cn: non-explicit discussion of rape
“Rape is about power, not sex” is one of those old feminist sayings. I don’t know the exact source, but Psychology Today suggests that it might be simplified from statements by Susan Brownmiller in 1975.
In its simplified form, it’s obviously a political soundbite, a piece of rhetoric rather than a serious thesis. If I put on my philosopher hat, what does it even mean for X to be “about” Y? Is this about-ness relation commutative, reflexive, or transitive? Based on usage, I’m guessing that what people mean is that rape (and other sexual violence) is motivated by power relations, and not motivated by sexual desire. Which just isn’t always true, so I don’t know why people say it.
I recently discussed the case of Avital Ronell (who, to be clear, was found guilty of sexual harassment, not rape). One detail I didn’t mention, because it was irrelevant, was that the perpetrator was lesbian, and the victim was gay. This surprised some people, and I saw people on Twitter defending the perpetrator on this basis, or suggesting that she must really be bisexual. This comes from the false belief that sexual harassment must be motivated by sexual desire. In this case, it was motivated by the power relation between an advisor and grad student.
Since I’m an ace blogger, I should add that it would be perfectly possible for an asexual person to perpetrate sexual violence. I am not personally aware of any cases, but denying the possibility is tantamount to inviting it.
But there is not just one narrative about sexual violence, and I have no idea why we would limit ourselves to only acknowledging the power motivations, and not any other motivations. I have every reason to suspect that perpetrators of rape often victimize people that they are sexually attracted to. I mean, sexual violence between intimate partners is one of the biggest categories of sexual violence. We often see sexual desire and power working in tandem, as people use their power to get something they sexually desire.
One thing I hate about the expression “rape is about power, not sex”, is that it appears to accept that if rape were motivated by sex, then it would be more tolerable. Perhaps in Brownmiller’s time, people excused rape as “a crime of irrational, impulsive, uncontrollable lust”, thus the need for the expression. But this rhetoric should be considered out of date. Not all rape is lust-driven, but even lust-driven rapists should be held accountable.
In case you think that nobody believes “rape is about power, not sex” anymore, I did a Google and found otherwise. It seems that the view is occasionally espoused on webpages listing myths and misconceptions about rape. For example:
Myth: Rape is about sex. People who rape do it because they cannot control their sexual desire.
Reality: Rape is not about sex. Rape is about having power and control over another person. Three out of five rapists are also in consenting sexual relationships. This myth takes the blame off of the rapist and does not hold him accountable for his actions.
And a similar example:
x Misconception
Sexual assault is sex.✔ Truth
Sexual assault is an act of violence, not sex. This is an important distinction because by framing sexualized violence as about sex and not about violence we focus on the perpetrator’s narrative and not the survivor’s.
I also have a lot of hate for assertions that rape does not count as sex. Some survivors may choose to view it that way, but other survivors choose to view rape as non-consensual sex. The quote above talks about focusing on the survivor’s narratives, but I doubt they ran it by very many survivors.
Acknowledging that you were a victim of rape can be very difficult, and initially many victims may at first view it as sex that went horribly wrong. When we acknowledge that rape is simply sex that you didn’t want, this helps victims understand what happened. If some victims would like to take a step further and say it didn’t count as sex, good for them, but they shouldn’t knock down the ladder behind them after they’ve climbed it.
There’s also another issue that one of my ace cobloggers likes to bring up. Aces are often told that they ought to “try” sex, and that their experience being raped doesn’t count as sex. This ignores the fact that many aces never want sex, so any sex they had would in fact be rape.
TL;DR: Just because I’m a feminist doesn’t mean that I believe in dated feminist political soundbites.
“Rape is about power, not sex” allows people to keep their concept of rape to be about the masked stranger that breaks into a home at night and gets off on terrorizing the victim. A lot of rape is clearly about sex because it’s the perpetrator thinking they’re using an “advantage” to get sex, like drugging a drink or going for an already very intoxicated victim. “Power not sex” allows people like Brock Turner to think they’re not rapists because sex was what they wanted.
i agree. but i also think there is some element of “i want what i want when i want it and i will take
it no matter what” it’s very entitled
I think a lot of the “rape is about power, not sex” mantra came from the justifiable desire to take the victim out of the equation as far as assigning blame goes. As long as rape and the like are associated with sex, to many people the victim will be at least partly responsible for what happened. And, of course, as long as rape is associated more with sex, many people’s claims of having been raped will be disbelieved because they aren’t pretty enough.
Unfortunately, saying rape is just about power does imply, as stated in comment #1, that rape is “about the stranger that breaks into a home at night and gets off on terrorizing the victim,” which silences some victims by effectively gaslighting their experience, and also comforts some perpetrators, who can tell themselves that they didn’t do that, so it wasn’t rape.
