Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Rape Politics

I've lived through too many high profile rape cases to find much emotion about them anymore. I don't make judgements on either the accused rapist or the alleged victim. I can't know what happened--only the jury can guess at that.

What makes me angry is the chatter that surrounds rape trials. I heard a conservative radio host talking about Kobe Bryant's case yesterday. It really didn't matter that it was Kobe Bryant's trial, he had more general things to say about how any rape victim should or shouldn't behave.

He said it wasn't reasonable for a victim of rape to have sex shortly afterward. He "justified" this claim by saying that he had come to understand that a rape victim would be too traumatized to have sex with anyone, even a boyfriend or husband, shortly after being raped. He also said that a rape victim shouldn't wear dirty underwear to the hospital for a rape examination. He thinks that a woman who would wear dirty underwear to the hospital clears any accused rapist.

Huh?

Obviously, he has never been a rape victim, or even really thought about what it's like to be a sexually active woman.

I met a woman, let's call her Ann, who had never been raped because she never said no to a man, even when she didn't want to have sex.

I knew a woman, let's call her Betty, who was knocked down and dragged into an alley by a complete stranger who brutally beat and raped her.

These two factual anecdotes represent extremes of women's sexual choice, or anti-choice.

Most women who are raped fall between these two neatly illustrated extremes.

I am one of them. In the muddy experience of rape that I understand, sex and date rape are very close cousins, but they are distinctly separated by one clear thing: the word "No." When a woman's protest is ignored, and a man goes ahead and intimately violates her body and her wishes, no one can know how she'll react to that.

In my case, I was so frightened that I allowed the rapist to have sex with me later that night (hours after he'd ignored my protests "No!" and overpowered me during the rape). He wasn't admitting that he raped me and I was afraid of what else might happen to me if I lectured him on what he had done. Irrationally, I was afraid to leave while it was dark outside. I lived in a small, conservative town, so I never reported the rape to the police.

The conservative radio host that I heard yesterday isn't interested in the distinction between a rape and sex. To me, it makes sense that a rape victim would want to have sex with a man she cared about, or at least a man she would like to have sex with, soon after a rape. It isn't the wisest or safest thing to do, but it could seem to her a repair to the sense of loss of self-control that rape searingly manifests.

Gee, is it any wonder that a rape victim might do something that is not in her own best self-interest? Many women do things counter to their own self-interest in general in this patriarchal society, why would a rape situation make women stronger?

I call on all commentators to do rape victims a favor 1) Help us educate men 2) Don't tell us and the world that women should act rationally after we've been dominated and victimized--some of us are well aware of the fact that we couldn't.

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