A Book Review By Jocelyn Crawley
As radical feminists become more resilient in our resistance to watered-down pseudo-feminisms that attempt to obfuscate the reality of male sexual tyranny, recognition of women writers who centralize sexual assault in their work becomes increasingly important.
In her lucid treatise against sexual assault entitled What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Sohaila Abdulali recounts both her own experience of being subjected to gang rape as well as the collective struggle that women across the world face in experiencing male sexual violence. In this review, I reference the author’s elucidations regarding the reality of rape to expand radical feminist discourse about what sexual assault is, and how resistant, dissident women should work to prevent it and/or resolve the psychosomatic trauma induced by this form of male violence.
Rape Drains The Light
The opening sentence to Chapter One of Abdulali’s text reads, “Rape drains the light” (1). This elocution is profound because of its reference to the unilluminating impact that sexual assault has on individuals, institutions, and the ecology of the environments in which it flourishes. Indeed, rape deprives individuals of the light that comes from mutual vulnerability, reciprocity, and the exchange of meaningful information which results in the acquisition of knowledge and the enhancement of one’s quality of life. Rather than providing any of these life-enhancing outcomes, rape results in the opposite. Instead of enabling individuals to cooperate and coexist in a mutually vulnerable way which produces relational parity and deep knowing of self and other, rape reduces human interactions to a master/slave modality predicated upon the patriarchy’s regime of domination. This regime insists that men are members of the master class and thereby operate as subjects who can use their self-sovereignty to reduce members of the slave class, women, to objects. Sexual objectification is the definitive modality when a woman is raped, in that a thinking, breathing human being is diminished into a mere object to be used in violently ‘sexual’ ways. In addition to draining the light, rape precludes reciprocity, a desirable socialization mode in which individuals rely on each other for livelihood and growth. Instead, rape creates a necrotic system of socialization in which the victim is at the mercy of the assailant who subjects her to a plethora of degrading and/or dehumanizing practices which deprive her of the will and ability to actively, equally engage the other. Finally, rape drains the light by preventing the exchange of meaningful information that could improve quality of life. Rape endows the victim with a negative, nefarious, necrotic form of knowledge that some men are depraved people. The knowledge of the other’s depravity can translate into a sustained sense of horror, the onset of feelings of inferiority, and neuronal complications such as repetition compulsion. In the event of repetition compulsion, human brains respond to trauma by constantly replaying the traumatic experience in an attempt to attain a deeper awareness of it in hopes of utilizing the knowledge to reduce the likelihood of event recurrence. Trauma-induced repetition compulsion can engender stress, which in turn can complicate neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to effectively adapt and change based on experience. Compromised neuroplasticity is a significant issue given that our ability to effectively adapt to the ecology of an environment directly impacts our capacity to survive and thrive in that social setting. The knowledge of rape can also adversely impact institutions such as educational facilities and governmental organizations as people continue to learn that rape remains a resilient, operative element of society. In this capacity, rape drains the light by inverting the ideal purpose of knowledge–which is qualitatively positive in the sense of it engendering the elevation of consciousness and communities–and causing individuals and institutions to devolve in destructive, debilitating ways.
As the book continues to unfold, the writer continually draws awareness to the multiple negative realities rape calls into being. One of these realities is that telling others about the rape to gain sympathy and understanding can catalyze unwanted outcomes. This fact becomes evident as the author asserts:
“Telling doesn’t always come with a reward: comfort, closure, justice. Sometimes women tell but everyone acts as if they said nothing at all. One woman emailed me: “I told my parents about it and they did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I felt so betrayed. Everyone in my family knew but still, he was there at every family function. He even works at my uncle’s shop” (18,19)
Interestingly, the negative nature of outcomes engendered by victims narrating the reality of their rape is underscored through the repetition of the word “nothing” to describe the response that survivors experience from individuals around them once they assert that sexual assault transpired. As indicated in the passage mentioned above, the victim’s parents did nothing, absolutely nothing. Conversely, one could effectively offer that the parents did the antithesis of doing nothing, and rather actualized something, with the something being creating the conditions conducive to the sustaining of rape culture by asserting that the comfort and social integration of rapists is more important than the safety and humanity of sexual assault survivors. This–the perpetuation of rape culture–is what these parents actualized by allowing the rapist to remain integrated into their family activity.
Patriarchy’s Oldest Trick In Its Book: Blaming The Victim
Like Chapter Three, Chapter Four provides evidence that negative attitudes towards rape which involve applying negative weight to the victim, rather than her aggressor, exist. In Chapter Three, the negative weight applied to the victim transpired through the framework of minimization. In Chapter Four, negative weight is applied to the victim in terms of the use of verbiage that reifies the most integral element of rape culture; blaming the victim for the sexual assault so that the egregious nature of the event is obscured and the guilt of the victim is maximized. Interestingly, minimization and blaming the victim do not exist as discrete, divergent ideological modes through which survivors are demeaned and erased. Rather, the two modalities converge in myriad ways. For example, a form of minimization results from blaming the victim. This minimization often transpires in contexts where those who do the minimizing believe that the victim played an integral role in the “hypothetical” rape. They therefore downplay the gravity of sexual assault because it is putative rather than actual. After all, the woman involved played an integral role in precipitating the undesirable activity.