Rape is a criminal act. While the act itself is overtly sexual in nature, the crime is independent of the perpetrator’s attraction toward the victim, and can be motivated by pretty much all the normal emotions. It doesn’t need to involve physical violence, just an attempt (either overt or covert) to bypass or inhibit the victim’s ability to give or withhold consent.
I’ve never been able to get behind the “rape is about power, not sex” rhetoric either. I’ve avoided undermining it for political reasons, but until lately I haven’t been able to articulate an alternative.
It’s about power + sex because the sex is the way the power is used for abuse and sexual urges are definitely involved (or at the very least aggression involving sex connected dominance behavior that requires sex in the expression). There are many ways power can be abused making it power + X. Power can be abused with fists, social interactions and influence and more and acknowledging the sex element allows us to flesh out how power is abused more finely.
“Rape is about power, not sex” dates from a time before there was such a thing as “date rape”. It dates from a time before DNA testing a proper rape kits, when “it didn’t happen” was a feasible defence to a charge.
As stated, it’s very obviously false. It once had utility as a way to start a conversation. In 2018 it merely marks out someone who attempts to use it as hysterical, wrong, and to be ignored.
Yes, “hysterical” is a fine word to be using when discussing this subject.
The horrifying statistics that one third of college men would like to commit rape is evidence that sex is a motivation to rape, though 45’s extreme sexual assaults may indicate more power concern than sex as the motherfucker is too old to be really highly sexed, though a war criminal was quoted as saying that power is the ultimate sexual exciter
The word “rape” covers a range of actions, all involving both power and sex but in widely varying proportions.
It amazes me that this post, in this venue, has not drawn a spate of attacks from defenders of what I’d thought was feminist orthodoxy – apparently mindsets have changed, even about one of the most emotional issues out there. And that without overt discussion reaching the feminist voices I regularly follow (Amanda Marcotte, Rewire, Planned Parenthood, various progressive aggregators, etc).
How and where did this reconceptualization occur?
Back in the day when people would say this and others would dispute it, I always found it intensely frustrating that nobody would ever say what “about” meant.
@Pierce R Butler:
When I founded my anti-domestic/sexual non-profit in the 90s, I did so because the non-profits I’d been working with still clung to some outdated ideas. The one that primarily motivated founding my own agency was that abusive behaviors committed by women need not be taken seriously. They would have said “have less serious impacts” when talking it through, but the policies for their own agencies and the public policies they advocated for local and state governments to adopt clearly did not take abuse committed by women seriously FULL STOP.
For instance, we knew full well even in 1994 that those persons who commit abuse see themselves as victimized by the people they abuse to the point where they just HAVE TO abuse those people. Think of the metaphorical burnt pot roast that the archetypal abusive husband uses as an excuse to rage at his wife. He’s put in a hard day’s work. He’s done his part for the family, now he’s just expecting that the other members of the family meet their obligations, and they don’t, and what the Freud is he supposed to do? But if abusers think of themselves as victims (and they do) and queer women’s relationships include some abusive relationships (which they do, and which we acknowledged in 1994), then some queer women are being abusive, and that means that some queer women who are actually abusers are going to think of themselves as victims and try to access victim services.
Was there a screening process to make sure that the abuser of a queer woman didn’t get invited to shelter? Nope. They went through the same screening process as everyone else. Did the screening process include questions designed to help distinguish women who are abusive but think of themselves as victims from women who are actually subject to abuse? Nope. Did the screeners get trained in how to spot telltale signs that would indicate they were interacting with someone who was more likely to be abusive than abused? Nope. Not for queer women and not for detecting the odd straight woman who abuses men.
It’s clear that we were in a time of transition, where we had accepted important new information (say, that queer women can be abused by other queer women and therefore queer women need access to emergency shelter on the same terms as straight women) but without thinking that through in the context of everything we know about abuse.
What you’re talking about, the “power not sex” bit was rhetoric that was still common, but it was interpreted as meaning something a great deal more specific than was understood by the general public. The problem was that we hadn’t wrestled with how that made our rhetoric (and thus our message) inaccessible to the general public. Just like now many people will speak of racism as institutionalized oppression distinct from (but originating in and flourishing in the company of) racial prejudice even though saying “Black people in the US cannot be racist” is rhetoric that says something both important and true that is nonetheless completely inaccessible to the majority of the public who do not distinguish between “racism” and “racial prejudice” (even if they would consider “racial prejudice” a separate concept that is usefully distinguished from “institutionalized oppression based on race”).
At the time, most people with whom I worked to “rape is about power not sex” to be the statement that you use to distinguish sex from rape: it was implicit that both involved sexual behavior, but rape had this added element of removing power from one or more of the persons involves by the intentional actions of another person involved. It really didn’t serve even that purpose very well – at least not consistently very well – but in a particular context it was still understood as an important and meaningful statement. It wasn’t rejected, just … compartmentalized.
