rape then the woman was already morally inferior” (Weis and Borges 1973: 77). Underlying this response to rape seems to be a complex array of factors, including not only a general sexism and ideas about women as male property, but also a set contradictory of ideas about women’s sexuality. For instance, while women were portrayed as sexually passive in relation to men, they were also imbued with a dangerous lurking sexuality that could be invoked in all sorts of ways to explain and justify rape. This underlying magnetically beckoning sexuality ties in with the notion of female sexual provocation that has been crucially invoked to diminish male agency in rape and to minimize the harm that rape might do to women.⁷ This is the idea that women are really responsible for rape by crossing some invisible boundary of sexual chastity to turn on men’s (naturally) rampant sexuality.

Also significant in the male-eye view of rape is the notion that women could have “an unconscious ‘rape wish’”(Weis and Borges 1973: 79), set up in part by the tension between women’s seething underlying sexuality and the social parameters which required it be unleashed by force in order for their feminine virtue to be protected. This way of thinking about rape could take hold in a period when there was no open outlet for the voices of women who had experienced rape, so that women’s own stories of what rape was like remained unspoken and/or denigrated in the public arena. In this context, rape could be represented as merely a form of sex with no recognition of its hurtful and humiliating elements. The task of defining the truth of sex, rape, and women’s psychology was left in the hands of scientific and medical experts. Psychoanalysis, with its notion of female masochism (Albin 1977; Edwards 1981), and sexology, with its promotion of forced sex as natural and normal, both neatly played to a cultural tendency to ignore, minimize, or justify rape.

Havelock Ellis, perhaps the most influential sexologist of the early twentieth century, provided an extremely gender-differentiated model of heterosexuality marked by male “aggressiveness” and female “coyness” (Ellis 1948). “Rooted in the sexual instinct” of women, according to Ellis (1948: 95), “we find a delight in roughness, violence, pain and danger.” Naturally, “the masculine tendency” is “to delight in domination” (ibid.: 32). Male force in this equation was naturalized by recourse to the logic of evolution, as Ellis (1948: 32) observed in citing A. Marro’s explanation for “why it is that among savages courtship becomes so often a matter in which persuasion takes the form of force”:

Force is the foundation of virility, and its psychic manifestation is courage. In the struggle for life violence is the first virtue. The modesty of women – in its primordial form consisting in physical resistance, active or passive, to the assaults of the male – aided selection by putting to the test man’s most important quality, force.

These elements of Ellis’s ideas were carried to a wider audience through Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s (1930) highly influential book, Ideal Marriage, which was apparently regarded as the “‘Bible’ of sex manuals” up until the 1970s (Jackson 1994: 146):

What both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the sexual act, is the essential force of maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of violent and absolute possession of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult in a certain degree of male aggression and dominance – whether actual or apparent – which proclaims this essential force.

(van de Velde 1930: 159)

Such force was no doubt required because women’s sexual “needs” were generally represented at the time, not as necessarily lesser than men’s, but in need of “awakening” by the man (Gordon 1971). Ellis did admonish men to ensure that their wives were sexually aroused before intercourse; otherwise “if the man is sufficiently ignorant or sufficiently coarse-grained to be satisfied with the woman’s submission, he may easily become to her, in all innocence, a cause of torture” (Ellis 1998: 114; see also Stopes 1926). Van de Velde (1930: 148) echoed this sentiment:

For the man who neglects the love-play is guilty not only of coarseness, but of positive brutality; and his omission can not only offend and disgust a woman, but also injure her on the purely physical plane. And this sin of omission is unpardonably stupid.

However, the unavoidable difficulty with this particular model of heterosexual sex is the question of how to distinguish female reluctance that is genuine disinterest or revulsion from female reluctance that is a normal and proper part of the “game” of “courtship”:

in the proper playing of her part she has to appear to shun the male, to flee from his approaches – to even actually repel them.

. . .

The seeming reluctance of the female is not intended to inhibit sexual activity either in the male or in herself, but to increase it in both. The passivity of the female, therefore, is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity, and this holds true of our own species as much as of the lower animals.

