I think this is an important and helpful book, however it does read like a PhD essay, with a lot of quotes and summaries of this theory and that person’s work etc. So instead of trying to summarise themes or chapters, I will share a few key things that I personally learned and deeply related to.
Tracey distinguishes between arousal and consent. A person’s body can be ready for sex, a person may experience erection, pleasure, wetness, but have never actually communicated a desire to have sex. These physical signals can be misinterpreted as consent, when they are simply arousal.
While there are many forms and definitions of rape, there are also many other forms of sexual violence including coercion, sexual harassment, and “really bad dates.” Tracey goes into a lot of detail about coercive and abusive dates and people’s ‘no’ being ignored or manipulated.
There was a survey conducted in 2012 with gender-inclusive language that “changed the definition of rape from ‘the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will’ to ‘the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part of object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.’” The results were depressingly interesting: 38% of victims identified as male. Sexual violence is perpetrated across all genders and even by all genders. This is not just a feminist issue.
Tracy talks about moving beyond consent to the language of mutuality. Kindness and empathy don’t have a gender, we should all be practicing these traits! We should have the deepest respect for other people’s boundaries, agency and autonomy.
Throughout this book, Tracey describes Disney princess and other stories that have been harmful, perpetuating patriarchal gender roles that play into rape culture. She talks about culture-jamming through music and lyrics, new stories, books and films, different ways of presenting rape and other messages on screen, through writing, music and other art forms. We are all the authors of culture and we need to let our voices speak!
Favorite quotes:
- Sexual assault (rape), sexual coercion, sexual harassment, and the sometimes brutally repressive imposition of male dominance and female subordination (gender socialisation) are not interchangeable concepts and are not reducible into each other, but they do all function as aspects of the social relations theorised as rape culture and they are all recognisable within a peace studies framework as the direct violences that cultures and structures render as inexplicable, inevitable, or ‘not that bad.’ They are all ‘that bad,’ in that each of them makes it vastly more difficult for the person who experiences them to face their social world with confidence that their value as a human being will be affirmed and respected.
- Rape, like all forms of sexual violence, is, in its worst impacts upon victims, ‘sexually invasive dehumanization’ (Anderson)… Solnit describes it as a ‘system’ premised on the idea ‘I have the right to control you.’
- In order to meet the problem of sexual violence of oppressive and harmful norms and scripts, we need to move beyond consent models of thinking about sex… into language of mutuality… that is not on the ‘problematic’ spectrum… that supports agency and desire for all of us. This point is also made by Sanyal, who argues that ‘people who know what they want and need are a lot better at respecting other people’s desires and boundaries as well as their own.’
- What I am urging is that we retire traditional gender prescriptions in favour of robust appreciation of self-determination/autonomy and nurturing and responsibility-taking wherever they occur, in persons of any gender… Learning to value in anyone character traits that had previously been rigidly gendered will open up societal space for more individuals to live lives less constrained by stereotypes. Coupled with an agentic and empathetic model of sexual consensus, I think this could produce less sexual violence and fewer victims.
- Rebecca Solnit argues that ‘at the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.