The carousel of rape discourse

We tend to go around and around on this one. I wish it were possible to be truth-seeking and compassionate at the same time.

It's that time of year again, or month? Where a female announces that she was sexually assaulted, or more explicitly, raped, by a man of notoriety. We women are all expected to line up, and say that of course what she is saying must be true. There is no reason to question her motives or her methods. To do so is to encourage violent treatment by men toward women.

But if we are honest, we all know we wish that rape accusations were easier to parse. We all wish that women would come forth with the accusations soon enough that there would be evidence to corroborate her claim. And of course we all understand why a woman genuinely raped would not do so. We know, perhaps most bitterly, that we women don't always understand what it means to be sexually assaulted. And that we can be easily manipulated by some men to believe that we consented to something we did not even as we can also be easily manipulated by some women to believe that we have been sexually assaulted when we have not.

The truth is, we are terrible at this as the females of this species. And perhaps there is a biological reason for it. Because there is certainly a biological reason that predatory males look for women—and in the worst possible situations, children—that they can exploit to gratify their sexual urges. That is biology, even when it is biology that has gone awry for any number of reasons. And so perhaps it is also biology that we are prone to be uncertain about sexual assault and as a result often over perceive the risk of sexual assault and are likely to overclaim sexual assault.

Simply admitting to this complicated set of facts is a type of betrayal to certain women. In this latest case, it is a prominent journalist who has made a claim of rape against an equally prominent pundit, who is also occasionally a contributor to a significant publication. I won't rehearse the case here, if you are immersed in rape discourse you know what case I am talking about. And if you are not, you could conjure this case almost perfectly from your own imagination. Because we have been here before.

Being here before is part of the source of rage for many women, because they believe that women are constantly exploited by men in their environments and that we should always support each other when one of us makes a claim against men. But for me, being here before means I have supported women in these claims before, whether they are public cases or private ones. Only to find that the claims were unfounded, and in some cases deliberate fabrications. I do not know what applies in this present situation. I do know that I wish the person making the accusation would provide any evidence whatsoever for the validity of the accusation. Including going to the police and making a claim, which she has not. And yet, despite not being willing to take this fundamental step, she insists that this man must be punished and labeled a rapist purely on the basis of her standalone claim. No email record, no second-hand retelling by a close friend she confided in, no evidence of any kind.

Maybe some of that will come forward in the days and weeks ahead. I almost don't care to wait to see how it plays out. Because I have been burned by enough women who have made these claims. The earliest one I personally experienced was a distant family relation who made horrible accusations against a man in her life. I was a younger woman then, it was at the start of a decade during which such accusations against family members and daycare workers would come out regularly. And we had not yet learned that the methods for retrieving the memories that supported these accusations were completely bogus. And so I actively and vociferously campaigned on behalf of these supposed victims.

When I later found out that not only was there no evidence, that there was in fact contrary evidence, and then later discovered that the method used to retrieve the memory of the assault is false and easily manipulatable, I have never felt secure in backing a woman's claim of rape since that time. Which is unfair! It means that occasionally I have harbored doubts in my mind even as I have kept them to myself about a woman's rape accusation.

When they turn out to be true, which is frequently, I am almost relieved that there was enough evidence, that the process of working with the police and the judicial system to bring someone to justice actually works. I know, however, that it doesn't always work this way and there are guilty men who go free for lack of evidence or lack of vigorous enough prosecution on the part of the woman involved. I know this. And yet, I still find that I am unwilling to get back on this carousel where we go around and around supporting every new round of rape allegations only to later circle back to find out that some of them were false.

Even when we find out that some of them are true, we also find that some of them were in that terrible, dark, horrible gray space in between. I don't mean the gray space of he said versus she said. I mean the gray space of her definition of rape is hard to support even if it happened exactly how she said it did. This applies where women use the fashionably new definition of sexual assault, where they believe that they have been raped because they had sex with a man consensually but later regretted it. Or that they chose to drink one or two drinks and thus later claim that they were raped because they didn't have their full faculties when they consented to have sex.

You don't have to read my bio very deep in to figure out that I believe the best protection against this is to abstain from casual sexual encounters completely. I am a matriarch, not a maiden, and so my opinion on what maidens should do to protect their own lives and, yes, their sexuality, will not be received well. Because I gave my daughters this one weird trick they could use to be safe: stay away from situations where a man might use their body in a way that they would later regret. This includes missing out on fun stuff like going to drinking parties that seem fun, or hanging out with men that they want to get close to without being smart about the circumstances they were being pulled in to. Rape is always the perpetrator’s fault. But putting yourself in a situation where you are likely to get raped can be avoided. And that’s also true of “regrettable sex.” If you don’t have casual sex, you can never regret casual sex.