However, throughout the 80s and 90s, largely starting with the not-nearly-famous-enough-but-still-famous “Sex Wars” within feminism beginning more-or-less in the 80s (individuals had engage in single combat earlier, but the War-scale conflicts probably did begin in the 80s) there was a reduction in the use of the “power not sex” rhetoric and generally less focus on using “power” as a distinguishing characteristic of rape. Instead, the 80s and 90s were the time of increasing focus on the word “consent” and how it could be meaningfully employed in anti-violence education, in victim/survivor services, in public outreach, and in the law.
One of the reasons that Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings is a watershed is because this marks a time when power-based language and consent-based language really both come out together to talk about the same case in subtly different ways. The power-based language felt to many feminists as if it was encouraging the public to see Hill as less powerful than she was. There was debate within feminism about whether this language tended to diminish Hill specifically and victims/survivors generally. On the other hand, Thomas was her boss and did have power over her and there was utility in pointing out that power differential and how Thomas made use of it. The response to this is that Thomas’ behavior can be criticized in ways that analyze his power and use of it, but that doesn’t mean that an underling that treated Hill in a similar manner wouldn’t be in the wrong. THAT brought about the response that this was misunderstanding the important distinction that was being made in “power not sex” rhetoric. Finally, that brought about the response that if so many people are missing the distinction, then maybe that wasn’t successful rhetoric.
There were many sides to this, of course, and it’s not as if all feminists came to one giant consensus by 1992, but I think it’s illustrative of the fact that feminists have known for decades that the rhetoric is useful in certain contexts, but is flawed in communicating important feminist points. Since then I think that many have concluded that “power not sex” rhetoric should be limited in use to those contexts, but feminists being humans, I’m sure you’ll still find a certain amount of disagreement and it is definitely still in use.
Look at the examples from the OP in their fuller context:
Clearly this one is talking about distinguishing the rape performed by rapists from the sex that rapists are having in consenting sexual relationships. This falls within the traditional uses of “power not sex” rhetoric. It’s more absolutist and less nuanced than I think it should be, but I recognize it as taking the form of an argument/message that was widely used in my early days as a feminist anti-violence activist. And it counters a still-prevalent myth (albeit using language that itself is open to interpretations that would be erroneous): men rape because they just can’t control themselves when their biological need for sex becomes too strong. Studies have shown us that it is unlikely to be a biological need for sex that drives most rapists or even a sizable minority. Definitions get very fuzzy here, as do the psychological interpretations of rapists’ motivations, but it’s pretty clear from the research that rape is not a crazed (and/or biologically pre-programmed) response to sex deprivation.
“The poor rapist just raped to meet biological sexual needs” is a still-current myth that does need a current counter. “Power not sex” is a clumsy and inaccurate, but understood as intended quite useful and appropriate, counter to that myth. So of course you still see it around.
Me? I prefer not to talk about the motivations of rapists just like I avoid talking about the motivations of racists and queer bashers. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how I don’t bother speaking of “transphobia” and “homophobia” and “queerphobia” etc. These place us squarely between the ears of people where we cannot find firm footing and where all our conclusions are suspect.
If rape is wrong because of what someone was thinking while committing the rape, we’ll never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone really deserves the opprobrium that rightfully attaches to people who are known to have committed rape. If queer bashing is wrong because of what someone was thinking during the bashing, the same problem ensues.
I take the tack that, for most purposes, I don’t give a fuck what you were thinking when you raped that person/made that racist decision/called that man a fag. The action was wrong. If you took that action, you deserve whatever infamy properly attaches to anyone who takes such an action. Whether you were thinking that you’re only doing this to film video that will make your friends laugh doesn’t fucking matter for the purpose of answering the question, “should you receive opprobrium for committing this act”.
Anyway, I’m not surprised you don’t have people shouting about this. Feminists have been talking about this for 3 decades now. We’ve long since come to a place where, whatever our personal opinions on how often (if ever) and in what context (if any) to deploy “power not sex” rhetoric, the vast majority of us understand that there are some reasonable distinctions to be made here. Those of us who don’t use it don’t have an interest in making any statement that might be taken as discrediting the legitimate points people are attempting to raise when deploying the rhetoric, and the people who do use it generally also use consent based rhetoric and other rhetorical tools, so they aren’t going to come down on someone for using something else that is effective in its own way.
Anyway, that’s today’s dissertation. Make of it what you will.
@Crip Dyke,
Thank you very much for the historical perspective.
