#sexual violence cw
@aellagirl’s recent post “The Rape Spectrum Survey Results” is great and provides a lot of food for thought, but it reminds me of one of my main issues with these discussions, which has to do with overlooking the factor of how much the object of the behavior in question did or did not want/like it, and how overlooking this leads to a lot of fuzzy thinking. (As far as I recall, I wasn’t audience to the original survey and certainly didn’t take it. Also, as a non-paying subscriber – sorry Aella, I still love your writing! – I can’t comment on it. But I’ve been meaning to expound at least upon the “did the victim in fact want/like it” issue here.)
[Long effortpost below. Content warning for the obvious, including some discussion in the second half on Donald Trump’s history of sexual violence.]
The array of mildy/somewhat/very rapey situations listed in the survey, and whether they qualify as rape or not, is thought-provoking in a relevant way, and there were a few (“Emerson and Frankie”, “26-year-old and 16-year-old”) to which I’m not entirely sure what my answer would be. Others are incredibly clear-cut to me even though they were contentious among the survey-takers (e.g. the Miller/Nico situation is a serious crime, but the crime is robbery, not rape! More controversially, I would suggest that the Carey/Aspen situation is not one of rape but of violent assault, where it so happens that the violence is part of a consensual sexual encounter). There are a couple of other “does this qualify as rape or not?” situations that I’ve considered myself that were not represented in the survey but don’t want to get into here. I’m sure someone with enough imagination could come up with a good hundred. (I remember John Nerst writing an Everything Studies article that linked to another article listing, as far as I remember, many dozens of such hypotheticals, but I’m not about to go on a search for this now.)
One of my main reactions was that I have somewhat of an issue with one of the main premises of the survey: the implicit assumption of significance to the term rape that is divorced from immorality/badness. Aella bent over backwards to make sure that the survey participants answered not according to whether each situation was bad, or how bad it was, but to whether the situation fell under the definition of the word rape. I understand why she went out of her way to do this, and there are certainly some scenarios in there where it’s clear to me that the obvious badness of the situation is quite separate from its rapiness or lack thereof (e.g. the Miller/Nico one which was clearly robbery and therefore very bad, but not rape). But I have trouble understanding the point of asking ourselves the question “Is this rape?” or “Do most people consider this rape?” without some sort of assumption that our definition of rape should capture some measure of badness of a questionable sexual situation. Of course we could instead be asking about whether something qualifies as rape according to a legal definition, but then we all have to do some pretty specialized law research, decide which state, country, and time period we are judging with respect to, and so on; this obviously wasn’t the object of the survey. Without referring to the law as it exists (somewhere and sometime), we are left with forming our own personal definitions of the term, and can it really be expected that most survey participants have developed these definitions to not at least be inspired by what they consider to be mildly bad versus severely bad?
But the real issue I wanted to discuss here, the one I mentioned in the opening of this post, is the fact that I consider the internal experience of the person acted/aggressed upon to be crucial to whether an act can be considered rape, which seems like it should be completely uncontroversial to me, and perhaps it is uncontroversial and assumed by nearly everyone in these discussions, but there still seems to be a lot of sloppy thinking with regard to it.
There are several scenarios laid out in the survey that I would not be able to answer, not because I consider them too gray and nuanced for me to feel confident in an answer (like a couple I listed several paragraphs above), but because of completely missing information about the victim(?)’s feeling about what is happening.
Teagan and Vic are at a party, making out. Teagan escalates. Vic seems nervous and tense, but doesn’t resist or say no. Teagan does not ask for verbal consent. They have sex.
Harper goes on a date with Kerry. Harper demonstrates being very interested in Kerry, with warm body language, compliments, and flirting. Harper gets progressively drunk, and at the end of the night is very intoxicated. They go to Kerry’s apartment and have sex. Kerry is sober the whole time.
Micah goes on a date with Kim, and seems uninterested, with cold body language and comments like “not being the kind of person to have sex on first dates”. By the end of the night, Micah is very intoxicated. They go to Kim’s apartment and have sex. Kim is sober the whole time.