This dialogue feels particularly heated for me right now because of a recent review I wrote of a best-selling book, The Frozen River, in which the author, Ariel Lawhon, takes an actual person from 1789, a heroine of mine, the midwife named Martha Ballard, and invents a horrific sexual assault that did not happen in reality. This is her prerogative as a fiction writer, I explained this in great detail in the review. What I disapprove of, however, is her claim in the author's note at the end of the book that she made the choices she did in the book because 33% of women in our world and, by extension, 33% of women in Martha Ballard's world, are victims of sexual assault. This is simply not true.

There is ample research on the rate of actual sexual assault, and none of it justifies claiming that one third of all women experience sexual assault. The only possible way you can get to this number is by including things that are not sexual assault. Even things that make you feel icky, like being catcalled or having a man try to brush up against you in the subway, which I am told happens in cities bigger than the small town where I live. I believe that that happens, I believe that it is gross when it happens, and I believe the women who leave those circumstances feel icky about it. But that is not rape.

The new term of art for what you call that is Sexual Violence (SV). And because sexual violence sounds like a euphemism for rape, people who encounter the term think that SV is equal to rape. It is not. So it’s understandable if author Lawhon arrived at her belief that 33% of women will experience rape or sexual assault in their lives because she heard someone claim that 33% of women experience SV (the number claimed usually ranges between 33% and 40% depending on what is included in this term).

I wonder if Lawhon knows where she got the idea of 33% of us suffering from sexual assault comes from. If I had any influence at all, I would ask her. My hope would be that she would see the difference between rape and SV and realize that she was perpetuating a lie, even unintentionally. However, I know from engaging women on this topic, that most are unwilling to reevaluate their estimates of the rate of sexual assault. They swat definitions of rape vs. sexual assault vs SV aside. Whatever number they got at whatever point in their life they were told a number, that is the number they are anchored to and they are unlikely to shift from that number. Usually, the number they have in their head is too high. But even then, they often believe the actual number is higher than that and just isn’t being reported, so any attempt to talk that number down is met with resistance. And so I won't try to engage the author, or if I do I won't expect much of a response.

Perhaps it is a biological defense mechanism on the part of women to suspect sexual assault around every corner. Even though living in a world where you believe that you have a one in three chance of being raped tomorrow must be absolutely awful, there are people who simply live with that high level of neurotic anxiety and I do not believe I am the person capable of changing that for them.

I am a matriarch. At this late stage in my life, I can admit to having seen people suffer tremendous things, including women who have suffered from sexual assault and abuse of different kinds. All this suffering notwithstanding, I stand by the claim that it is better to live with the belief that these things are as uncommon as they actually are. It is healthier, for you personally and for your relationships. Not the same thing but related, another thing that trended briefly on Twitter last week was a tale of a woman who had a “bug out bag,” the kind of bag where you keep several days worth of supplies and maybe a few hundred dollars, so that if you had to get out of your home fast you could do so. In her case her bug out bag was to keep her safe from her husband. The husband that she had been married to for 5 years and with whom they had a two-year old child. And a husband, from all accounts, who has never demonstrated any violent tendency toward her. When he discovered that she had this bug out bag, he felt betrayed and confronted her. She justified herself by explaining that spousal abuse is very common and that every woman needs to have this kind of escape plan made, at least that’s what many podcasts and social media platforms had told her. How common spousal abuse is is a question worth studying. Or you can pretend that your likelihood of suffering spousal abuse is subject to random chance—even as you overestimate that random chance—rather than accepting the responsibility for identifying whether you are legitimately in a marriage where there are tendencies of violence and figuring out what you should do based on that rather than what some woman says on TikTok.

Honestly, I don't believe the Twitter story is real, it's one of those things that somebody posted somewhere and everyone else gets excited about it, but the thing that is real are the comments from women standing up for the bug-out-bag ladies, these supposedly clever women who live in constant fear, suggesting that they believe they should always expect their relationships to turn on them. Without realizing that living like that creates the inverse situation for the man in their lives. That they are essentially turning on that man every single day in their hearts. And then wondering why, at some point, he realizes he's married to a woman who does not want to be with him enough to trust her own experience of him, instead listening to strangers online whispering conspiracies against her husband. How a woman gets to this point, or what responsibility she has to turn off Instagram or see a therapist when she finds herself here is a different conversation. But if any of it starts with this mistaken belief that sexual assault or spousal abuse are just incredibly common things that most women are going to face, then we owe it to ourselves to correct this tendency to wallow in statistical absurdities. We owe it to ourselves to get off the carousel.