The blame-the-victim minimizations can take the form of verbal elocutions like “You just had bad sex,” “You asked for it,” or “You just did something that you regretted the next day and now you’re trying to transform the experience into rape out of resentment towards your partner.” This thought schema is worth elucidating because it exists in confluence with several other equally problematic ones. Specifically, the idea that blame-the-victim minimizations are an accurate way to respond to victims explaining that they have been raped transpires in the context of another one, which is the idea that if individuals truly believe that a person has been victimized, they would not reduce the depth of depravity that is rape to a mere unpleasant encounter. This idea exists in continuity with a third one, which is that individuals are rarely victimized by rape and rather play an integral role in unpleasant, undesirable sexual situations. This idea also lives with other thoughts, including the idea that since rape rarely happens, paying substantive attention to sexual assault as a personal and/or political reality is illogical given that other ostensibly weightier matters should be given greater priority in public consciousness. These intertwined, intersecting thoughts exist as a rat king-esque modality in which one form of rumination is indelibly connected to another, such that all of the cogitations coexist in a manner that engenders one’s mental life being bound together by one central thought: it’s her fault.
The intersecting tails of thoughts cannot be disjoined and, operating together, they bind the victim in her culpability despite the potential presence of other mental maneuverings. In Chapter Four, the author illustrates the blame-the-victim minimization modality in response to a call for the public to contribute their thoughts regarding how to address the issue of rape and rape culture following the rape of Jyoti Singh. One individual asserted that “The victim is as guilty as her rapists…can one hand clap? I don’t think so.” (30). Here, male logic reigns supreme despite its cognitive illogic.
According to the hypothetical question “Can one hand clap?” rape victims are culpable for sexual activity because when two parties are involved in a modality of sexuality, consent to the acts which transpire is always automatic, thereby making the likelihood of those acts involving coercion moot. Yet this logic is illogical because of our awareness that individuals who coexist together can be subjected to all forms of unwanted, coerced violence, including rape, but also hitting, punching, slapping, shoving, etc. It seems that the asserter of this illogical blame-the-victim minimization elocution is suggesting that if an individual truly does not want to be raped, she will take the measures necessary to prevent it from happening. If this is the assumption, it is important to note that it is false. Many victims struggle to prevent bodily coercion from transpiring, including by pretending to be insane and by using physical strength or dexterity to fight attackers off and run away. Rapes are completed in these contexts, meaning that–perhaps paradoxically–one hand can indeed clap.
Addressing The Incertitude That Rape Engenders
In addition to revealing the patriarchal pattern of utilizing blame-the-victim minimizations to erase the reality of rape, this elucidating book draws the reader’s awareness to the pervasive impact that rape can have on victims. I like to reference this type of information during dialogues about rape because one of the standard beliefs shared about rape amongst many victims, perpetrators, and general society is that sexual assault is not that bad. How to quantify and qualify what makes an experience definitively and profoundly negative is problematic. Still, I argue that if the event itself is negative and subsequently engenders negative outcomes in many other areas of one’s life, it is not a minor infraction in an otherwise predominantly positive life-world. Rather, it is a glaringly egregious reality that warrants recognition as such rather than the minimization that takes place in androcentric societies. In discussing the ways rape impacts victims, the writer notes:
“While few people love going to the dentist, a tooth-cleaning visit can hold particular horrors for a rape survivor. The first time after the rape that a man with a mask came at me with sharp instruments while I was lying helplessly in his chair, I almost fled the room….They don’t tell you that you might freeze in a job interview because the man asking you questions is wearing a tie just like the one your rapist wore. They don’t tell you that you may dread becoming pregnant because having a child is going to mean you have to pay some serious attention to your vagina, which is historically not a peaceful place….” (100).
As made evident by this passage, the experience of rape engenders qualms and complications regarding everything from dental visits to job interviews to one’s volitional inclinations regarding procreation, thus rendering fallacious the idea that rape is a singular event with an insulated impact limited to the temporal sequence in which it unfolds. Instead, the reality of rape ingrains itself into the memory of the person impacted and subsequently impacts the epistemological and existential approach they bring to other sectors of their life.
