Guest Column: ‘Rape culture’ is still sexual assault

Guest Column

Jane Drover, PhD

I was asked this week to write a piece to clear up the misconceptions around the term “Rape Culture”. I didn’t want to enter this debate, but after a young woman in my Gen Ed class thanked me for speaking up in the Metro the other day, I changed my mind. A serious discussion on sexual violence mattered to her just as it should matter to us all. So here I am.

I am supposed to offer you a piece that clarifies the misconceptions around the expression “Rape Culture”, but I cannot. The reason I can’t stems from the very term itself. It is a term that functions to prevent specificity, history and ultimately agency.

“Rape Culture” is a conveniently constructed catchphrase – albeit an anachronistic and criminal one – used as a kind of portmanteau or meme to hide the truth about our society. It is a term meant to have many interpretations, to seem ahistorical, to be hard to pin down, one impossible to put in “so many words”. And that is precisely its function. It hides the truth, it obscures the issue and it allows perpetrators to escape being part of the discussion. At the very least we could call it “Rapist Culture” to assign some semblance of blame and agency. But the assaulter is hidden as is the ugly truth: we live in a world of violence against women and have so throughout history. What is different now in our everyday parlance is the term “Rape Culture”. We can point to it as the problem. So when we hear that four out of five female undergraduates surveyed at Canadian universities report being victims of violence in a dating relationship, (Sexual Assault Centre, Hamilton) we can just shake our head and say that we are living in a rape culture. This just happens. It’s rape culture that’s to blame as if somehow it has an existence all on its own.

Yet that’s a lie. I don’t rape, my friends don’t and neither do the students I’ve met over the years. Then who does and why is there a collective amnesia around the prevalence of sexual assault? Men are assaulted as are people with disabilities, pregnant women, children, college students. Yet we don’t discuss this. We are too busy talking about rape culture.

But here’s a strange thing. We also live in a time of armed robberies, drug wars, home invasions, tax evasions – you get my point here – yet we don’t say we live in a home-invasion culture or a robbery culture. Why is that? Why is one crime – sexual assault – called a culture while the others are not? On reason is that we do not live in a culture. Culture is something made, expressed and shared. It evidences itself in our art, our buildings, our music and writing. Culture is the highest expression of our thought either in artistic creations or in our institutions – like MRU. To apply it to sexual assault is to give that crime a certain gravitas or permanence. Again, this is a lie.

What we live in or more accurately what we live under is an ideology – one bell hooks (social activist) calls “White Supremacist, Patriarchal, Global Capitalism”. Now this term has specificity, has a history and thus can be explained or clarified. We can acknowledge that under such an ideology, women are objectified, which each one is, sexual assault is not a surprise. But it is not coming from nowhere: it comes from this accepted violence.

Patriarchal societies like Canada perpetuate misogyny. Thrive on it even. These societies profit from the sexual exploitation of women at work, at home, online or abroad. Behind that exploitation is violence. It’s a violence that we even see erotized, what bell hooks calls “pugilistic eroticism”. It’s the turn on one feels from beating up a woman or seeing a mangled dead woman in a movie. It’s the turn on in getting physical with a woman in residence, for instance, who says no to having sex. All these abuses we can specify one we understand our current ideology and how it works on us – men included. How else can we understand the following statistic? SACHA (Sexual Assault Centre, Hamilton) cites a recent study in which 60 per cent of male college students surveyed said they would rape if they were certain they wouldn’t get caught. I learned this in a class by a student presentation. After hearing that statistic, one of the men in class did the calculation and said: that would mean four of us in here would rape. A sobering moment. We are all victims here.

So let’s change the dialogue and challenge anyone who hides behind the indefinite but conveniently “catchy” term “Rape Culture”. Remind them that using such a term is a cop out; it’s a way to avoid holding our society accountable. And it avoids naming the crime: Sexual Assault. Invoking that empty expression causes us to overlook, simplify, even give up in the face of what seems to be an unchanging culture. That’s another lie. We can change out world. We can name the misogyny and the structural sexism and heterosexism under patriarchal capitalism. Speak out, act out and resist. History matters. Words matter.

You matter.

Thanks to my student in Gen Ed 1401 for speaking out and keeping me real.