did you say no? are you sure? are you sure you said it loud enough?
postcard 28: on casual misogyny perpetuating abuse, rape culture, and the regression of society
Trigger warning: discussions of rape, abuse, and misogyny.
Also, comments are open to all for the time being, but I will be paywalling the section if anything spins out of control.
HERE IS A TALE as old as time: a young woman is walking home alone in the dark. She decides to take a shortcut through a dimly lit alleyway when suddenly, she hears footsteps. Heart slamming against her ribs, she breaks out in a run. But she's not fast enough. A man in a black zip-up hoodie and baseball cap grabs her, slapping his hand over her mouth with a knife digging into her neck. He says: "Scream and I'll kill you."
This is the classic 'rape narrative' we see in media and books. It involves an innocent girl, a stranger who is later revealed to be an outcast with sociopathic tendencies, and an extensive support system that never once doubts the girl's account. Everything is cut and dry in this scenario: the girl was wearing all the right clothes, she was sober, she is conventionally beautiful, and she displayed just the right amount of horror and despair at what happened to her. In the end, everything is tied up neatly in a bow. The rapist goes to jail, and the girl gets to grieve for just the right amount of time before she is expected to forget and move on. Only inspiration and motivation will come out of this traumatic event.
This specific narrative is a part of rape culture, which is defined as a “subset of values, beliefs, and behaviors in a society that trivializes or normalizes sexual violence, including rape.” It is such an unsurprising part of daily life, so embedded into the tapestry of our society, that so much of it is difficult to even discern or articulate into words. Rape culture propagates the idea that women should be responsible for their own safety, which in turn enables impunity for the perpetrators.
We see the cogs of rape culture in daily life when women are told to dress modestly more than men are told not to catcall. In media where sexual harassment is portrayed as comedic or romantic, allowing the public to further trivialize such actions. In courtrooms, where alcohol is used as a vehicle to condemn victims and excuse perpetrators. Where it is harder to prove that you were raped more than disprove that someone raped you, that so many women don’t even report it at all. Where “she didn’t say no” is a legitimate defense and “why didn’t you fight back” leads to both parties being complicit. Where people suddenly develop overwhelming empathy for abusers that morphs into clinical disregard for victims.
Women always matter, of course, and women are as important as men until we deviate from the de facto script society expects us to follow. Boys will always be boys, and girls are simply expected to be wallflowers until they become victims. But were they drinking? What were they wearing? Did they initiate contact? Did they say no? Are they sure? Are they sure they said it loud enough?
BY THE TIME Marie Adler calls the police in the morning to report a rape, she is no longer crying. She is closed off, calm, and collected. When the detectives arrive to investigate the crime scene, they have already made their mind up about Marie after mere minutes: she is a troubled young adult who has been in and out of the foster care system, and she has some gaps and inconsistencies in her testimony that she had to repeat thrice. In the next few weeks, she is called in and put through a harrowing series of investigations that end with Marie recanting her statement, saying she lied.
A False Report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, a nonfiction book that began as an investigative journalism piece, interweaves her story with another one, both inextricably related but unbeknownst to either party. The other story centers around two female detectives three years later, who are hunting down the same rapist, but doing everything right. The investigation lasted over three years because authorities simply did not trust a young girl’s statement when she said she was raped. Her report was then filed as false because the truth didn’t seem to match up with the narrative the detective had in his head. Ultimately, the book shines a light on how haphazard, prejudiced investigations and a long history of distrusting victims are both complicit in abusing a supposedly functional system.
To the detectives investigating Marie’s case, the truth was inconvenient. Not only does the police doubt her, but so does her foster mother, Peggy, due to her own perception of Marie. She calls the detective and indirectly says that she does not believe Marie as she has a history of lying, explaining that the roots of her skepticism were "deep and tangled, intertwining what she knew about Marie from helping to raise her, what she had seen the day before, and what she had heard from someone close to Marie" (104). Peggy, like the detectives, has already made her mind up about whether Marie is telling the truth.
Why wasn’t she crying more? Why were the minute details of the incident not congruous every time? Why should anyone believe she was telling the truth when she’s lied a few times in her life? She is not a “righteous victim”, which denotes someone who has the character and expectations that a jury would expect. In this case, what a jury would expect of a violated woman or a rape victim. Marie is treated more like a suspect than a victim. Later on, Marie's therapist tells her, "you were assaulted twice – once by your attacker, then again by the police". Thus begins an investigation that was finished before it even began, surfeited with prejudice and misogyny.
