Tori Amos once sang, "Yes, I wore a slinky red thing. Does that mean I should spread for you, your friends, your father, Mr. Ed?"
I do not intend nor hope to demonize men, but considering that rape is a crime committed almost exclusively by one gender (around 98 percent), we must recognize that "something is rotten in the state of [masculinity]," to borrow a line from Shakespeare. Thus, the issue lies within the societal construction of maleness.
Amos' lyrics directly point to the problematic sense of entitlement to women's sexuality and their bodies that is encoded in the social construction of masculinity. Stigmatizing sexual inexperience and conflating sexual prowess with maleness, the norm requires that men seek out sex and obtain it from women, who may hide behind the decorum of continual resistance to avoid the consequences of double standards. But having sparked a man's interest, a woman should follow through, for women generally cannot refuse sex without some form of backlash — whether it's being called a "tease," other forms of derision or potentially enduring some form of sexual assault, at which point the disconcerting standard becomes even more problematic.
Men, expected to be sexually active and get what they want when they want it, may ignore a woman's refusal or her withdrawal of consent. If our culture creates such a disparity between the levels of body autonomy among different genders, then rape will persist, and rapists will continue to almost always be men. But imagine if our cultural notions supported women's free reign of their sexuality and disavowed dated masculine ideals. Would it be too farfetched to surmise a major change in rape statistics? And to clarify, I do not aim to explain away society's ills by blaming society itself — but I am talking on a more general, systemic level in order to highlight the contribution of gender inequality to the prevalence of men as rapists.
Additionally, reframing of the notion of a rapist is essential to understanding the way in which sexism promotes rape culture. The tendency to attribute some sort of mental disorder to rapists often leads people to overlook the sense of entitlement, among other faulty gender narratives, as an important aspect involved in the motivation behind the widespread sexual violence against women and girls in the United States, which has one of the highest rates of rape in the Western world. We must, therefore, lift the conception of a rapist out of the ensnaring realm of psychoanalysis and personal knowledge, which can both function to protect criminals and hold the victims responsible. Whether involving attempts to pass the blame or to discredit the allegation with floods of testimonials praising the moral fiber of the rapist, ignoring the systemic factors helps no one. It often, in fact, furthers the trauma and contributes to rape culture.
Banal phrases like, "He's happily married with kids" or, "But he does well in school and volunteers," often enter the mainstream discourse, highlighting the resultant cognitive dissonance of those who try to resolve the paradox of identifying upstanding men as rapists. It is thus imperative to recognize the influence of gender inequality and gender expectations. Doing so allows for the basis of a more accurate model of a rapist as a man who perhaps sticks too closely to the norms, and in doing so acts out this sense of entitlement — more often than not — to reestablish the power dynamic. It reaffirms who controls the situation; in other words, it puts women back in their places and solidifies a man's status.
The prominence of men as rapists should then lead us to question the values of society and the construction of masculinity. We must therefore examine the troubling ideologies passed down through our culture of sexism and work to change them.
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Elisha Sum is a junior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
