Trigger Warning: The following post, while meant to be educational in nature, also poses the risk of triggering trauma. Before reading, please make sure that you have the  support and self-care you need to continue reading about sexual violence.

Following two recent sexual assaults in public transportation buses (one of which left the woman dead), Jakarta’s Governor Fauzi Bowo had some advice to prevent rape: women ought to ride a motorbike taxi side saddle, and no miniskirts if you plan to get in a taxi. Miniskirts might make the driver “fidgety” he says.

Fortunately, women are protesting his ludicrous, misogynistic, victim-blaming remarks.

But, actually, why aren’t men protesting the insult, too?  Because let’s face it—blaming a woman in a miniskirt for “inviting” rape is saying something about men, too. It’s saying that when a man is attracted to a woman, he might have little choice but to use his penis to do violence toward another human being. What a twisted way to think about male sexuality. (Go here to see a 3-minute talk by Hugo Schwyzer on the “myth of male weakness.”)

So, just in case Bowo missed the memo: miniskirts don’t cause violence and rape is not about lust.

Rape is about power, dominance, misogyny, racism, and the worst forms of male entitlement. And oh yah, it’s not just about women—men get raped too. Rape is about hierarchies of masculinity played out via a sexualized form of violence.

Miniskirts have nothing to do with the matter. Really, if it was that simple, we would have figured this all out a long time ago. Patriarchy’s rape culture is a hell of a lot more complicated than miniskirts.

So, check back later this week for more information on what creates rape-culture. But, here’s a hint: rape-culture is positively addicted to blaming the victim and implying or directly stating that the victim is responsible for preventing the assault.

To get a feel for how much we are socialized to blame the victim, read this list  about how to stop rape and consider why it almost seems comical to assign the responsibility to men.

But just to remember the good stuff happening: if you didn’t already know, there are lots of men working to end sexual violence. I mean, we gotta first thank the women pioneers who largely started these movements—women who courageously spoke out against violence from within many cultures and contexts—but there are many men who have now joined the work, too. Check out this U.N. page for one example of how men are educating men. Awesome.

I think Gov. Bowo could benefit from some education.

So, in summary, here’s some education for him: Men who rape will stop raping when other men stop making excuses for them. Men who rape will stop raping when other men learn from and join the seasoned women anti-violence workers who understand these issues from years of rigorous study and activism. Men who rape will stop raping when other men are fed-up with cultural messages that imply male sexuality is one miniskirt away from claiming the right to do violence to another human being.

Alright, I’ve got to get breakfast now and read some good poetry or go twirl in my backyard. This stuff is terrible to look at first thing in the morning. Make sure you go do something good for yourself, too.

Ancient Stories of Rape, Conquest, and “Protecting” Women
The biggest writing project that I have working on this month is about how to read the stories of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. There are many rape narratives in the Bible, and they all serve different literary purposes within larger narratives. But, one reoccurring theme I am seeing over and over is how many of these stories on rape are imbedded in stories on war. Read more »

(Trigger warning: This post contains content on sexual violence. Please care for yourself well—like good friends and healthy meals and spaces to grieve and beautiful poetry— if you decide to read this post and it triggers stories in your own life. Don’t be alone in your own pain; let others, whom you trust, hear your stories and care well for you.)

Today, I am mid-process in a research paper trying to parse out the intellectual history of rape in the U.S. context. I am trying to figure out how male sexual violence against women has been conceptualized historically, in order to figure out why it still exists at such high rates. The U.S., in contrast to other cultures and places, is called “rape-prone” by anthropologists who study these things. Certain male academics in the sciences are spouting their answer for why: rape exists because it is part of evolutionary, biological patterns, and that’s that.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with them. And their argument sounds a lot like the arguments for racism in the 1800s that came from a similar rather twisted Darwinian claim.

Nor, though, do I have answers yet to replace these male academics who seem to understand rape so well. But this I do know: In the American context, we have profound levels of collective dissociation around rape. This dissociation is as old and deep as the beginning of the nation, in which it was perfectly legal for masters to rape slave women as much as they wanted to, and then keep the children of those rapes (their own children) in chattel slavery. In the history of my country, fathers were legally permitted to own and sell their children as slaves. I can’t get over this thought. If there is one thought this semester that I am stuck on, in the midst of all that I have learned my first semester at Yale, it is this one.

As I research rape, what is very apparent is that you can’t talk about rape without also talking about the history of racism, class, economics, and homophobia. It is all interconnected, in the midst of the shifting background of American sexual discourse. Patterns of rape are tied to specific contexts and the intersection of many systems of domination.

So, what’s the context today in American society that creates such atrociously high rates of rape, rape that usually is perpetrated not by strangers but by fathers, friends, boyfriends…men whom a woman is supposed to be able to trust? The trauma of being terrorized by someone you know is a much different experience than being terrorized by a stranger. Both experiences, of course, leave the world feeling unsafe and leave the survivor with profound levels of pain. But what I am concerned about in my own research is that until we stop conceiving of a rapist only as that man in a ski mask who jumps out of the bush, we won’t be able to name the experiences that most women have of rape—that the sexual violence is occurring in the context of relational structures that are supposed to be safe.

