The Mother of All Questions Page 3
New recognitions required new language, and feminism coined a plethora of words to describe the individual experiences that the conversations of the 1960s and 1970s were beginning to flush out of hiding. Susan Brownmiller coined the term date rape in 1975. The term sexual harassment was perhaps coined in 1974 by Mary Rowe to describe misconduct at MIT, or by a group of women addressing the same problem at Cornell in 1975. The legendary lawyer Catherine MacKinnnon took the concept forward with her 1979 book Sexual Harassment of Working Women. The term and the concepts behind it would only become well known to the public with the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings in 1991. In 1993, Oklahoma and North Carolina became the last states to make raping one’s spouse a crime. Lack of jurisdiction over one’s own body is a form of silencing, a way of making what one says have no value, and words without value are worse than silence: one can be punished for them.
II: Every Man an Island: Male Silence
Silence is present everywhere under patriarchy, though it requires different silences from men than from women. You can imagine the policing of gender as the creation of reciprocal silences, and you can begin to recognize male silence as a tradeoff for power and membership. No one ever put it better than bell hooks, who said:
The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.
That is, patriarchy requires that men silence themselves first (and perhaps it’s worth noting again that, though patriarchy is a system that privileges men and masculinity, many women are complicit in it, some men rebel against it, and some people are undoing the rules of gender that prop it up). This means learning not only to be silent to others but also to themselves, about aspects of their inner life and self.
Reading hooks’s passage, I was chilled, as though I suddenly understood that this is the plot of a horror movie or a zombie movie. The deadened seek out the living to exterminate feeling, either by making their targets join them in numbness or by intimidating or assaulting them into silence. In the landscape of silence, the three realms might be silence imposed from within; silence imposed from without; and silence that exists around what has not yet been named, recognized, described, or admitted. But they are not distinct; they feed each other; and what is unsayable becomes unknowable and vice versa, until something breaks.
A certain kind of emotional wholeness is the price men pay for power, and the renunciations begin early. When I questioned a nephew, as neutrally as possible, just before he turned five, about why pink was no longer among his favorite colors, he knew exactly what we were talking about: “I like girls. I just don’t like girl things,” he exclaimed, and he knew what girl things were and that he must not let them define him. In fact, he already despised them and segued into a tirade against My Little Pony.
I thought five was early to be bombarded until I shopped for a friend’s unborn son and was reminded that our roles seize us at birth. Girls get being cuddly, pretty, attractive, and maybe passive: warm colors, kittens and flowers and flourishes. Boys get distance: cool colors and active figures, often menacing ones or ones that are removed from intimacy and emotion—sports figures, balls and bats, rocket ships, cold-blooded animals like reptiles, dinosaurs, and sharks, strange choices for helpless mammals who depend on nurture.
Masculinity is a great renunciation. The color pink is a small thing, but emotions, expressiveness, receptiveness, a whole array of possibilities get renounced by successful boys and men in everyday life, and often for men who inhabit masculinized realms—sports, the military, the police, all-male workforces in construction or resource extraction—even more must be renounced to belong. Women get to keep a wider range of emotional possibility, though they are discouraged or stigmatized for expressing some of the fiercer ones, the feelings that aren’t ladylike and deferential, and so much else—ambition, critical intelligence, independent analysis, dissent, anger. That is to say, silence is a pervasive force, distributed differently to different categories of people. It underlies a status quo that depends upon a homeostasis of silences.
Misogyny and homophobia are both forms of hating that which is not patriarchy. “What causes heterosexuality?” asked one of the stickers put up around my hometown as part of Queer Nation’s insurgent campaign against homophobia a quarter century ago. It was a brilliant question reversing the conventional one, recognizing that heterosexuality was also socially constructed and did not have to be regarded as an unquestionable norm. I’ve been blessed to be around gay men since I was thirteen, around people who have resisted the indoctrinations of heterosexual masculinity, since at least some of its privileges excluded them or didn’t interest them or weren’t worth the tradeoff to them, or because dissenting erotically opened up the possibility of other kinds of dissent. Knowing them has been a long encounter with what else men could be.
Many of the gay men in my life have seemed more whole than most of the straight men I’ve known. They have been more able to experience and express a full range of emotion and to understand and appreciate it in others (and often to have honed perception of nuances and shades of meaning beyond the rest of us as well as the wit to express it). They have been soldiers who defected from patriarchy’s war, people with the binocular vision we call humor: the ability to recognize the gaps between how things are and how they are supposed to be.
Masculinity itself was and is open to question in a culture that includes the spectrum from drag queens to aestheticized hypermasculinity, and in which men recognized themselves as subject of the male gaze. Beneath it all lies a sense that all identities are a costume you don, and behind that lies latitude about who you want to be. Of course everyone in every category of human being has the right to be awful, and the mere fact of one’s orientation, like one’s race, class, religion, and gender, doesn’t necessarily generate liberation or insight; I am speaking not of all gay men but of my own friends and community.
