Writing About Rape

A preamble with no visuals

I have been thinking about this for a long time. Off and on. For decades. Mostly off, but it’s been “on” more often in the last five years because #MeToo = lots of people not just thinking about it, but talking and writing about it. And because it feels like, while discourse on the subject has become more accepted and therefore broadened, it’s at the same time become more restricted. Or rather, restricted in a different way than in the past.

I’ve thought about this broadening/restriction blend most recently in relation to Women Talking, Sarah Polley’s adulated film based on a novel based on actual mass rapes, over a period of years, of women and children by the men of their own community. And also because of a conversation I had with a woman I called A.B., whom I featured here in a Jan. 18th post titled “Flying Over the Abyss.” In response to my invitation to readers to send me descriptions of their experiences of facing down an abyss, A.B. sent an account of a transfiguring experience she had while being raped over a period of days as a young teen. She was willing to use her full name, but I persuaded her not to because I felt that she was making herself too vulnerable. She questioned me, basically asked what are you afraid of? And I couldn’t entirely say; this post was for paid subscribers only, a small and gracious cohort whom I felt confident would not say anything remotely rude to this woman. I was influenced by the fact that she’s about to publish a book about a lot of things, including her horrible experience; on the verge of a public appearance, I didn’t think she should ID herself first and foremost as a teen rape victim.

Right or wrong, this opinion is based on experience. I’m primarily a fiction writer and in that mode I feel that whatever I write about is protected by an invisible but radiant forcefield delimiting the realm of art and dreams; people can say whatever they want, but they can’t quite get at you because…while they might think they can see you in there, really they can’t. But, as you know from reading this SStack, I write nonfiction too. And that is different. I’ve written nonfiction about being raped. Bizarrely, I find that line hard to write. Bizarre because in the past—in 1994, to be more exact—I did not find it hard; I was pretty matter-of-fact about it. And that was because, as I said to a commenter (on A.B.’s post) I was not so much “brave” as unaware—naive, even—of how my disclosure would affect my presence in the world.

That “affect” has been mostly subtle, but sometimes not. Physical attack of any kind leaves a residue of psychic vulnerability that can linger around the victim and this is particularly heavy in the case of rape which is an attack inside the body, on the site of female life-force. What I’m calling this “residue of vulnerability” can sometimes get converted to a kind of brittle aggression, but I think under that the terrible hurt spot can be subliminally felt; this is a risky combination to have as part of a public persona. On top of that, the subject itself touches readers’ inchoate feelings of vulnerability and aggression which can translate into a strong reflex to protect or dismiss. In my case that vulnerability/aggression aspect (both mine and that of others) was amplified because what I wrote about my experience of rape was not the expected thing. At the time, I was protected by naive faith in the power of my words to make people understand me and, in 1994, this faith not entirely unwarranted; for better and worse it was a time of receptivity to divergent ideas.

But in the time of “believe all women” what was merely unexpected has become actually offensive, at least to some people, so offensive that it doesn’t matter how eloquently I might speak. And that “offensiveness” makes some feminist journalists and university students see me antagonistically. I can’t really complain because I created the conditions for this. But it is hard and also confusing in terms of my own feelings. Because while I didn’t see it coming, I can nonetheless understand their impulse to antagonism; because I actually care about what they think in a way I would not care about the opinions of a blatant misogynist.

I have to get more specific for this to make sense. In the essay in which I wrote about being raped, I didn’t describe being raped. I just touched on it. What I did describe was an experience that I’d had a lot of confusion about; while I had for many years called this experience “rape” I eventually came to see it differently. And I admitted that I had misrepresented what actually happened to the point of lying about it. Here is a link to the entire essay:

The Trouble with Following the Rules

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…but it is long and so, in case you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, here are the first two pages in which I describe how and why I lied:

First two pages.pdf

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This piece appeared in Harper's in the context of a 90’s media debate about “personal responsibility” and “date rape,” the latter being a concept that some feminists embraced as brutal reality and others dismissed as “next day regrets.” I went from my experience in Detroit to a wide-ranging discussion of that more general debate (“more general” meaning that it wasn’t exclusively about “date rape”), mentioning that after Detroit, I had “been raped for real.” I wrote:

“The experience was terrifying: my attacker repeatedly said he was going to kill me, and I thought he might.  The terror was acute, but after it was over, it actually affected me less than many other mundane instances of emotional brutality I've suffered or seen other people suffer.  Frankly, I've been scarred more by experiences I had on the playground in elementary school.  I realize that may sound bizarre, but for me the rape was a clearly defined act, perpetrated on me by a crazy asshole whom I didn't know or trust; it had nothing to do with me or who I was, and so, when it was over, it was relatively easy to dismiss.  Emotional cruelty is more complicated.  Its motives are often impossible to understand, and it is sometimes committed by people who say they like or even love you.  Nearly always it's hard to know whether you played a role in what happened, and, if so, what the role was.  The experience sticks to you.  By the time I was raped I had seen enough emotional cruelty to feel that the rape, although bad, was not so terrible that I couldn't heal quickly.  My response may seem strange, but my point is that pain can be an experience that defies codification.”

One, I admitted that I’d lied about being raped and two, that when I actually was raped, I didn’t find it as horrible as certain playground experiences. So yeah, unusual! Particularly for someone to write in an intellectual magazine in measured rational words. For centuries, the normal female reaction to rape would be cries of outrage and revenge; in comparison, I could’ve sounded like someone trying to intellectualize her pain away. But it seemed important to me to assert my intellect then. Because I didn’t see what I experienced described anywhere else and I couldn’t believe I was the only one. I did lie, though out of confusion, not malice, and with no practical consequence. But there is always some moral consequence to a lie like that, especially when race is involved; that is also why I wanted to tell the story, to expose it and to explain why (sometimes) such lies might be told without harmful intent.