There is something happening in the U.S. context that is contributing to a culture in which a man can force himself into a women and his actions don’t seem really like an anomaly—or are not even named as sexual violence— but rather his actions are normalized and just viewed as an extension of all the messages we already hear about masculinity: that a “man” is aggressive, not in control of his actions once he is aroused; that he is just living out a biological, evolutionary drive; that a woman’s body exists to serve a man’s wishes. (And whether or not we say women’s bodies exist to serve men, our high rates of rape in the U.S. communicate this cultural belief.)

All these messages, continually repeated about masculinity and sex, are rubbish. Patriarchal myths. And I have heard them in Christian contexts, too, if a bit disguised in Christian language about “serving” one’s husband.

Some men rape their friends, girlfriends, and wives because they feel perfectly entitled to women’s bodies—because their privileges as men within this patriarchy leave them somehow removed from any imaginative, empathic capacity for what it feels like to be forcibly penetrated. Or maybe they can imagine, and don’t really care. Or maybe they can imagine, and at some sick level, they enjoy the level of harm they are perpetrating. I don’t know.

I just know that it must stop. Whatever we are doing in this culture to perpetrate myths about masculinity—the messages we give men that somehow give them the “right” to assume dominance of women’s bodies—these messages themselves must be named as violent.

Specifically, I would ask that if you are a man reading this post, recognize that you have a tremendously important role in stopping male violence against women. If you choose not to be a cultural bystander, but rather choose to speak out in situations in which you hear these myths being perpetuated, you will be standing for justice. If you pay attention, you’ll hear the myths in music, movies, frats, locker rooms, dinnertime conversations, biology books, class lectures, and sermons. The messages saturate the air we all breathe.

I can’t walk into a coffee shop or my gym at Yale without hearing the myths blaring from the music. I often am left wondering why I have to live as a woman in this culture penetrated by those messages in so many public spaces. I mean, I go to rowing practice for self-care and health, and then have to put up with music that is utter misogyny. And I can’t ignore this harm anymore. I can’t dissociate from it. What it would feel like for a man in that room to stand up and say, “This music is totally unacceptable.” I don’t ask for a man’s participation in this because his role is to “protect” women in some paternalistic way. I ask for it because until men partner with women—until men see male violence against women as a male problem, not just something for women’s studies class to care about–we can only get so far in this conversation. But until we take seriously the harm and stop collectively dissociating, the messages about masculinity will go on blaring, unchecked and unengaged.

Trigger warning: This post contains very difficult content.

Last Tuesday, Annie Le, a young female graduate student at Yale, was last seen by surveillance cameras walking into a university lab at 10 a.m. What is likely her body (though still unidentified) was found Sunday in the wall of the basement of the building, the same day she was to be married. The police at the point are disclosing few details.

What we do know about the case implies a horrific act of violence against a young woman. While the details of the case have not and cannot be disclosed, I believe that the information is only going to get more horrific—that in the next developments in this story we will be learning about elements of sadistic sexual violence, which is all too often part of the script of a murdered woman.

And I am left wondering how and if this type of violence should be understood as a different type of violence than that which is all too familiar in New Haven? I just moved to New Haven last month, and I have quickly discovered that it is a city, like many others, with high rates of crime, gang-related violence, and a social milieu struggling with racism, classism, and marginalization. When young African American men are shot on New Haven streets, how do the news outlets cover their stories? Are they dismissed? Are there lives given just as much value and attention?

Those questions are important to ask, and we need to ask them. At the same time, it is necessary to parse out another set of questions:Can we give ourselves permission to ask how Annie Le’s murder is a different kind of violence than the street violence or gang-violence in New Haven, though no more or less tragic? Can we give ourselves permission to ask how this murder is a cultural mirror for a particular gendered script of violence?

It needs to be said at this point in my discussion that far more men than women are killed in homicides (and far more men commit them, too), and so our attention and compassion should certainly not just be focused on women-as-victims.And yet, at the same time, the violence done to women by men in our culture is often is of a different kind—and needs to be understand that way—if we are going to make progress in preventing such horror.

In the background of Annie Le’s story is an insidious cultural script dedicated to upholding violence toward women that is knit with sadism and misogyny. The script lurks deep in our cultural psyche, though somehow we must dismiss it over and over again. We have popular video games that give the player points for raping and murdering a woman. We have certain kinds of widespread pornography built on making violence toward women erotic. We have the Twilight series, the recent bestselling vampire books whose script is built on whether the helpless Bella will be murdered by the man with whom she is in love, should he get “carried away” in his sexual passion for her. And we have our seemingly “harmless” crime shows every night on television that entertain us with their ubiquitous storyline—another woman raped and murdered.Another act of violence toward women to increase the ratings.

There is a part of me that shudders that Annie Le’s story—splashed all over the headlines— is becoming another form of T.V. entertainment. Another Law and Order show, only this episode is all the more titillating because it’s real.

Amidst the profound grief of this week’s tragedy in New Haven, the question becomes: will we continue to see such violence toward a woman as the act of a lone sociopath—or will we have the courage to ask how this violence is part of a much larger cultural and gendered script, a script in which we are all a part?

And what is at stake for us if we start to ask that question?

I remember being shocked when I first read Marie Fortune’s book Sexual Violence and I learned that marital rape has only recently been made a crime in all 50 U.S. states. I was in my early teens (1993) when the last state finally conceded that a husband does not have legal rights to force sex on his wife.