c o n s e n t

An  article on consent by Philippa Willitts for http://www.thefword.org.uk

Jack Tweed and Anthony Davis have been found not guilty of raping a teenage girl.

While this verdict has now been passed, and I therefore cannot suggest that either of them are guilty, I do want to challenge the idea that a woman not saying no means that you are able to just fuck them.

In Davis's testimony, it turns out that; The court heard that in the police interview Mr Davis said he saw his friend having sex with the woman against a window and that "she didn't protest it".

"She didn't say 'stop'. She didn't say anything to suggest she didn't want it to happen," he added. "She didn't say anything at all. I just got closer and closer. She didn't say anything."

It is never ok for a man to presume that he can fuck a woman based on the fact that she is being fucked by someone else, and that when he approaches she doesn't say anything.

Hugo Schwyzer says, “The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”, and there is a lot of truth in that.

Davis went on to say  "If a girl had been assaulted or raped, she would have come out of that room traumatised. "She would have been screaming, surely someone would have heard something."

This is a common misconception, and one which contributes to the low conviction rates of rapists in this country. That rape victims behave in a certain way. If she is not screaming and crying, if she doesn't instantly call the police, then she can't have really been raped.

Women cope in whatever way they can in order to survive. This can include denial and withdrawal as much as anger and seeking justice. There is a lot of shame for rape survivors, and a lot of self-questioning, which can mean that women do not immediately tell people - least of all the police, who don't have a great reputation for sensitivity in these situations - what has happened. This does not mean it did not happen!

aest.org have an article about Rape Trauma Syndrome which outlines and explains some of the many possible reactions that people who have been raped can experience and display.

I can't comment on Tweed and Davis being found not guilty. But I am using some details of their testimony to challenge some commonly-used assumptions about women's reactions to male violence, which apply in many rape cases we see.

http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2010/04/silence_does_no

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a handful of interviews about rape, rape myths, consent, trial issues and victim support..

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The Day I Faced My Rapist In Court

The morning I was to read the statement in the courtroom would be the second time that the man who raped me and I were going to be in the same room. But unlike that day, we were in a room open to the public, and I could say what I felt and what I thought.
The assailant had pleaded guilty to the two rapes, so there was no need for the trial. I was given the option of sending my statement or reading it in the courtroom. I decided to read it in person. Four years had passed since the assault, two and a half years to find the rapist, a year before I decided to press charges, and several months to indict him.
I entered at the back of the room, and sat in the second or third row. He entered by the front, on the right, and sat in the first row. He was looking down and I could only see his back. Earlier, the district attorney made sure I wasn't going to shout at him or call him names. She hadn't read the statement I'd written in advance. She sat me at a table in the front of the courtroom. I began to speak, but nobody understood me. M told me to start again, to speak up, and to speak more slowly. I did. The room quieted, and after I finished, there was complete silence:
"In the act of presenting charges, my identity is revealed. I have a name, I am recognized as a subject, a person. This should make my assailant aware that I am a person and of the damage of his violent act upon me. But it also implies that he knows who has presented the charges. I fear I could be attacked again."
Instead of blaming him, I calmly analyzed the damage done by his abuse. I explained how my relationship suffered and eventually ended. How for years I felt like a refugee without a home. How I lost self-confidence and hope. How I was constantly sad and lacked enthusiasm. How I felt unconnected to others and ended up isolating myself. How my perception of life had changed: I no longer looked forward to the future, I didn't enjoy my present and often thought about death. How I continually lived in fear. I wanted the rapist to listen to the effect of his action upon me, and also I wanted the judge to understand that the rape had not used an excess of cruelty and violence. I shared the fears I had for my life, my concern that other women would be raped, and brought up my fears about the length of sentences:
"This crime is not a rational thing. I was held in my own house, forced to be contained, silenced, and raped. He applied cruelty—threatening death and humiliation, making me an object, raped—but no more than was necessary to get what he wanted, not in excess. It was a violent act, because rape is a violent act, but he wasn't aggressive. I do not hate him as a person but I do hate what he did. It is not only that this is illegal, it is that it is also unfair and wrong. But still complexity must remain, and the knowledge that each of us is a person and must be treated as such. Believing in the force of humanity for changing an individual and a world, I express my will of the sentence to have no excess and to be rather short than long."
I understood the legal system as a way of settling matters, of drawing a line and moving forward. I faced the risk that my argument would be misinterpreted as implying I hadn't been raped. But I didn't want to simplify the issues because I was the victim. I wanted to be as fair as if it hadn't happened to me, not to fall into the temptation of excess, now that I had the opportunity to speak. I did it from fear, but also out of fairness. By requesting that the sentence be short rather than long, I may have risked that my attacker would come after me sooner rather than later, while I was very tired of living in fear. When I left the room, I felt as if I was untouchable.