In the heterosexual mainstream, women have performed the labor of holding and expressing emotion for others. When I was very young, I went on a road trip with my boyfriend, whose father, seeing us off, said, “Keep in touch. Your mother will be worried.” She was the stand-in for his inexpressible emotions. She had the feelings that could be acknowledged. She was the one who filled in the home’s silence with chatter to try to keep people connected, to be open in a house full of kind but shut-down men, decent men who were at worst uncomfortable with emotional expression and felt that connection was not their work.
If emotion must be killed, this is work that can make women targets. Less decent men hunt out vulnerability, because if being a man means learning to hate vulnerability, then you hate it in yourself and in the gender that has been carrying it for you. Girl and pussy have long been key insults used against boys and men, along with gay and faggot; a man must not be a woman, must not cry, must not be weak; and the fear of being gay was of being sexual in some way that might not be about domination and penetration, might be about being penetrated, being equal, being open. As if openness were weakness rather than strength. In ancient Greece and some contemporary cultures, masculinity has been defined by being he who penetrates. Being he or she who is penetrated is regarded as degradation equivalent to not being masculine—which makes being heterosexually female a perpetual state of degradation and, perhaps, equates the penetrator to he who degrades. (In medieval Iceland, the insult “a troll uses you like a woman” was considered so deadly that the insulted party was granted the legal right to kill.)
Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has ri
ghts and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play. So much sexual violence is a refusal of that vulnerability; so many of the instructions about masculinity inculcate a lack of skills and willingness to negotiate in good faith. Inability and entitlement deteriorate into a rage to control, to turn a conversation into a monologue of commands, to turn the collaboration of making love into the imposition of assault and the assertion of control. Rape is hate and fury taking love’s place between bodies. It’s a vision of the male body as a weapon and the female body (in heterosexual rape) as the enemy. What is it like to weaponize your body?
If you have not been taught to collaborate, to negotiate, to respect and pay attention, if you do not regard the beloved as your equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, you are not well equipped for the work of love. We are in a world where men until recently in the industrialized world assumed that access to women’s bodies was a right that women should not impede. It’s still common to hear heterosexual men complain of the onerous unreasonableness of having to earn sexual access, and maybe we should remember that until recently in the United States husbands had unrestricted rights to their wives’ bodies, which is the other way to say that wives had almost no rights over their own bodies.
Only in California and New York in recent years did affirmative consent become the statewide standard for consensual sex on college campuses. When affirmative consent was signed into law, a host of men in the United States (and on the London-based Guardian’s website) raised a shriek of indignation that both parties had to be consciously, actively in favor of what was going on. It was telling that they regarded this as a terrible obstacle, newly erected. The previous criterion had been the absence of dissent, which of course meant intimidation, intoxication, and unconsciousness could all be read as consent. Silence was consent, in other words, as though silence said one thing when it can say so many, as though the burden was to issue a no rather than elicit a yes.
It’s traditional to separate out rape from domestic violence from murder from institutional misogyny. But women being raped and beaten and harassed on the street and stalked often fear, with good reason, that they are also going to be killed, and sometimes they—we—are. The distinctions between the kinds of violence don’t serve us when they prevent us from talking about what gets called gender violence as a broad and deep phenomenon. And that even calling it all gender violence obscures that violence is only a means to an end, and that there are other means as well. If the subject is silence, then how some silence others broadens the query into one that can include shame, humiliation, exclusion, devaluation, discrediting, threats, and the unequal distribution of power through social, economic, cultural, and legal means.
Domestic violence expert Evan Stark argues that the very term is wrong; he writes in his 2009 book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life,
This book reframes woman battering from the standpoint of its survivors as a course of calculated, malevolent conduct deployed almost exclusively by men to dominate individual women by interweaving repeated physical abuse with three equally important tactics: intimidation, isolation, and control. . . . The primary harm abusive men inflict is political, not physical, and reflects the deprivation of rights and resources that are critical to personhood and citizenship.
He compares it to kidnapping, its victims to hostages, often cut off from access to other people, to freedom of movement, to material resources such as money or cars, punished for infractions by the dictator of the household. Often the most dangerous time is when victims of coercive control try to leave. Many are killed for trying, or for succeeding in reaching freedom, a freedom that is not safety. Stark adds,
The women in my practice have repeatedly made clear that what is done to them is less important than what their partners have prevented them from doing for themselves by appropriating their resources; undermining their social support; subverting their rights to privacy, self-respect, and autonomy; and depriving them of substantial equality. . . . Coercive control is a liberty crime rather than a crime of assault.