The other part is harder to understand maybe. I tried my best in the section I’ve quoted and I’ve tried since. But I would like to be more specific: what I saw on playgrounds and in classrooms was nice, normal, popular children hurting vulnerable children by making them feel ugly, inferior, shut out of the world of goodness and normalcy, and doing it routinely for years. At the same time I was learning about the far worse cruelty of groups in the adult world, race-hate and anti-semitism (also deployed to shut people out of “goodness”), lynch mobs made up of “normal” people who seemed to me larger versions of those nice, normal kids, normally looking to discharge their normal aggression on someone.

What the rapist had done was an acknowledged wrong; it would’ve been different if he’d been a normal member of my community—whatever that might’ve been for a runaway teen—but he wasn’t, he was an obviously mentally sick criminal destined for a world of shit. He was bad officially and as such he could terrify me and hurt me physically. But he could never make me feel as worthless and humiliated as my officially nice peers—along with some nice teachers, more or less decent close relatives and child psychiatrists—had made me feel, in many different contexts previous to my unfortunate run-in with him. Nor for that matter could he make me feel as bad as some officially nice men I voluntarily dated long after.

It bears repeating: A physical attack on what I called female life force is a serious thing but so are psychic attacks on an unformed child by essentially the child’s entire community; so are many forms of cruelty. By the time I was raped at age 17 I knew something about it, personally and generally—enough that I was not shocked by the fact of this violent assault. Given what I knew, I could not understand why I had been brought up to see rape as the ultimate evil. And I was sick of hearing that women are destroyed by rape, sick of it. The idea was profoundly offensive to my pride. Yes the experience was terrible, yes it caused me to carry fear in my body that could unexpectedly surface. But it did not come close to destroying me. It hurt me. But not as much as other things.

Another reason it was important for me to publish this in an intellectual magazine: I wanted to say that people are all different, and so are situations, that there is no one “correct” way for a victim of rape to feel, no normal opinion she is required to have about it—that there is, by extension, a strong element of emotional subjectivity to human suffering of any kind.

When it appeared this essay was very well-received. Indeed, it was even adultated in some quarters, something like the film Women Talking is now adulated—to the extent that can happen with a magazine article. It still exists and has been reprinted in a my 2017 collection of essays titled Somebody With a Little Hammer, plus a slightly different 2021 UK collection called Oppositions. Which is great. But now, I have been made aware—by various online comments, by the distorted direction taken by certain interviews and by students telling me that they’ve decided, after reading such interviews, that my “stance on S.A.” makes them feel it would be “unsafe” to take a class with me—that it lands differently now. It seems like now there is a correct response to being raped and it is a strictly binary one with no ambiguity allowed: in this framework, there is no real difference between the two men described in my essay, they are both rapists. In this framework, it is in some circles controversial to say that in 1971 one could not expect a young man from any cultural milieu to know that he was supposed to obtain explicit verbal consent from a girl—I didn’t know that either, it wasn’t a concept then.

(Note: A remarkable and rare pop cultural expression of ambiguity, even in a describing an undeniable rape scenario, can be seen in the final episode of Michaela Coel’s HBO series I May Destroy You, in which Coel’s heroine sequentially imagines murdering, entrapping and eventually making love to her assailant as the penetrator.)

This need for a correct response, uncompromised by shame, is sometimes a practical necessity because response can lead to action, ideally reparative action. I wrote my essay, not just to acknowledge subjectivity, but to expand the idea of what “personal responsibility” actually means, to suggest a path by which that might be more developed in men and women both. Even though I find it ridiculous and weird for a student (who plans to write about being sexually assaulted) to declare that she would feel “unsafe” in my class because of something she read in an interview, I recognize that in some very basic way she and I are on the same team.

This is why I said above that I can understand such an avoidant/antagonistic attitude; I can relate to it as a desire to finally, once and for all, find the right way. After all, when I wrote my essay, I thought that I had made great progress towards rightness. And, on the basis of that thought, I very nearly attacked another woman who was having a response I didn’t like. I was sent a review copy of a book titled After Silence by Nancy Venable Raine; it was about her experience of violent rape and its aftermath. I disliked everything about it—the genteel tone, the emphasis on shame, her descriptions of her wrecked life, her seeming disbelief that such a thing could happen to her in her own home—this last part almost made me angry. How is it possible, I thought, that she, in her mid-30s, didn’t realize that this could happen to her? I was so indignant that I actually called an editor of a prominent online journal and told her I wanted to review the book, negatively. She was of course, happy for me to do it; in the late 90s, that kind of thing was catnip to editors.

But when I sat down and read the book a second time, my righteousness faltered and fell apart. Why had I been so angry? Passages that I had underlined for particular disapproval looked, the second time around, completely legitimate, even poignant and yes, brave. She was just different from me—and her experience had been different too, actually worse. There is of course nothing wrong with critiquing a book about rape; any book out there on the market is subject to criticism. But what I was planning to write would’ve been tantamount to an attack on the author and her coping strategies. Thank God I realized what a cruel and stupid thing I had been about to do, and backed out of the assignment. But that I even had the impulse to do it is an example of what I meant when I used the term “brittle aggression.”

This contentious, potentially bruising need to establish the correct response to sexual violence, ideally leading to correct and effective action, takes literal dramatic shape in Women Talking. That dramatic focus is possibly the core of its power. I feel ambivalent about the movie for many reasons, most of them artistic in nature—except in this case it is hard to separate artistic choices from ideological ones. I plan to post about the film next week; this is basically a preamble to create context for my response. It’s been hard to sort out my feelings and thoughts, and I know it’s late in the usual terms of publication time. But I don’t want to ignore it.