I was going to start this with an apology: Sorry there’s been so much about rape culture on the site in the past week, I promise this post will be the last for a while, etc.
But then I thought about the Saturday after the attacks on two women near Boyd Wilson field, when I walked my little sister up that same path to her empty flat and waited as she packed a bag of clothes and toiletries. Then, as the purple dusk started to turn into night, we walked back to my house – also in the area, but closer to town, better lit, more populated – where she stayed the rest of the weekend.
It felt like we were waiting for a sentence to be lifted. We went to the gym, did some baking, went out for coffee, watched Frozen, got drunk – it felt like any other weekend. Except it wasn’t, because though we acknowledged it in only the vaguest of terms, we were together because Jess was afraid to be alone.
And we knew it was illogical. We knew that, with a security guard posted on the path and a description of the attacker being widely publicised, he was unlikely to ‘strike again’ in that area. We knew the chances were miniscule that he’d ever be caught, let alone that weekend. We knew we were far more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone we knew.
And I knew – at an academic level at least – that by spending her weekend any other way than how she would have had the attacks not happened, Jess was kowtowing to a culture that holds victims to blame for their assault.
But I didn’t tell her that, because what good would that have done?
These are the knots that I came across and struggled to unpick in the reporting and writing of my feature on rape culture. It’s been shared widely since it was published last Thursday, which is gratifying given there are two very good reasons not to read it at all: first, it’s long, and second, it’s depressing.
But I’m also aware that the people who’ve liked the feature on Facebook or shared it on Twitter or said nice things about it to me in person already knew about the rape culture in which we live. And that knowledge marks us as a minority.
I was reminded of this that same weekend when, in what I guess was a misjudged attempt to “lighten the mood”, my ex-boyfriend joked on Facebook about his apparent resemblance to the attacker. It made me, for a moment, blaze with anger, and I had to restrain myself from commenting. A friend texted me to ask if I’d seen his status, and said she was glad we’d broken up.
She and I both know he’s a decent man, the kind of feminist ally who wouldn’t hesitate to speak out at a sexist joke or step in if he saw an assault, but who equally would never presume that made him an authority on the subject. But – for a number of reasons, his gender being only one – he didn’t see that his post was at best tasteless, in much the same way that a sociologist can argue that rape culture does not exist because he doesn’t experience it himself.
My own (I want to say “feminist awakening”, but I also really, really don’t want to say) feminist awakening clicked into place when I was 15 or 16, sitting in my school uniform in the lounge of my family home in Nelson, watching the six o’clock news with my mum and my sisters, and hearing the statistic that one in four women would be sexually abused in her lifetime. I remember thinking: That can’t be right, surely.
Those of us who are versed in the language and theory of rape culture need to act as ambassadors for the movement against it
Then I moved to Wellington and started going to uni and at some point I realised that the flipside of the messaging that I’d so far taken for granted, that I shouldn’t walk by myself or drink too much or wear too short skirts, was that if I didn’t abide by those ‘rules’ and something happened to me, I’d only have myself to blame. Meanwhile, my male friends were free to go where and do as and wear what they pleased.
As feminist theory goes, this is entry-level stuff. But what strikes me is this: if it took me, a middle-class Pakeha, a couple of years into my tertiary education in the liberal arts for even the first penny to drop, imagine the barrier to entry for much of the rest of the population.
I don’t propose raising awareness of rape culture as a silver bullet, as though it were an upcoming fundraiser we need to hand out flyers for. But the more people who are aware of it, its insidiousness and its impact, the better – and that means those of us who are versed in the language and theory need to act as ambassadors for the movement against it.
But at the moment, it can be difficult and stressful, if not downright unpleasant to talk about feminism. Not in all circles, nor with all feminists. But a lot of us. More than one person I interviewed was leery of commenting on what was perceived to be so thorny an issue for fear of provoking the anger of the feminist community by “saying the wrong thing”.
Working in the news media, I’ve seen that ire in full flight. It can be a powerful force for positive change (the suspension of Willie Jackson and John Tamihere in the wake of Roast Busters last year; the pressure on Radio New Zealand to observe Chelsea Manning’s preferred name and pronoun), sending an uncompromising and unambiguous message that “We will not tolerate this”.
But it can also be misdirected and myopic and unproductive, enacting outrage over an unfortunate but well-intentioned choice of words, or an entry-level response or viewpoint that neglected to cover off every angle, every tension, every stakeholder’s interests that a more learned, fully-fledged, just better feminist would have known to take into account.
To comment on feminism or issues of gender and sexuality feels like putting yourself in the firing line. I asked three more articulate feminists than me to proofread this piece, partly to identify and pre-empt any readings that might make me a target on Twitter later today.
But I wonder if I should have felt like I had to.
There’s an element of policing – of “My feminism is better than your feminism” – to so much of the dialogue, that many of us who are proud to identify as feminist don’t feel confident enough to speak for fear of being shouted down. As my friend put it over Gchat: “There’s very much the sense that if you have to ask questions at the meeting, you shouldn’t be at the table.”
I’m familiar with the argument is that “intent isn’t magic” – that those of us who are literate in concepts like victim-blaming shouldn’t have to teach them to people, especially men; that the resources are freely available, and the onus is on them to seek them out.
But when most people won’t, leaving it at “Just Google it!” feels like apathy to me.
It’s easy to forget, when your social media streams and social circles reflect your own views and interests back at you, just how foreign these concepts are to the vast majority of the population. For them, it’s easier not to engage than it is to read a long and depressing feature on rape culture, assuming they even came across it online in the first place.
As such, the more entry points into feminism there are, the better it will be for everyone.
You can argue that a public service campaign aimed at reducing domestic violence with the message “Real men don’t hit women” is heteronormative, and reinforces stereotypical ideas of masculinity; the gender-flipping used in the Auckland Law Revue girls’ ‘Blurred Lines’ parody may well be crude and reductive.
But if either prompted the average person – who might still think of feminism as an extreme movement, who has no idea what ‘rape culture’ is, who doesn’t catalogue the crimes of the patriarchy on Tumblr – to think about the inherent problems with the way in which society treats women, and puts them on the path to their own ‘feminist awakening’ (again, sorry), then surely that’s a good thing.
I don’t mean to provoke a battle of think pieces (“Ms Hunt might be content to dismiss hate speech as an ‘unfortunate choice of words’…”), nor am I claiming to be free of fault: My rolling my eyes at “craftivism to end rape culture”, or the self-congratulatory grandstanding of the male ‘allies’ on my Twitter timeline, is ultimately unproductive.
And by no means am I saying that we shouldn’t be angry.
But I do believe we need to be mindful of the fact that a big part of dismantling rape culture is helping others reach the realisation that their words, their opinions, their views – even the music they listen to, the jokes they find funny – uphold a culture that damages us all.
Some, maybe even many, are thoroughgoing misogynists, not only wilfully blind to society’s problems with women but actively contributing to them. But not all of them.
Many are a product of the rape culture in which they live, and we need to be considerate of the fact that having their eyes opened to that can be an uncomfortable and jarring experience.
That’s what we want – first, for people to see the world in a different way, so that the world can be different. But if it’s too difficult to understand or too awkward to question or too unpleasant to talk about, it will always be easier to turn a blind eye.
Cover photo by Margot Mills for Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association.