Excerpted from Rape New York by Jana Leo. Available now from Feminist Press.

http://jezebel.com/5769530/the-day-i-faced-my-rapist-in-court

i found it particularly interesting (in relation to rape/ trauma and its after-effects) what she says around 9:00 onwards...

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“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanising and inhuman.”

Naomi Woolf

female chauvinist pigs

'I first noticed it several years ago. I would turn on television and find strippers in G-strings explaining how best to lap dance a man into orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out.

Charlie’s Angel’s, the film remake of the quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one in 2000 and made $125 million in theatres nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its stars, who kept talking about ‘strong women’ and ‘empowerment’, were dressed in alternating soft-porn styles – as massage parlour geishas, dominatrixes, yodelling Heidis in alpine bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 – in which the Angel’s perilous mission required them to perform stripteases – pulled in another $100 million domestically). In my own industry, magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag, which included titles such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, was hitting the stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.  

… this new raunch culture didn’t mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We’d earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification and misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture, where men had been enjoying themselves all along.

When I asked female viewers and readers what they got out of raunch culture, I heard similar things about empowering miniskirts and feminist strippers, and so on, but I also heard something else. They wanted to be ‘one of the guys’; they hoped to be experienced ‘like a man.’ Going to strip clubs or talking about porn stars was a way of showing themselves and the men around them that they weren’t ‘prissy little women’ or ‘girly-girls.’ Besides, they told me, it was all in fun, all tongue-in-cheek, and for me to regard this bacchanal as problematic would be old-school and uncool.

I tried to get with the program, bit I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavoured to banish good for women? Why is labouring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job it is to imitate arousal in the first place – going to render us sexually liberated?'

ariel levy

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susan brownmiller:

'further, "females more often than males reported 'disgust' and 'offense.'"

from whence comes this female disgust and offense? are females sexually backward or more conservative by nature? the gut distate that a majority of women feel when we look at pornography, a distaste that, incredibly, is no longer fashionable to admit, comes, i think, from the gut knowledge that we and our bodies are being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to boster that 'masculine esteem' which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing anonymous, panting play-things, adult toys, dehumanized onjects to be used, abused, broken and discarded. this, of course, is also the philosophy of rape.'

'by seeing the rapist always as a stranger, never as one of their own, and by viewing the female as a careless, dumb creature with an unfortunate tendency to stray, they exhorted, admonished and warned the female to hide herself from male eyes as much as possible. in short, they told her not to claim the privileges they reserved for themselves... the message they gave was to live a life of fear and to do it they appended the dire warning that the woman who did not follow the rules must be held responsible for her own violation.'

'but the irony, of course, is that while men successfully convinced eachother and us that women cry rape whith ease and glee, the reality is that victimized women have always been reluctant to report the crime and seek legal justice - because of the shame of public exposure, because of that complex double standard that makes a female feel culpable, even responsible, for any act of sexual aggression committed against her, because of possible retribution from the assailant, and because women have been presented with sufficiend evidence to come to the realistic conclusion that their accounts are recieved with harsh cynicism that forms the first line of male defense.'

'women have been excluded by tradition and design from all significant areas of law enforcement, from the police precinct, from the prosecutor's office, from the jury box and from the judge's bench, up to and including appellate and supreme court juristdictions, has creasted a doube handicap for rape victims seeking justice under the laws of a man's devise.'

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