It seems like a key point is that the “power, not sex” rhetoric predates consent rhetoric (or at least predates the popularity thereof). Nowadays it is so easy to define rape as simply non-consensual sex, but without an understanding of consent I could see it being difficult to explain, especially to an unsympathetic public, what rape is and why it’s wrong. “Power, not sex” certainly seems like it could be a useful expression under the circumstances.
When I did research for this post, I found basically nothing that explained the history of it. Most articles fell into two categories: Science journalism claiming that a new study disproved the idea that rape is about power, not sex; and sexual violence myths and misconceptions pages. The science journalism articles took the viewpoint that “about” means “motivated by”, which is the viewpoint I take in the OP. I was rather doubtful of this interpretation, but there really wasn’t any other clear interpretation on offer. I share the frustration of my boyfriend (comment #9) that people can idly throw around these terms without stopping to consider what the hell “about” means, or even acknowledging that its meaning is ambiguous.
For example, one possible interpretation of the expression is, “power is the salient characteristic of rape that distinguishes it from sex.” And the expression still isn’t true, but I could see that meaning being useful in a world that doesn’t have a notion of consent. In a world that does have a notion consent, it’s like, consent is the distinguishing characteristic of rape, why would we have an expression that says power is the distinguishing characteristic, his expression must have some other interpretation–oh I know, it must mean that rapists are motivated by power.
I was also very interested to hear about your experience founding an anti-domestic/sexual violence non-profit. You know, a couple of my cobloggers run an online resource (Resources for Ace Survivors), also motivated in part by seeing dated ideas in mainstream resources on sexual violence. Although I do not contribute to their project, my approach to talking about sexual violence is strongly influenced by interactions with them.
Crip Dyke… @ # 10 – Wow, thanks for all that.
It will take a while to digest, and I’ve got a busy day lined up so can’t give this reply the thought it needs. So, I’ll just go off on a tangent about vocabulary and the new buzzword “consent”, which bugs me just a bit.
“Consent” can mean anything from “Ehh, okay” to “Hell YEAH!!!”, and I sometimes wonder whether its predominance may encourage a sort of coercive nagging/pleading that technically makes it over the bar but still produces unhealthy dynamics. Maybe it would be too utopian to insist on, say, “eagerness” or “desire”, but I don’t think we’ve found the exact right word yet for this context.
Being mixed race, I really don’t like the idea that a man “couldn’t control his sexual urges.” Sounds too much like the old racist ideas about men of color.
@Pierce R Butler:
Have you looked at the document that Caine created (with input from many others, but she did the work of creating the initial document and incorporating/synthesizing the suggestions of others into a cohesive whole) titled “Crystal Clear Consent”?
I’m actually concerned about modifying the word “consent”. I think that “enthusiastic consent” is important for teaching concepts vital to healthy sexual communication, negotiations, and relationships. Yet, the very fact that consent is modified implies that there must be some consent that is not enthusiastic. If I consent, why should I pressured to be enthusiastic as well? There are many reasons I might legitimately consent without being – in the moment – enthusiastic. Most of these are far more likely in a long term relationship, and most consent education is focussed on those teens and college students who are not in long-term sexual relationships, so I understand and accept why certain sexual education efforts take the form that they do, but want to maintain the freedom to consent without forced to be a shiny, happy person. I wonder about your response and feel twinges of concern that your idea might import ideas of enthusiastic consent to contexts where it is less suited. Does the Crystal Clear Consent document address your concerns, or is there something else you would want to see in consent-based discussions of sexual behavior?
If you’re curious, while the link is to the specific comment that sums up CCC, that comment is embedded in the thread where what CCC ought to be is discussed among a number of members of the Horde.
@robertbaden
I agree. I think that rhetoric was deeply intertwined with racism and racist stereotypes. Of course, as you would expect for a racist society it operated differently for men of different races. For white men, it seems to have typically functioned as an excuse: He’s a good guy, but was temporarily overcome by his sexual urges. For Black men and indigenous men – and likely other men of color, though I not familiar with examples off the top of my head – it was judged an enduring trait or state of being that was both symptom and proof of that man’s inferiority: He can’t be allowed out of prison; he is ruled by his sexual urges.
It’s pernicious, long-standing, sexist, and racist-as-Freud.
Crip Dyke @ # 14 – I think I missed that first time ’round, 5 years ago.
While it doesn’t precisely address my concern(s), it does seem something that should be included in consent education (assuming such a thing exists in any systematic form).
And your counterpoint also clarifies some issues, though it also points to the ways in which no concise (or verbose, probably) formula can address all sexual situations – particularly those in which one party’s desires (for sex, power, or whatever) produce a willingness to twist words and their meanings.
I suspect my concerns might drag us into Martin Buber territory, where no one wants to go any more, and which certainly does not lend itself to the rule-making effort now in hand.