To my mind, the applicability of “rape” to each of these situations rests primarily on whether Vic, Harper, and Micah are happy with what happened, in the case of the latter two, whether they would have consented had they been sober, or whether their sober selves beforehand and afterwards wanted something like that to happen. This isn’t specified at all in any of the above three. This fact about the making of the survey imposes an implicit background assumption that whether an action is rape or not entirely depends on what is perceivable from the point of view of the rapist(?). This way of looking at it strikes me somehow very… perpetrator-centered rather than victim-centered? And I don’t even know if I should see that as a good thing or a bad thing, but it strikes me as wrong.
Whereas meanwhile, the following scenario, which was split almost 50-50 among participants’ answers, is completely clear-cut to me:
Carroll has sex with Darby at the end of a date. Darby gives mild resistance, looking unenthusiastic and saying hedged “no"s, but secretly really wants and is enjoying it.
If someone really wants and enjoys sex they are having, then they are not being raped.
I claim that rapey/possibly-rape behavior should be thought of in a similar way to how we think of drunk driving. When someone drives intoxicated, it’s not a certainty that they’ll get in an accident and hurt someone, but by making the choice to drive in that condition, they’re running a significantly elevated risk of something like that happening. That’s exactly why it’s really bad to drive drunk! However, someone is not guilty of manslaughter just by virtue of having chosen to drive drunk, unless their drunk driving results in the death of someone else. Again, drunk driving is very bad, precisely because it might result in someone’s (most likely another person’s) injury or death. Choosing to drive under the influence means not at all holding one’s own or others’ well-being in high regard. For this reason, we treat it like a crime, even in instances where no bodily harm results from it. But it isn’t a crime on the level of actually, say, killing someone through drunk driving.
(Upsetting personal story time: I have a childhood friend, who I remember as an exceptionally kind and compassionate person, who accidentally killed someone and permanently injured someone else from behind the wheel under the influence of alcohol when he was 19. As far as I know, he’s still doing the prison sentence. I didn’t find out about any of this until he had just entered prison, and I remember one of my dad’s main reactions being anger that his prison sentence was 12 years when others make the exact same horrible choice that he did all over the place and, if they happen to get caught, receive far milder punishments – it was unlucky that my friend’s horrible choice actually had tragic consequences. And I do get where my dad is coming from. This gets into the whole issue of consequentialism-based punishment being meted out according to expected consequencesversusactual consequences of a bad choice, a topic for another post maybe. But I still kind of think that at the end of the day, my friend is guilty of a worse crime because of what the consequences turned out to be and that this should be reflected in how the law sanctions it, even while I continue to feel heartbroken for my friend who is far too good of a person to ”deserve“ his whole life to be half-ruined in this way.)
If you begin or continue to have sex with someone when they’re not displaying unambiguous consent, you are not necessarily raping them, you are running a very high risk of raping them and so are not holding their bodily autonomy in much regard. Precisely for this reason, this is really awful, irresponsible behavior and should always be treated as such (even if it turns out that no harm was actually done in the sense of the sexual partner wanting/liking it the whole time). Perhaps it should even be prosecuted as a (in the absence of the other person experiencing nonconsensual sex!) mild crime. But what would make it actually rape is if the other person in fact did not consent to beginning or continuing the sexual encounter.
When a sober person has sex with someone who is obviously drunk, they’re incurring a very high risk that the other person doesn’t really consent to what’s going on (even if that person is like Harper above and acted in a way that suggested wanting to have sex later). That is not okay behavior! Whether or not it deserves to be called rape, though, in my view depends mainly on whether the other person feels directly afterwards that this was an encounter that they wanted. (I’m oversimplifying here, I suppose, and probably their feelings even while intoxicated and having the experience bear some weight here as well, although we’re assuming for the sake of argument that they were rendered incapable of resisting or expressing a desire to stop at the time. It’s a thorny situation, and I don’t mean to imply that deciding the next morning that they’re okay with what happened is necessarily enough to qualify the night before as "not rape”.)