Although Abdulali makes many meaningful assessments regarding the reality of rape throughout the book, her assertions about the amorphous, ambiguous impact that openly confronting the existence and agency of sexual assault has on an individual is particularly significant. Specifically, Abdulali asserts that “Maybe some good will come of forcing us to confront the grossness we live with every day, including everything from a butt-pinch on the subway to rape and murder behind the curtain of the jungle, with no witnesses but a passing sunbird, flying indifferently on to the next flower” (123). This passage is important because Abdulali qualifies the hyper simplistic, minimizing interpretation of sexual assault as an event that will eventually “do good” with the adverb “maybe.” Often, individuals within the anti-rape movement generate dialogue regarding sexual assault with an attitude of certainty which is inappropriate because it assumes that the outcome of clear communication regarding rape will engender positive results. Yet we know that, in light of anti-rape communities having remained in active dialogue regarding sexual assault for decades, rape continues to permeate every facet of culture both in the US and around the globe. Despite this fact, I think the confrontation of rape through potentially transformative dialogues is important for many reasons, including
1. The ability to demonstrate genuine concern regarding rape as a profound social problem for other like-minded individuals, thereby increasing the likelihood that alliances predicated upon ideological alignment can be created
2. The ability to discuss rape in a manner that engenders a plethora of meaningful extrapolations which can bring forth positive outcomes, including strategizing for more effective prevention of rape and treatment plans for victims
3. A greater level of self-reflexivity engendered by substantive, meaningful assessments of how one situates herself ideologically in the context of rape. For example, one’s dialoguing with others regarding the reality of rape may catalyze activist work or lead to an ideological shift away from one philosophical approach to combating it, such as Marxist feminism, to another, radical feminism.
The Pervasive, Permeating Impact Of Rape
Like the previous chapters, Chapter Seventeen of the text provides readers with a plethora of thought-provoking suggestions and suppositions regarding rape, including the repetition of the idea that sexual assault has a pervasive, permeating impact. The author notes that, after sharing with her daughter that she experienced gang rape, everyone-including herself and her daughter-must face the fact that “no matter how glorious a life she has, at some point someone in it will be raped” (128). Another key element of this chapter is the author’s ideological alignment with those who oppose the idea that we should obscure, rather than expose, ourselves to information about rape because the exposure catalyzes the erasure or diminution of our innocence. Specifically, the author references another piece she co-authored with Bishop Desmond Tutu and Jacob Lief in which they all assert that “…You do not lose innocence when you learn about terrible acts; you lose your innocence when you commit them” ( 131). This is one of my favorite assertions in the text because it works to unravel a patriarchal pattern which contributes to the prevalence of rape. I am of course referring to the silence regarding the reality of sexual assault. Additionally, their assertion indicates that innocence is lost when you no longer maintain the status of shared humanity marked by reciprocity and mutuality associated with engaging people in modalities reflecting equal exchange, as opposed to coercive rape.
Another take-away that I found meaningful is Abdulali’s question “If I reject the notion of rape taking away women’s “honor”–and I do–then what does that take from you?” (150). Like Abdulali, I reject the idea that rape revokes a woman’s honor, and I would also argue that this assertion is profoundly patriarchal in its accedence to the idea that a woman’s value always exists in direct relation to her sexuality and if it is pleasing to men.. We do know that the insistence upon female virginity results from male values rooted in viewing women as property that can be “sullied” by a man putting his penis into the vagina of a woman before her marriage to another man, making her, to use a colloquial, contemporary term, “damaged goods.” A woman’s honor is not lost based on the objectifying and hyper-simplistic understandings of sexuality that men apply to women’s bodies, so this is not what is lost through the act of rape. What is lost through the act of rape is volitional will and autonomy, and–in part, because these are the vehicles through which individuality and self-reflexivity transpire–it is indeed a deep loss to observe and abstractly understand that this is what sexual assault engenders in the existential life of the victim-survivor.
As radical feminists become increasingly resilient in arguing against rape now that rape-friendly paraphernalia/propaganda such as pornography increasingly involves representations of sexual assault, it is important for us to critically examine the ideas and arguments being presented by anti-rape thinkers such as Abdulali. In considering Abdulali’s text as an integrated whole, she presents a very thorough, comprehensive depiction of the disorienting ideas that people from all walks of life have about rape while subsequently noting various points of ideological convergence which enable us to attain an amorphous yet meaningful awareness of how cultural consciousness is shaped in context of sexual assault. Ultimately, I would include Abdulali’s text regarding sexual assault on my anti-rape bookshelf as a substantive work to reference when creating or contributing to dialogue with those who envision the creation of a planet without rape and subsequently develop tangible strategies which are antagonistic to androcentrism as it manifests in the material world.
Jocelyn is a 39-year-old radical feminist who believes that male violence is the most egregious problem on the planet, particularly concerning manifestations of sexual violence against women and girls. When not writing about radical feminist topics, Jocelyn enjoys yoga, eating out with her wife, and building community with like-minded individuals who are sick of patriarchy precluding us from having nice things.
