Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] The roots of sexual assault
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http://socialistworker.org/2011/06/16/the-roots-of-sexual-assault
Comment: Elizabeth Schulte
======== THE ROOTS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT =========================================
How can we achieve a world without rape or any form of sexual violence?
Elizabeth Schulte explains what socialists have to say about the question.
June 16, 2011
SLUTWALK MARCHES, organized in response to a Toronto police officer who told
college students that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to
be victimized," have spread to cities worldwide. The attention they have
drawn to rape and sexual assault is a welcome development in a society that
rarely takes violence against women seriously--and, when it does, shifts the
blame onto the woman.
Take the recent acquittals of two New York City police officers accused of
raping a woman in 2009. In court, the case revolved largely around the fact
that the woman was drunk at the time, which supposedly made her story "less
credible."
But the reason the woman came in contact with police in the first place was
because /she/ thought she had too much to drink, and sought their help in
getting home. After they took her to her apartment, the officers raped her,
according to the woman--a security camera recorded the cops returning several
times over the course of the night.
The woman even managed to later record a conversation with one officer in
which he said he used a condom that night. Yet the woman was supposed to be
"less credible" because she had been drinking.
Clothing choices, how much she drinks, her behavior, her occupation, if she
changed her mind about wanting to have sex--none of this should make any
difference if a woman says she was raped. But in the U.S. justice system, all
these things are regularly put on trial to smear a woman's credibility.
And that's not all. While lawyers and judges may not openly discuss it, a
woman's race and class play a defining role in whether she is believed.
For example, in 2006, an exotic dancer hired by the Duke University lacrosse
team as an entertainer for a party reported that she was beaten, raped,
strangled and sodomized by three players in the bathroom during the party. In
the media frenzy over the charges, the woman was forced to endure scrutiny of
every detail in her life--while the accused were described as young men "with
their whole lives ahead of them."
For the majority of victims of sexual assault, the justice system fails
miserably. It also fails a number of men who are accused of rape, because the
justice system is rigged to punish the poor, and the African American poor in
particular.
In several high-profile cases through history, the vilification and
demonization of young Black men accused of sexual assault has been used to
create an atmosphere of racist fear. For example, in 1989, when a white woman
jogging in New York's Central Park was raped, the media frenzy led to a
witch-that swept up five innocent teenage African Americans men, who were
rounded up and charged.
With billionaire Donald Trump running ads in newspapers calling for the death
penalty and politicians calling for more cops on the streets and tougher
sentencing, the innocent men were useful scapegoats. They were later
exonerated, but they lost years of their lives in prison. And their innocence
didn't stop politicians in New York and elsewhere from passing tough-on-crime
legislation that further scapegoated poor minorities.
So in the end, there was no justice for the rape victim--or for the innocent
men accused of assaulting her. The only ones who benefited were the
politicians responsible for whipping up a fear of monsters waiting to attack
around every corner.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
STATISTICS SHOW that most rapes and sexual assaults aren't committed by
strangers, but by people women already know--including spouses and partners.
Some two-thirds of reported rapes are committed by someone known to the
victim, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Thirty-eight percent
were a friend or an acquaintance, and 28 percent were an intimate.
According to some conservatives, incidents of sexual assault in which the
woman knows her attacker or cannot prove that she fought off a violent attack
should not be considered rape. Congressional Republicans made this clear when
they tried to pass legislation that would narrow the definition of rape to
apply only if it was "forcible," making the woman responsible for proving she
fought back.
That conservatives would even try to get away with such anti-women
legislation is a sign of their determination to reverse the gains of the
women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s--and to take us back to the days when
a woman could not even accuse her husband of rape.
The women's liberation movement made public the fact that rape happened at
home and at school, and wasn't always the stranger in the street at night.
The movement raised the slogan "No means no, and yes means yes"--a sentiment
that has, over the decades, been all but forgotten in the public discourse
about rape and sexual assault.
The movement brought the issue of rape out of the shadows and began to create
a climate in which women could insist on a different way of thinking about
sexual relationships.
A small part of the movement furthered an idea that is still prevalent
today--that rape is really about male power. For some today, this has come to
mean that rape has nothing to do with sex, something that should be shared
and enjoyed, but is instead about power and violence.
This conclusion is understandable considering the lack of seriousness that
sexual assault is taken with in this society. But this characterization
inaccurately describes the situation in which rape occurs--and does a
disservice to those who want to locate the real source of sexual violence and
act to get rid of it.
The idea that sexual assault is about male power can be traced back to such
feminist writers as Susan Brownmiller, who argued that rape was the result of
a patriarchal power structure in which all men keep all women in a state of
fear and intimidation because of their ability to rape. In her 1975 book
/Against Our Will/, Brownmiller argued, "Rape is a historical condition that
underlies all aspects of male-female relationships."
While the concept of rape as a man's demonstration of power may strike a
chord in cases like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary
Fund head who is, indeed, one of the most powerful men in the world, this
isn't an accurate characterization for the majority of men, who don't possess
such power.
If, as Brownmiller claimed, the power to rape underlines every relationship
between a man and woman in society, why then is it the case that most men do
not rape or commit sexual assault?
According to this view, all men are ticking time bombs who could rape at any
moment--unless, in the best-case scenario, they are "fixed" through
individual education or censorship of pornography. This analysis focuses the
blame for rape and sexual assault on individual men--and leaves the real
culprits off the hook.
The causes of rape and sexual assault go beyond the actions of individual
men. They are rooted in a system that thrives on furthering sexist ideas that
divide men against women.