And the behavior of Carroll above is obviously unacceptably awful, even though he obviously lucked out here since Darby wanted and enjoyed it. I would go so far as to say that Darby (after a certain kind of wising up in the aftermath) should resent and distrust Carroll as a person who showed he clearly doesn’t care about her autonomy. No doubt this is why nearly half of survey participants chose to brand Carroll as a rapist here, even while to me it’s a no-brainer that he did not in fact commit rape. (Of course, while Darby’s behavior might seem odd, I imagine there are some people, particularly women, who behave this way, and that it was even to some extent a societal expectation of women many decades in the past. To my view this was incredibly damaging as it muddied society’s perception of rape for a long time and slowed our progress in addressing it as a serious problem.)
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This brings me to the fact that the view I just expressed extends to all types of sexual assault. Which brings me to Donald Trump and the very infamous the Access Hollywood tape. I thought of writing out my thoughts dissecting it at the time (the gist of which would be what I’m about to write below), then didn’t, and now I’m very, very late to this party. But here goes. (Spoiler: Trump’s words are quite disgusting no matter how you look at it, but evaluating them as evidence of sexual assault is much trickier than people are making it out to be.)
The common perception, at least among those of us who hate Trump, is that he directly admitted to sexual assault – he even said he “grab[bed] them by the p****”, for crying out loud! Which… it’s probably true that what he was describing was sexual assault, but only if the women involved didn’t want/like it. I see a lot of ways to interpret he words that leave room for different conclusions about whether or not he grabbed women sexually when they didn’t want it.
First of all, there’s ambiguity in the statement, “When you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything.” On the one hand, it could mean, “When you’re a star, other people are too intimidated to stop you from doing whatever you want to them.” Which absolutely would cements Trump as a psychopathic perpetrator of sexual violence. But it could also mean, “When you’re a star, women are so attracted to you that they’re willing for you to do anything; you don’t even have to ask because it’s a certainty that they want it.” (Or if he’s being a little more nuanced, he might be thinking more along the lines of “I don’t even have to ask because a lot of the time they want it, and I being a very stable genius have the judgment to know without asking when they do or don’t want it.”) I would say that the latter seems somewhat more likely to be what Trump meant, because the former would be a straightforward admittance to being a psychopathic monster – a thing which Trump is, mind you, but I doubt he’s self-aware enough to know it and that’s much less likely something he would actively brag about (unless I’m just really naive about what people in his circles are okay with others bragging about).
If in fact Trump meant “When you’re a star, women are so attracted to you that they’re willing for you to do anything; I don’t even have to ask because it’s a certainty that they want it / because I have a good enough sense of these things to know if they want it”, then that of course doesn’t rule out the possibility that what he’s describing is sexual assault. In fact, I find that possibility extremely high. It’s not like women typically want to be grabbed sexually by a near-stranger. Even estimating that 5% of women want to be grabbed in the you-know-where by a near-stranger with no asking beforehand, even if that near-stranger is a major charismatic celebrity, is probably being a little generous. And we can’t exactly assume that Trump was remotely correct in his judgment of these situations. <sarcasm> Trump of all people doesn’t seem like the type to overestimate his own attractiveness or abilities at anything or harbor delusions of grandeur, does he? </sarcasm>
Then again, it’s also possible that this was all empty bragging, that Trump just wanted Billy Bush to think that he was such a star that so many women wanted him to kiss them or grab them in an intimate manner that he didn’t even have to ask but that Trump never actually tried this. I actually find this plausible, if still rather unlikely, but again it’s predicated on the plausibility of Trump considering this a thing to boast about, which again suggests that he didn’t mean, “they let me because they’re too intimidated to resist”.
There was a lot of talk at the time about how dare he dismiss this as “locker room talk”, “normal” men’s locker room talk isn’t like that (one of the only times I’ve heard “typical” default male behavior defended in feminist discourse!), and indeed I was agreeing with them by pointing out that men may brag about how much they score but primarily on the basis that women want them and like it. And yet, it’s perfectly plausible that this is more or less the kind of bragging that Trump genuinely meant to be doing.