(Ellis 1948: 229)

The problem with Ellis’s sexology is that it allows no room for women’s voice or agency in heterosexual sex. Any determination about the occurrence, timing, or course of sex is left to the man’s discretion and goodwill.⁸ While Ellis (1948: 101) did explain that it is “only within limits that a woman really enjoys the pain, discomfort, or subjection to which she submits,” the impossible challenge remained: who gets to say how much aggression and pain is too much? Clearly this framework has dangerous implications for acknowledging the reality of rape, on the basis of women’s accounts, as seen when these ideas are invoked in a legal context to minimize rape. Henry Weihofen (1959: 210), for instance, argued that rape accusations “are very frequently made by women who are caught in the act of fornication, or who are seeking compensation, marriage or revenge”:

Even the woman who is quite sane, but who is possessed of strong guilt feelings, may convince herself in retrospect that her own conduct was really blameless and that she was forced. This conviction is the more easily arrived at because it is quite likely that her conscious response at the time could not accurately be labeled either as consent or non-consent. There may have been an ambivalent and confused mixture of desire and fear, neither of which was clearly dominant. Most women want their lovers to be at least somewhat aggressive and dominating. Some consciously or unconsciously want to be forced.⁹ Their erotic pleasure is stimulated by preliminary love-play involving physical struggle, slapping, scratching, pinching and biting. The struggle also saves face for the girl who fears she would be considered “loose” if she yielded without due maidenly resistance; it also relieves the guilt feeling that might exist if she could tell herself that “he made me do it.” Many of the wrestling matches in parked cars come within this category.¹⁰

When female sexuality is portrayed like this, as present and strong, yet shackled by the constraints of a socially required femininity, the man who is sexually forceful is not a rapist but some kind of romantic hero.¹¹ The woman who is forced can never be a rape victim, because she was “asking for it” in the indirect way that women must. Alternatively she was an active and willing participant, who later changed her mind, out of shame. As sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is reported to have said, “the difference between a good time and rape often depends largely upon whether the girl’s parents happened to be awake when she returned home” (see Forrester 1986: 253 n). Within this model of heterosexuality, many acts of rape could conceivably pass under the guise of normal sex. This representational possibility was not necessarily restricted to rapes that took place within a heterosexual relationship. Even those that made it to court could be minimized and rendered not-rape through this kind of logic. Susan Edwards (1981: 50) has noted that within the rape trial itself, “it is invariably the case that a model of female sexuality as agent provocateur, temptress or seductress is set in motion.” It is a familiar Western way of thinking about female and male sexuality, linking as it does to the Biblical story of Eve (Bland 1981: 64; see also Smart 1989, 1995).

The other strong possibility that women faced in disclosing or reporting a rape was a response of disbelief – that is, that anything at all happened. Not only was it thought that women might “cry rape” in a vindictive act of revenge, but it was considered entirely possible that women might generate the idea that they had been raped through neurotic fantasy. In the second half of the nineteenth century these kinds of “sexual delusions of rape” were considered to be the outcome of gynecological pathology (Edwards 1981). By the early twentieth century, however, psychoanalysis held that “elements of sexual fantasy and masochism [were] essential characteristic features of femininity” (Edwards 1981). Helene Deutsch’s work in particular provided the chilling proposition that “women secretly desire to be raped and violated” (Edwards 1981: 103; see also Albin 1977; Brownmiller 1975). These “rape fantasies,” she reckoned, were “variants of the seduction fantasies so familiar to us in the lying accounts of hysterical women patients” (Deutsch 1944: 256; quoted in Edwards 1981: 106):

Rape fantasies often have such irresistible verisimilitude that even the most experienced judges are misled in trials of innocent men accused of rape by hysterical women. My own experience of accounts by white women of rape by Negroes (who are often subjected to terrible penalties as a result of these accusations) has convinced me that many fantastic stories are produced by the masochistic yearnings of these women.

(Deutsch 1944: 254; quoted in Brownmiller 1975: 229–30)¹²

These views of women’s masochism and the inherent untrustworthiness of a woman’s allegation of rape have been recycled in public debate against legislative changes, as well as in the courtroom (Edwards 1981; Estrich 1987). In his influential 1978 Textbook of Criminal Law, Williams explicitly drew on Deutsch’s theories to claim: “That some women enjoy fantasies of being raped is well authenticated, and they may welcome a masterful advance while putting up a token resistance” (quoted in Forrester 1986: 65; see also Williams 1962). This discursive construction of female sexuality allows woman’s sexual passivity, or even her resistance, to be seen as a faux front that masks her real underlying desires. From this point of view, women’s consent is always up for question. These notions of female precipitation (be it active or completely passive) formed a vocabulary of justification that could readily be deployed in everyday talk as part of the ongoing formation of a culture that silences rape survivors. They could also be drawn on by men to successfully defend against rape charges where the issue in dispute was the woman’s consent. Hostility to the woman who dares name forced s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• PART 1: Rape in a different light
• PART 2: Gender, power, and sexuality – and the limits of individual choice
• PART 3: Going too far, not going far enough
• PART 4: Rejoinder for the second edition
• References
• Index