The actress and feminist activist Patricia Arquette noted in 2016,
There’s a ripple effect in being underpaid for women. Ten thousand women are turned down every day for domestic abuse shelters. Part of domestic abuse is often economic suppression; the male might take your paycheck every week and never give you money or allow you to work because he’s too jealous. The number-one reason women say they returned to their abuser is financial insecurity. Often they have kids with them.
We can expand on Stark’s framework to see many forms of attack on women—by strangers and acquaintances, by politicians and the state, not just by intimate partners—as coercive control. The endless war against reproductive rights—against not only abortion but also birth control and access to family planning and sex education—is an attempt at institutional coercive control. Violence sometimes plays a role, but coercion occurs by many other means, including the making of punitive and rights-denying laws. It’s not hard to see legislation that pretends to focus on the rights of the unborn over the rights of women in whom the unborn are situated as actually focused on the rights of men and the state over women’s bodies; or to see, in the effort to deny access to birth control and abortion, an attack on women’s autonomy, agency, and right to choose what sex means to them, to control their own bodies, to pursue pleasure and connection without submitting to the enormous demands of maternity, or to choose that maternity on their own terms.
The widespread existence of gender violence and sexual violence serves to curtail the freedom and confidence of those who must navigate in a world where threats become a background element to their lives, a footnote on every page, a cloud in every sky. These are not “crimes of passion,” as they were often called, or of desire, but of the fury to control and to reinforce or reimpose the power structure. A lot of domestic violence homicides are punishment for or attempts to continue controlling women who have announced they are leaving, tried to leave, or left. Killing someone is killing her freedom, her autonomy, her power, her voice. That many men believe they have the right and the need to control women, violently or otherwise, says much about the belief systems they inhabit, about the culture we exist within.
In recent years, from Brazil to Canada, rapists have filmed their sexual assaults. The video is then circulated among male peers as evidence of the agency of the rapists and the lack of agency of the victim, the subsequent humiliation and loss of control over her privacy and dignity (and much mainstream heterosexual porn reiterates this scenario in endless variations, with excitement seeming to come from homoerotic power, not heterosexual pleasure). This shaming drives some rape survivors to suicide—and it says a lot that a sexual assault is supposed to be shameful for the victim and not the perpetrator. These videos remind us of the coexistence of two wildly different worlds: when they circulate in the legal system, they are evidence of crimes, but when they circulate in the perpetrators’ peer group, they demonstrate to the others the perpetrators’ conformity to norms of masculinity.
But the law and the rapists are not so different in other ways. Many rape cases bring victims into court or university proceedings where the administrators perpetuate the discrediting and devaluing of the victim with questions that treat her like a perpetrator, cast her as an inherently untrustworthy person, attack her with intrusive, irrelevant, and prurient questions, often about her sexual history. University and legal authorities sometimes express more concern over the future of campus rapists than that of their victims and are often more inclined to grant credibility to the former than the latter. The consequent unwillingness of many survivors to cooperate with the legal system results in a loss of their legal rights, in silencing, in allowing rapists to go unpunished and often to act again, and in a society (the United States) in which only 3 percent of rapists serve time for their crimes.
Thus does coercive contro
l happen at a societal level as it does in the home. Women are instructed, by the way victims are treated and by the widespread tolerance of an epidemic of violence, that their value is low, that speaking up may result in more punishment, that silence may be a better survival strategy. Sometimes this is called rape culture, but like domestic violence, the term narrows the focus to one act rather than the motive for many; patriarchy is a more useful overarching term.
The pandemic of campus rape reminds us that this particular kind of crime is not committed by a group that can be dismissed as marginal in any way; fraternities at elite institutions from Vanderbilt to Stanford have been the scenes of extraordinarily vicious acts; every spring the finest universities graduate a new crop of unpunished rapists. They remind us that this deadness is at the heart of things, not the margins, that failure of empathy and respect are central, not marginal.
Empathy is a narrative we tell ourselves to make other people real to us, to feel for and with them, and thereby to extend and enlarge and open ourselves. To be without empathy is to have shut down or killed off some part of yourself and your humanity, to have protected yourself from some kind of vulnerability. Silencing, or refusing to hear, breaks this social contract of recognizing another’s humanity and our connectedness.
Contemplating a book of lynching photographs published a few decades ago, I imagined the white people who brought their children and picnics to the torture scenes were celebrating their numbness, their separation. The people making or consuming rape videos and misogynist porn must be doing the same. Our humanity is made out of stories or, in the absence of words and narratives, out of imagination: that which I did not literally feel, because it happened to you and not to me, I can imagine as though it were me, or care about it though it was not me. Thus we are connected, thus we are not separate. Those stories can be killed into silence, and the voices that might breed empathy silenced, discredited, censored, rendered unspeakable, unhearable. Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.