Friedman, Valenti & Graff Ending Rape Culture

1. Friedman, Valenti& GraffEnding Rape Culture “Rape is rape”

2. Cui bono? • In what ways do the vast majority of men, who are not rapists, benefit from rape culture? • Sexual freedom, agency • A legacy of power & ownership • Prestige and status • Epiphenomenal • Culture that takes men’s word more seriously than women’s continues to do so in cases of rape • Male dominance extends into sexual sphere • Privilege & invisibility

3. “To too many people, ‘rape’ and ‘rape victim’ are not accurate descriptors but political shorthand—the product of an overblown, politically correct interpretation of sex”. • Tennessee Senator Douglas Henry, 2008, “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.” (Valenti, Ending Rape Illiteracy) • Is rape a political act? Is rape victim a political category?

4. Todd Akin • “Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.” • How can the rapist be punished? What is rape? • “Legitimate rape” = violent, stranger rape • A woman pregnant from rape by definition not raped • She wanted it, culpable in her own rape

5. WI state representative Roger Rivard • “Some girls rape easy.” • Clarifying: “What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me [from my father], telling me, “If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.” So the way he said it was, “Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.” • Reflexive distrust of rape victims • The shadow of the slut enables rape: • Stigma of the slut attached to women who have sex • This stigma causes a belief that a women will allege rape so as not to be labeled a slut • Rape victims thus not credible

6. “Recently the Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned a sexual assault conviction for a man who attacked a woman with severe cerebral palsy. The woman cannot communicate verbally, and according to the court’s documents, has the “intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old.” • Still, because of how the state defines rape in cases of physical incapacitation, the court decided that the victim was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” and therefore could have communicated a lack of consent and didn’t. Basically, she didn’t fight back hard enough in order for what happened to her to be considered rape.” (Valenti, “Ending Rape Illiteracy”)

7. After the Department of Justice reported that there were 182,000 sexual assaults committed against women in 2008, a study by the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center showed that their numbers were wrong—thanks largely to the way they talked to women. Instead of asking questions like “Has anyone ever forced you to have sex?”, they asked women if they had been subject to “rape, attempted or other type of sexual attack.” • Thanks to the confusion around the definition of rape, and the hesitance of many women to label themselves victims, the actual number of women raped was much higher—the center put it around 1 million.