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UNDER CAPITALISM, women are primarily responsible for raising children,
cooking meals in the home and other forms of domestic work. Put in more
formal terms, they perform the majority of the labor required for raising the
next generation of workers, without receiving a single cent for their work.
And at the same time, working-class women's labor outside the home is
compensated, on average, at a lower pay than men.
Beyond this material inequality, society has furthered a set of false
assumptions about the differences between men and women--men are portrayed as
the "stronger" sex and women as "nurturers," men are the ones who "pursue"
and women are the "pursued," men are portrayed as "sex-starved" while women
are chaste or disinterested.
Violence against women is the outcome of such a society--a class society that
has, for hundreds of years, been maintained in part by the material
inequality between men and women, and by the furthering of sexist ideas that
divide men and women. Without these divisions that pit workers against one
another, it would be impossible for capitalism to maintain its rule.
Sexist ideology encourages men to view women as less than their equals. The
conditions that working-class women endure--lower wages, inferior health
insurance, an added burden of labor in the home--carries no benefit for
working-class men. But the illusion is created for at least some men that
they are better off than women. In this context, sexist ideas--that women are
intellectually inferior or that they are simply sex objects to please
men--will gain a hearing among some men, and play a powerful role in further
dividing men and women.
Under capitalism, everything that can be transformed into a commodity /is/
transformed into a commodity--including sex and women's bodies. This process
warps the sexual interactions between men and women under capitalism, and our
ability to be fulfilled as sexual people.
It is little surprise that in a society that places so little value on
working-class women's lives, some men might not view a woman's consent as
necessary for sex.
Sexual assault is also the product of a class society in which sexual
relationships between men and women are shaped by alienation from their own
bodies and emotions, and from one another.
Young men and women aren't provided with the information they need about
their own bodies, much less how to communicate their desires. Instead,
society gives them false information about what men and women "want"--men
want sex and women do not, women should say no or they are "slutty," and men
"can't take no for an answer." This leads to understandable confusion for
both women and men about what they actually do want, and how they are
supposed to act.
According to a National College Women Sexual Victimization Study, one in four
women students experience completed or attempted rape during their college
years. Forty-two percent of the women who were raped said they had sex again
with the men who assaulted them. And 84 percent of college men who committed
rape said that they didn't consider what they did rape.
These figures show the shocking frequency with which some young men and women
consider rape as within the realm of "normal" sexual experience.
Sex is distorted by the alienation that permeates capitalism, and rape
happens in that context. The confused view of male and female "roles" helps
explain why three out of four rape victims in the U.S. report that they were
raped by someone they know.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE ARE plenty of measures in the here and now that would go a long way
toward changing all this. For instance, real sex education in schools--not
the abstinence-only training so popular among politicians today--could
provide the information that men and women need.
Plus, women and men have the power to shift the terms of the debate about
sexism and women-blaming, and speak out against rape and sexual
assault--coming together to create an atmosphere where women are valued and
violence isn't tolerated.
At the SlutWalk demonstrations, for example, women have spoken out about
their experiences of rape and sexual assault, making powerful stands on
questions that are usually ignored or swept under the rug.
When Dominque Strauss-Kahn, who is accused of raping a housekeeper in a New
York City hotel, returned to court for his hearing, he got a welcome he did
not expect--from more than 100 housekeepers from several hotels who gathered
to protest. "I felt as if I was defending myself, defending my own person,"
Lourdes Colón-Santos, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who has
worked at the Hilton for seven years, told the /Guardian/. "It could just as
easily have been me that this happened to."
The women, most of them immigrants, sent a clear message--we aren't taking it
anymore. This is a message that has to be repeated in every city and town.
Ultimately, we need a completely different society. Capitalism is incapable
of righting the wrong of rape and sexual assault. It thrives on sexism,
violence and alienation, and it has no interest in changing the status quo.
A total transformation of society is needed, where the priorities of the
powerful few at the top are replaced by the needs of the majority of the
population, and where the complete liberation of men and women is the goal,
and every resource of society is devoted toward fulfilling that goal.
Liberation can't be decreed into existence--the material conditions have to
be created for it to flourish. As Alexandra Kollontai, a leader of the 1917
Russian Revolution, wrote:
>The champions of bourgeois individualism say that we ought to destroy all
>the hypocritical restrictions of the obsolete code of sexual behavior. These
>unnecessary and repressive "rags" ought to be relegated to the
>archives--only the individual conscience...Socialists, on the other hand,
>assure us that sexual problems will only be settled when the basic
>reorganization of the social and economic structure of society has been
>tackled.
>
Under socialism, the highest priority of society would be to foster
solidarity, liberation and equality for all--including free and accessible
health care, child care and birth control, and everything else we need to
liberate women from the burdens of household labor and every other shackle
that keeps us from being equal participants in society.
With these conditions in place, one can imagine a world free of sexism, rape
and sexual violence. Frederick Engels, who showed how the roots of women's
oppression lay in the traditional family in his book the /Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State/, concluded:
>What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be
>ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of
>a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear.
>
>But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has
>grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is
>to buy a woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument of
>power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give
>themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to
>refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic
>consequences.
>
>When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what
>anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and
>their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each
>individual--and that will be the end of it.
>
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Featured at Socialism
Hear *Elizabeth Schulte* at Socialism 2011 [1] in Chicago, speaking on "A
woman's place is in the revolution: Class struggle and women's liberation."
Check out the Socialism 2011 [2] website for more details.
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[1] http://socialismconference.org/
[2] http://socialismconference.org/
