CHAPTER 1

“Felawe Masculinity”

Teaching Rape Culture in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

On a warm May night in Rhyl, a run-down seaside town in North Wales, a nineteen-year-old waitress goes out dancing with her friends after her shift is over. In an hour and a half, she drinks two large glasses of wine, four double vodka and lemonades, and a shot of Sambuca. She remembers dancing, then holding a pizza box, then nothing.1 Surveillance footage shows her staggering into a late-night fast-food takeaway shop called The Godfather after 3:00 a.m. She falls on the floor and has to be helped to her feet, but not before a man walks past her fallen body and points at her. Outside, she sits down in a doorway, stumbles into the side of a building, and wanders with her pizza before trying to get into a taxi without her handbag, which she accidentally left in the shop. A man who had been inside The Godfather with his friends joins her in the taxi. He tells the driver to take them to the budget hotel room that he and a friend have rented for the night. He texts his friend, the man who pointed at the woman when she fell earlier, telling him, I’ve got a bird.2 In court, the taxi driver will describe the woman as “drunk, very docile, and not with it.”3
The man in the taxi is a six-foot-six professional soccer player named Clayton McDonald. The Premier Inn’s security cameras show him walking arm in arm with the woman through the lobby at 4:10 a.m. She is wearing a royal blue sleeveless dress with high tan wedge heels and is leaning heavily on him; she is “out of it,” the receptionist on duty will testify.4 McDonald has sex with her in room 14. His teammate Ched Evans, the friend he texted from the taxi, arrives at the Premier Inn with his younger brother and another male friend. Evans enters the room and watches McDonald having sex for a few moments. He will later testify that he “was being juvenile, having a laugh.”5 In court, he will claim that McDonald asked the woman, “Can my mate join in?” and that she said yes, although he will admit that he never spoke to her before, during, or after the encounter. His brother and friend stand outside watching through the ground-floor window, giggling and using their phones to record the incident for sharing among their peer group. Evans’s brother will testify in court, “At the time I thought it was funny.”6 Before he leaves room 14, McDonald opens the curtains so the two men outside can get a better view of Evans’s actions.7 Evans will testify that he used no protection and did not ask the woman if she wanted him to use protection.8 CCTV shows him leaving the Premier Inn through the fire escape shortly thereafter.
The woman awakes alone in the hotel room the next morning in a panic, having been so intoxicated that she wet the bed. She does not know how she got there or remember anything after holding a pizza box the night before. She is naked and bruised, her right arm in pain, and she is missing her handbag and phone.9 Later, Evans tells police, “We could have had any girl we wanted. When we go out it’s not uncommon to pick up girls. We’re footballers. Footballers are rich and they have money. That is what girls like.”10 In a 2012 trial, McDonald is acquitted of raping the woman because his interactions with her in the taxi and hotel lobby are interpreted as sufficient evidence of her consent despite her extreme intoxication. Evans, who testifies that he did not speak to the woman, learn her name, or remember what her face looked like, is not so fortunate. His conviction is met with outrage from his supporters, who release the woman’s name and address online and bombard her with electronic vitriol. She is forced to change her name twice and move five times in the first three years after the trial.11
After serving two and a half years in prison, Evans is released in late 2014. His conviction is quashed shortly thereafter due to the presentation of controversial new evidence, and he is granted an October 2016 retrial. After his friends and family advertise a £50,000 reward for information that would lead to his exoneration, Evans’s defense team produces two male witnesses who claim to have had sex with the woman within weeks of that May night at the Premier Inn. This was just one manifestation of the numerous inequalities between Evans, a wealthy professional footballer from Rhyl backed by his girlfriend’s millionaire father and legions of fans eager for their hometown hero’s return to the sport, and the woman, a waitress who lived at home with her parents and siblings.12 During the retrial, both of the new witnesses allege that the woman ordered them to “Fuck me harder,” a phrase that Evans claims she said to him as well. One man testifies that he was “in shock” due to her assertiveness, while the other says that she “directed” the encounter.13 In closing arguments, Evans’s attorney declares, “Drunken consent is still consent.”14 Swayed by the inclusion of the woman’s sexual history, the retrial jury finds Evans not guilty. Their verdict is unanimous.15 Five months after his retrial, Evans re-signs with Sheffield United, his old team.16
A striking element in the Evans case is the pivotal role of masculine community among brothers, friends, and teammates in facilitating (alleged) sexual violence. In the taxi, McDonald texts Evans that he “got” a “bird,” his language framing the woman as an object he has acquired for the group’s enjoyment and demeaning her in gendered terms, as “bird” is a slang term for “a girl, woman” that is “often used familiarly or disparagingly.”17 One man’s acquisition of a woman’s body belongs to his friends, who soon arrive at the Premier Inn to claim their share of the prize. Evans, who testifies that he previously enjoyed threesomes with McDonald, watches his teammate having sex and becomes aroused at the sight. McDonald deliberately opens the curtains so that Evans’s brother and friend can watch and record without the woman’s knowledge or consent, allowing them to share in the experience and to capture it for repeated enjoyment. This collective consciousness is underscored by Evans’s admission of entitlement articulated in the first-person plural: “We could have any girl we wanted,” he says. For these men, sexuality is a communal enterprise.
Three months before Evans’s retrial, I have a conversation with a fellow scholar about rape in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale. “I don’t think ‘rape’ is the correct term that applies here,” he says.
“How do you read it, then?” I ask.
“I think the Ched Evans case is a useful parallel,” he replies.
“Oh,” I say. I think about the intoxicated woman falling down in the takeaway shop and waking up alone at the Premier Inn, filled with bewildered horror. And I think of twenty-year-old Malyne in the Reeve’s Tale, awaking lead-limbed from a drunken slumber to find one of her father’s houseguests on top of her, penetrating her before she has a chance to say no or yes.
In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses a group of eight male pilgrims from the mercantile-artisan classes to illuminate the workings of a type of masculinity, which I call “felawe masculinity,” that is centered on men teaching their peers to perpetuate rape culture, much like the brand of masculinity espoused by Evans, McDonald, and their crew. By “teaching to perpetuate rape culture,” I mean that Chaucer’s pilgrim faction actively espouses “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women.”18 Anastasia Powell and Nicola Henry define rape culture as “the social, cultural, and structural discourses and practices in which sexual violence is tolerated, accepted, eroticized, minimized, and trivialized. In a rape culture, violence against women is eroticized in literary, cinematic, and media representations; victims are routinely disbelieved or blamed for their own victimization; and perpetrators are rarely held accountable or their behaviours are seen as excusable or understandable.”19 These elements are prominent in the obscene comic tales told by Chaucer’s “felawes,” who trivialize rape as “pley,” name women as “wenches” before they are assaulted in order to blame them for their victimization, and let the perpetrators go unpunished, as when Alisoun “graunt[s]” Nicholas her “love” in the Miller’s Tale after he assaults her (I.3290), or when the Reeve’s Tale’s John and Aleyn “gon” “on hir wey” home with their freshly ground flour in hand, eager to share stories with their friends at Soler Hall (I.4310).
Communal obscene storytelling is the group’s preferred tool for teaching the lessons of “felawe masculinity.” They share bawdy “japes” to dehumanize women, to bond intimately with one another, to compete viciously with one another, and to authorize violence against women and aggression against other men. They present their tales as overtly pedagogical and containing ...