GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE GUIDE TO LIFE ⇒

“The personal is political” was adopted as a feminist catch cry to encapsulate the idea that the personal experiences of a woman’s life wasn’t something that happened to an individual in a vacuum but there was a commonality to women’s experiences that placed them out of the personal private realm into a hierarchy of political power relations. This phrase encompassed many aspects of women’s lives – the housewife who had given up a promising career to care for children, the battered wife, the victim of rape, the victim of incest all occupied a place in a hierarchy of power relations between men and women whereby their experiences were understood as happening as a direct result of these imbalances.

In the area of rape and sexual violence the phrase that was coined to sum this up was “rape is about violence, not sex” which removed rape from the idea of an isolated sexual act and placed it as an expression of the male sex’s domination of the female. Susan Brownmiller in her book, “Against our will: Men, woman and Rape,” fully expounded this theory reaching the famous conclusion that, “rape is an act by which all men keep all woman in a state of fear.” Rape was not about individual, socially depraved man, but was an act in which all men were implicated and the subjugation of women brought about by the constant campaign of sexual violence was a situation of benefit to all men. The clear division between perpetrator and non-perpetrator was removed. Not only were all men potential rapists but all men were rapists as whether or not they actually committed the physical act of rape, they collected the benefits that accrued from it.

In effect what this strategy did was to remove the sexual content from rape and sexual abuse of children and reframe it instead as pure violence. Men didn’t rape from an overwhelming sexual urge, which could have been viewed as some kind of justification to argue that the act had been beyond their control. Rape was an instrument of war. This theory has a lot to recommend it. The use of rape as an instrument of terror in war is hard to deny, as well as the use of rape in marriage as a way to control a disobedient wife. It was also probably a strategic move to simplify the problem of rape into a tidy political package by removing the taint of sex. Maybe sex itself was too private to be brought into the public sphere, so sexual violence became simply violence. Maybe sex is too complex, too rooted in a confusing mass of conflicting, barely conscious urges to be easily unchallengeable when it is used as a source of polemic. Also the legacy of Freud and later psychoanalysis and its theories on sexuality had for too long been used as a convenient way to disguise the reality of sexual violence. In a mass of oedipal complexes and unconscious drives the idea of the sexual innocent had disappeared and the idea of complicity inhered in every sexual encounter, no matter how violent, and no matter how much the woman expressed her lack of consent. A lot of this issue hinged around the idea of consent and that was where psychoanalytic theories played havoc. Introducing as it did the idea of a divided self, with both the conscious and an unconscious that was ultimately unknowable, it was very hard to state with any certainty when the conscious act of “consent” had occurred. A conscious lack of consent could be merely masking the unconscious urges that were consenting.

Ultimately, the simplification of the issues that 70s Feminism attempted, as if to distil out the essential political concepts from within a mass of personal details, failed the women that it set out to save. It failed to effectively describe the experiences of the women who were the victims and ended up silencing those for whom it aimed to provide a voice.

There is no escaping from the fact that rape is a sexual act. The intrusion of a penis into a vagina cannot be removed from any sexual connotation. In this discussion of rape I will include both the rape of adults and of children. They are in some senses seen as very separate and there are issues that are specific to each, but they are both part of the same continuum and central to both is the key issue of consent.

The impetus for this discussion came from a comment made at a forum I attended on sex, art and pornography. The general feeling of the forum was pro-pornography and anti-censorship and pro personal choice in forms of sexual expression, but one by one the speakers all said, “of course we’re not talking about children here – it is not negotiable that children must be protected until they reach the age of consent.” After several speakers had said this, a woman in the audience questioned this assumption and asked what this idea of consent meant anyway. This sparked off in me a whole thought process around that word and all I’d ever heard about it. Children may believe they are consenting but their consent is uninformed. And adult consenting who is a victim of childhood sexual abuse is consenting from their habitual position of victimisation, so their consent is unenlightened. It seemed a lot of the time in my experience of essentialist-based feminist groups that the aim was a retrospective re-evaluation of experiences where you believed yourself to be consenting but on reflection you uncover all the parts of you that weren’t really fully saying yes. This sounds a lot like the backlash attitude of women making things up and in some ways maybe it is, but what I keep coming back to is, whatever the facts of the situation, which are anyway non-discoverable and therefore irrelevant, any attitude of simplification and essentialising of sexual violence is profoundly unhelpful and inadequate to describe the real lived experience.