To explain why there is such a contradiction between sexual assault laws and the reality of investigations, Armstrong and Miller reveal how through centuries, people have been conditioned to distrust women as the first line of defense. They emphasize this point by showing a startling similarity between a statement written in the 18th century and one written ten years ago. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to James Madison regarding his objection to giving harsh punishments for rape. This was "on account of the temptation women would be under to make it the instrument of vengeance against an inconstant lover, and of disappointment to a rival" (221). This sentiment is echoed three hundred years later in 2014 in an interview of Michigan police officers, as one says, “girls use ‘the rape card’ to get back at a boyfriend or they need attention, they're having a bad week, you know, 'if I cry rape my whole family will come to me" (209).
Misogyny is so bolstered and fortified into society and has been for thousands of years, that it is almost undetectable. Mentioning it will sometimes make you feel like the crazy person. It’s so intrinsic in our day to day lives that we all perpetuate it—men and women alike, without even giving it a second thought. The detectives on Marie’s case, to Marie’s own foster mother. It takes a herculean effort to go against what is seen as the societal norm. From 1786, when women were considered a ‘nonperson’ and legal property of their husbands, to ten years ago in modern society, this idea has not changed, but simply the manifestations of it. While the system says “innocent until proven guilty”, it seems like it’s actually “guilty until proven innocent” for many victims like Marie.
RECENTLY, IN THE WAKE of the horrifying French trial in which a husband drugged his wife over a decade and had dozens of men come into their bedroom and rape her while unconscious, I have been talking to my friends about it. Most of it has been about solidarity, but a lot of it has been centered around men and their general complicity. I cannot think of even one women around me that has never been harassed or assaulted in some degree, and I often think about the statistic that an overwhelming majority (97% in the UK, at least) of women have experienced this. I am not special for having experienced this—in fact, not experiencing it would make me an anomaly.
This case is horrifying to even think about. Dozens of men in her town had raped her while she was unconscious over the course of a decade, and many of these men were people she knew and talked to in broad daylight. It is unfathomable to imagine the pain Gisele Pelicot is going through and unfathomable to imagine just how someone can commit such a chilling crime and act…normal. These were not monsters living on the outskirts of society. All of these men were people in her town—neighbors, good samaritans, family men.
The only reason why this has become a global talking point is because the victim, Gisele Pelicot, waived her rights to anonymity in order to make this a public trial—something so unbelievably brave and courageous for her to decide to do. The trial has already become discourse, mostly in the right direction. But must we always rely on the victim to sacrifice more than they already have, in order to even conjure up vague notions of change?
This entire post isn’t to say that all men hate women, because it is not black and white like that. Of course all men don’t hate women, especially outwardly. But there is a history of it interlaced into every culture around the world, and thus so many laws and actions unconsciously are a reflection of that. I honestly believe there is really nothing that can be done at this point to completely fix this, realistically speaking.
I’m also not saying that all men want all women dead or raped. I already know that there is going to be at least a few men in the comments, armed with an arsenal of ‘whatabout-ism’ questions, telling me that women abuse men too, that women hate men, that women do all of these terrible things that I have detailed in this post, in varying degrees. And I am not disagreeing—of course there are these cases that are extremely horrifying, where women are the perpetrators. But if you are a man and your immediate response is to type out a long diatribe about how I am ignoring the victimhood of men, please consider your own complicity in the exact problem I am addressing. If a woman says she hates men, it will most likely be because of harm that was caused by a man. If a man says he hates women, chances are that he just…does.
There are good men in the world. I know there are, because I was raised by one—my dad is the best dad I could ask for; he loves me and my mom and my sister and my friends always call him a ‘girl dad’. My childhood best friend, who is someone I’ve known and trusted for seventeen years and counting, is a guy. I see good men all around me, all the time. I’m sure every woman knows good men and trust good men in their lives.
But how many of these good men speak up about it? How many of these good men would not turn a blind eye? One of the most horrifying details about the Dominique Pelicot rape case is that he posted this ‘offer’ on an online platform. The men who replied are disgusting criminals, of course, but what about the men who saw it and didn’t do a thing about it? When you think of misogyny as a spectrum, those men are somewhere on there too. It would have taken one anonymous phone call to a local police department (even then, of course, there may have been no legal repercussions). At least it would have been brought to attention.
