Tori Amos once sang, "Before the truth was buried alive, did we prize it?"
Last week, I wrote on the issue of domestic violence and the concerns that arise from gendering it solely as a women's issue and the resultant detriment to male survivors of abuse. In order to continue the discussion on the former topic, this week I want to talk about the unnecessary and needless gendering that continues both explicitly and implicitly in the world of representation — literature, text, imagery, etc. — and thereby informs our policies, worldviews and behaviors.
Toys, occupations, clothes, traits, desires, body shape and basically everything under the sun enter a gender binary machine for sorting and then exit with various degrees of association with either masculinity or femininity. These arbitrary designations impinge upon individuals and problematically fabricate a reality founded upon notions of gender essentialism that uphold and reproduce gender inequality.
To further examine gendering and its resultant implications, I'd like to focus on victim blaming and anti-rape campaigns.
First off, let's get it straight: Rape culture is alive and well. Last year, students at an all-male college at the University of Sydney created a pro-rape Facebook group called "Define Statutory." April 30, 2010, was "National Punch a Slut Day," according to a Facebook event. And just last month, the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon at Yale University inducted their pledges by having them walk around campus yelling out disgusting and horrific chants; "No means yes, yes means anal," was one of the more toned-down slogans.
Aside from these seemingly innocuous events, which are manifestations of ingrained misogyny and the crystallization of rape myths and false narratives, we clearly see in the media the problematic representations of gender that feed into rape culture. The gendering of rape as a women's issue feeds the gender binary machine that inevitably deploys illegitimate claims about gender and influences the perception of the problem and the response.
The collusion of stereotypes about women and the fact that women are overrepresented as survivors of sexual assault, including rape, has led to the birth of many anti-rape and violence preventions campaigns that just get it wrong. Often, they have focused on limiting a woman's agency and implicitly attribute fault to the female rape survivor. Women are told to dress a certain way, curb their drinking and never walk home alone, to give some examples of campaign slogans that fail on many levels and instill fear in women.
Moreover, in response to the rise in the instances of rape, the police chief of the Dallas Police Department allegedly said in August that the solution to date rape is to get women to stop drinking because that is the cause of date rape.
Other than again victim-blaming, the police chief's words point to another aspect of rape culture that occludes a clearer understanding of rape and its nature and falls prey to a false gendered narrative. This narrative characterizes men as sexual beasts incapable of controlling sexual desire and imbues them with the active intent to violate the rights of another individual to serve the purpose of satiating his overwhelming desire.
In the same vein of male targeting, a new advertising campaign called "Don't Be That Guy" launched in Edmonton, Canada, nevertheless seems promising based on a few of the slogans I've seen. The ad text seeks to dispel the idea of male entitlement to a woman's body and clarify issues of consent. It should be clear, though, that anti-rape campaigns, along with other violence prevention campaigns, should not fall prey to mainstream narratives of gender that clearly do not benefit any of us.
Yes, Virginia, rape culture does exist. We, however, do have the tools and capabilities to address it.
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Elisha Sum is a senior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