1994

How would it feel to be raped?, 1994?

I'm almost certainly not qualified to answer this. I wonder if anyone is, or if rape is an experience that is just too intensely individual. I don’t think that I have ever been raped, although I used to believe that I had been. I used to have memories of being raped as a child - so-called 'recovered memories'. These kind of memories are in such disrepute these days. Part of me thinks this is justified, that to question these memories is a very good idea. But having said that, I do feel somewhat suspicious: there is part of me that agrees wholeheartedly with the feminist position that sees this questioning as a very predictable manifestation of backlash.

But to come back to my initial question, I wonder if it's even meaningful to ask how it feels to be raped because surely everyone knows. Isn't the 'feeling of being raped' just so widely disseminated within culture - well a particular subset of culture anyway - that to claim some kind of privileged knowledge just because you happen to have actually been raped is no longer possible. I don't mean by this some kind of idea that because of sexual inequality, every woman lives in a constant state of being raped - that's just feminist dogma and whether it's true or not I hold no truck with it. No, what I mean is that I, at any rate, have heard so many women's stories on TV and in magazines and books that I can clearly identify a 'feeling of being raped'. With my own memories, I feel that if I sat down to describe them they'd just come out sounding like anyone else's experiences. I know on some level this universality is believed to be comforting. I've been told by far too many counsellors that I should feel better about myself because everyone feels the way I do. To use specific examples, everyone feels that they were to blame, lots of people completely suppress their memories, everyone feels a sense of panic that they cannot rationalize away when it comes to being sexual with people later, everyone feels despair and that they would like to die. I don't find this universality comforting though and more than that I feel as if my experiences have been somehow stolen. Not only can I not talk about them without sounding like a cliche, but I can't even identify them as my brain is too full with an 'experience of rape' for me to identify my experience of rape.

And here is where believing memories becomes so problematic. I'm not after some kind of misplaced sympathy here. I certainly don't buy that feminist bullshit that anyone who believes they have been raped has been. That seems to me excessively naive and a complete denial of the power of some ideas about sexual violence, many of them originating from feminism, that have become a social paradigm. Not to mention that it also represents an unforgivable disregard of the complexity involved in the formation of a human psyche.

The problem is that we probably all live in a state of fear. I know I do. Most of my despair comes from the thought that I am going to have to go through my life with this much fear. I'm terrified of other people doing things to me, and all my fantasies are built around somehow finding an insurance against fear, which I fantasise as coming in the form of a steady relationship or financial security. Of course immediately after I have these thoughts then the fear kicks in of what it’s going to be like when, having just got used to these securities, they are taken away from me. I usually end up deciding it would be better never to have had them in the first place.

But anyway this fear is probably a universal truth, dubious concept though that is, and it seems to me to be a real problem when there is an attempt to explain this fear as being a part of some kind of cause and effect dynamic. I know that's what I did when I decided that I had been sexually abused as a child. That's not to say that I have experienced a manifestation of false memory syndrome - false memory syndrome is an irrelevant concept. Whether or not the development of it as an idea does represent some kind of backlash, it's important to remember that this would be a political strategy aimed at undermining the political system of feminism, and would have nothing to do with the issue of sexual abuse except for using it as a convenient vehicle. The real issue of contention is the idea that there exists a discoverable truth in these cases, which is the assumption behind the arguments of both feminists and proponents of false memory syndrome. The issue I have with feminist dogma, as the belief system I've had most direct contact with, is that it ends up being extremely damaging. Ultimately, it fails completely to create any kind of understanding of lived experience. I don't believe that using subjective experience as a basis for making any kind of general political statement is possible - but then as I also don't believe there is anything else but subjective experience, this becomes a problem.

I'm left with is philosophical belief system that is a passionate distrust of any kind of system of belief, and this would be fine except that I have to wonder if, in a world where there's so much pain and injustice, morality might demand that I commit myself to something more.