IN 2016, A VICTIM STATEMENT in a sexual assault trial went viral. Then referred to as Emily Doe for anonymity, Chanel Miller was sexually assaulted by a Stanford student while she was blacked out. I mention the Stanford student part, because although that should be a trivial detail when speaking about a grave crime such as sexual assault, it was the main source of influence in the judge’s decision. Despite the gravity of the crime and extensive media attention, Brock Turner was given a mere six-month sentence because the judge worried that his ‘bright future’ would be ruined.
There were witnesses to this assault; it did not happen in a vacuum. It happened behind the dumpster, and two men saw it happen and forced Turner off of her. But in her victim statement, she says: "I was warned, because he now knows you don't remember, he is going to get to write the script. He can say whatever he wants, and no one can contest it. I had no power, I had no voice, I was defenseless. My memory loss would be used against me".
Later, in her memoir Know My Name, she writes, “if a victim speaks but nobody acknowledges her, does she make a sound?”
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, I would have a main point and a solution to this essay. I am someone who always needs to have an answer to a problem. I pay attention more to logics than emotions, my head over my heart, when I encounter a difficult situation. I like taking feelings out of the equation when making decisions or troubleshooting a problem because I think it makes my life easier. And maybe I’m biased because I’ve always been this way, but I think doing so allows me to see things objectively and come up with something quicker. That’s why I usually write essays about retrospective topics, or things that I am over fifty percent sure that have an answer.
But I am writing this with my heart and my emotions, and this will never have an answer. I’ve been feeling pretty hopeless lately, and my mind draws a blank at what the future may look like, so I thought I’d pen this out without a main point. There is no main point, because I actually don’t think this is something that society will ever fix. I think we will forever be trapped in a vicious cycle. Something tragic will happen, we will all share our own experiences and pleas for change, people will disagree and say ‘what about—’?, and then something tragic will happen again. It’s always been this way. It’s simply a way of life now.
Maybe I’m cynical and pessimistic, but us as a global society breaking out of that vicious cycle, is a delusion for a utopian society that will never exist. When I read essays about this—heartfelt, personal essays from women—and click on the comment section, there are so many vitriolic comments from men (and sometimes women—what even is that? Because there is no way male validation from a stranger feels that good to be embarrassing yourself online like that). Trying to nitpick at one statistic, trying to twist the argument into something that it is not (“so are you saying you hate all men? Men matter and get murdered too!”, when it’s about women getting murdered). Two issues can coexist at once without being mutually exclusive, and we can talk about one issue without silencing the other.
The only reason why Dominique Pelicot was caught was because he was secretly taking upskirt photos of women. I truly believe it is never ‘just that’; if someone is doing anything on that pyramid, if they are willing to make rape jokes at the expense of women and brush it off as ‘locker room talk’, they are fully capable of climbing up in degrees of severity. It is never an isolated incident and should not be treated as such.
We seem to be in an era with a growing push into casual misogyny, with people like Andrew Tate convincing men that the reason why they are feeling inadequate and unconfident is actually, because of women. Women who have nothing to do with them, women who don’t even know them, but it’s just women as a whole because we sometimes don’t bend to the will of men. The thing that scares me the most is not extreme and horrifying cases like the ones I mentioned, but things I encounter in my daily life—incidents that pertain to the bottom of the pyramid in the picture above.
Every time I see a post about this, the comments are all the same. “Women need to rise up and say enough.” That women need to create change, that men will never do anything so women need to ‘take the problem into their own hands’. But from my experience and what I have been seeing my entire life, we have been saying enough. We have been begging, actually.
But did we remember to say we respect men? Did we acknowledge and apologize for all the women who have abused men? Did we name and list every single good man we know in our lives? Did we preface about men’s rights before we brought up the issue? Did we say please? Did we beg?
Are we sure? Are we sure we said it loud enough?
your voice echoes millions of women, amazing to have this on my feed.🤎
Such a good read, the ending questions are absolutely brilliant. The patriarchy relies on women’s silence, whether by intimidation or force. This piece is an act of defiance, thank you for writing it.