To summarize, the “testimony” on the “bus tape” suggests that Trump sexually assaulted a number of women, if he was in fact wrong in judging that they wanted it, and if he wasn’t in fact just spewing empty words for the purpose of boasting. (And if he didn’t mean “they let you do it” as in “they’re too intimidated to stop me from doing it” in the first place, which as I explained above, I doubt is what he meant.) I would say that still leaves a very high likelihood that his comments refer to actual sexual assaults. But others may disagree on the likelihood, and the fact that there’s room for judging such likelihood means that there’s room for many to instinctively interpret his comments as not being proof of sexual assault.
Now I say none of this to defend Trump, who is rather disgusting for saying those things in the first place even assuming the best possible interpretation and who is incredibly disgusting for a multitude of other reasons (including evidence elsewhere of sexual violence). I’m picking this apart to make a point in response to all those who express mystification at how so many people on the more Trumpy side of the political spectrum (even women!) can possibly dismiss the “bus tape” comments or say they’re basically okay or at least not an ironclad confession of sexual assault. It’s because sexual assault, in my mind (and so I’m sure in many people’s minds), requires that the potential victim doesn’t want or like it, and there’s room for interpretation by reasonable people as to whether Trump was claiming that the women whose genitals he grabbed didn’t want or like it. And part of the reason why so many people on my side of the Trumpism divide are so mystified about how anyone can choose to overlook the “bus tape” comments has a lot to do, I imagine, with fuzzy thinking around the idea of sexual violence by definition requiring the victim not being okay with it.
And what’s most frustrating to me about the whole thing is that it’s plainly obvious to me that Trump is in fact a repeat rapist and a repeat sexual assailant. Not because of his recorded comments (which, as I’ve argued, by themselves are very weak as evidence), but because of twenty or so women who have come forward with straightforward allegations of such behavior. And yet, there’s disproportionately very little talk about the actual allegations, and the conversation about Trump’s sexual misconduct has generally revolved around the Access Hollywood tape. I get that the tape gripped and chilled people a lot more, because that’s his actual voice we’re hearing, but it all still seems very unfortunate. People wonder why more of the country hasn’t completely turned against Trump with regard to whether or not he’s guilty of severe sexual misconduct, and there are many reasons for this, and maybe focusing on the actual allegations wouldn’t convince that many new people in practice, but I bet it might be more effective than harping on the tape all the time.
mobility aids are PART OF US. they are not accessories you can just take and play with. even if you ask us nicely to take it, it’s still weird. you wouldn’t fuck around with someone’s leg like it’s a toy. so don’t fuck around with our mobility aids like they are.
even if you think you are “helping” us, you still need to ASK and GET PERMISSION to touch us and our mobility aides
you can’t imagine how terrifying it is to have someone forcibly move you when your body is fragile and doesn’t move like theirs and YOU DONT KNOW THEM!!! Its creepy!!! it’s like common sense goes out the window when it comes to disabled ppls boundaries. stop being weird
Removing someone’s mobility aid is basically like tying someone up: it’s incredibly serious and you should basically never be doing it unless you’ve specifically been asked to.
CW abuse:
Something I wish i’d known when I was younger is that constantly refusing or making it harder for you to access your mobility aid can be an abuse tactic. If someone is happy moving your chair or cane, especially without asking, that is a massive red flag.
In my case my partner would keep my wheelchair completely out of my sight/ reach “to save space”. Then one day they refused to get it back. This meant I was physically unable to leave their bed, leaving me very vulnerable to other kinds of abuse, I was reliant on them for everything that kept me alive (they prevented me getting access to paid carers), and when I got scared/ hurt/ raped by them I might as well have been chained up because it was impossible for me to leave or get help (they also took my phone charger so I couldn’t call anyone). It was an incredibly dangerous situation and I only just survived.
