Guest Post: Thomas MacAulay Millar is a book contributor, the principal blogger at YMY blog, a founding member of NYC Consent Working Group. This was originally posted at:
Yes Means Yes Blog - December 12, 2012 - reprinted with permission from the author.
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So by now many of my regular readers will know that Good Men Project
first published Alyssa Royse’s piece about how her friend who raped a
sleeping woman (both she and, in her telling, he call it rape) but she
wants to discuss how he was confused by the mixed signals the woman
allegedly sent (prior to sleeping). Then, Good Men Project published
another piece by an anonymous rapist (he admits he is) who gets wasted
and fucks people who are too wasted to consent, and he says he won’t
stop because it’s just fun to get wasted and not give a shit what
happens to other people. This predictably drew outrage, and lots of
folks have been all over it, including Jill at Feministe in two posts
here and
here. Joanna Schroeder at GMP put up a post defending the decision to give the drunk rapist a platform, and in the
comments
one thing she’s done is try to distinguish the research that Lisak
& Miller and McWhorter have done on “undetected rapists” — those who
have not been caught or disciplined, but whose responses on surveys are
concessions to having raped, though they don’t call it that. This is
in part a discussion about that research, and I cover it in
Meet The Predators, which is among the most cited posts here at YMY — I’ll assume familiarity with it.
As what lawyers call a “threshhold issue,” Schroeder thinks the
studies don’t support my post, but she’s not just arguing with me.
She’s arguing with Lisak about his own research.
David Lisak has said:
“This is the norm,” said Lisak, who co-authored a 2002
study of nearly 1,900 college men published in the academic journal
Violence and Victims. “The vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by serial offenders who, on average, have six victims. So, this is who’s doing it.”
I’m not putting words in his mouth when I say that Predator Theory
(my term for the conclusions drawn from his and similar research) is the
explanation for the vast bulk of the rapes that happen. That’s what he
says his findings mean, too.
Next, I think Schroeder ‘s criticism doesn’t grapple with the math.
Let’s use Lisak & Miller’s numbers, with a population of a
million men and a million women. If 2% of the men are single-offense
rapists meeting Lisak’s definition, and a further 4% are repeaters with
an average of 5.8 victims, that implies that 20,000 of the men are
single-offenders with 20,000 victims, and the 40,000 repeat offenders
have 232,000 victims. To oversimplify and assume that no women rape, no
men are victims, everyone is either a man or a woman and there are no
repeat victims, we then have 252,000 victims, or about a quarter of the
population of women. If we believe the various victim-report data,
that’s about what we would expect. So, while Lisak & Miller’s
questions certainly will not capture every rape, they do capture the
vast majority — they have to, unless she’s postulating a victimization
rate much higher than the victim report data account for. If she’s
saying that maybe half of all women are raped … well, you can say that,
but where is the data to back that up?
Also, I don’t agree with how she reads a question. Look at Lisak
& Miller’s Question 2, which Shcroeder puts a lot of weight on in
her argument that Lisak’s and McWhorter’s questions capture premeditated
rape only. Question 2 does not actually do that. It captures all
situations where the respondent knows that consent was absent by reason
of intoxication; not just those where he concedes knowing that at the
time. McWhorter includes a similar question that allows for getting
someone drunk or high and does not actually inquire about foreknowledge,
an element she read in. She misreads “they didn’t want to” to mean
premeditation, but if you take out “they didn’t want to” then why would
it be rape? It’s only rape if one participant to the act does not
consent and if they don’t ask that, then they are not asking about
rapes.
If one actually goes back and reads the account from the rapist GMP
published, he would be captured by Lisak & Miller’s survey, though
maybe not McWhorter’s. Lisak & Miller asked:
(2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though
they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol
or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
What did the guy whose accountin the GMP piece say? He said:
A friend of mine once told me about a girl who he knew
for a fact had only had two drinks. He didn’t know she was on
prescription medication that amplified those two drinks beyond all
measure. He thought she was just very horny when she wouldn’t leave him
alone or take “Are you okay?” for an answer. It wasn’t until she kept
calling him by the wrong name and couldn’t remember the right one that
he realized she was not able to consent, and called a halt to things
before they went any further. He says he had to dissuade her from
pursuing things further, because she was really into it, apart from not
knowing who he was or where she was.
“Can you imagine?” he tells me in horrified tones. “I was almost a rapist.”
How do I tell him that I was in a similar position and made a
different call? How do I tell him that I am what he’s terrified he
almost was?
The fair read of what he said about “a different call” is that he’s
been in a situation where he realized that his prospective partner was
so out of it that she was in no position to give meaningful consent,
i.e. unable to resist his advances, and went ahead and fucked her
anyway. That satisfies Lisak & Miller’s question 2.
The other piece that has brought a recent storm of controversy on
GMP, Alyssa Royse’s, has a similar story, and that one would not be
captured by either the McWhorter or Lisak survey. But I don’t think
that helps Schroeder’s argument, since her issue is that the Predator
Theory deals only with premeditated (it doesn’t), deliberate (that’s
correct) rape. The story in the Royse piece is a story of a deliberate
rape. She was asleep. She could not give consent, and at the time, she
was not giving any signals – none at all. Sleep is not a communicative
state. Even if one assumes that he was certain she wanted to fuck him,
he would have pursued that while she was awake. If he thought she
consented, why wait until she is asleep? So this is a deliberate rape,
maybe not a premeditated one but a decision to stick his cock in a
person who was unable to express consent, and was in fact unaware of his
conduct until his penis was in her.
I think Schroeder is starting from the premise that these
“miscommunications” have to be the more prevalent scenario, and are
simply saying that Lisak and McWhorter can’t be addressing the majority
of rapes because they don’t address that. But that’s misguided as a
matter of math, of reading their questions, and I think of how the world
works.
I submit that, because the phenomenon that Lisak and McWhorter
identify squares with victim report data in terms of overall numbers,
while it doesn’t capture all rapes, it does capture the bulk of the
problem. I reason from this premise to the conclusion that the sort of
miscommunications that you seem to be talking about, are a much smaller
dynamic. And that squares with other research, that outlined in the
post
Mythcommunications,
which is another of the most-referenced YMY posts, and which has been
picked up for republication in specialty publications for folks that
deal with rape in professional settings, like law enforcement and
medicine.
I think the folks saying that guys rape because they misread signals
are mostly getting snowed by guys that are taking advantage of the
wiggle room people are willing to extend them, even after recognizing
that what they did was rape. This is what I’m talking about at the end
of Meet The Predators when I discuss the Social License to Operate. If
we start from the premise that the rapist is the guy in the bushes, of
course, we can’t accept that what the people we know do is rape. But
also, if we start from the position that the people we know are good
people and we’re unwilling to reevaluate that, then we’ll forever make
excuses for them.
The two pieces at GMP recently have the effect of erasing the
rapists’ responsibility for the rapes. It’s the “weather” approach –
guys just do this, they misunderstand signals, they’re drunk, sure it’s
wrong but it can’t be helped, so all you women out there better change
your behavior. It’s really telling that you used the words “for the
record” – it’s terminology people use when they have to say something
but they don’t really mean it, a formal acknowledgement of something
they’re trying to undermine or amend or excuse. It’s the part that
comes before “but.”
The guy whose account GMP published is, if not wholly a rational
actor, at least a partially rational one. He knows what he’s done and
he knows what he will do. He’s choosing this path because it hasn’t
cost him enough yet, because the rewards in the fucked up feedback loop
still outweigh the costs.
(He’s a drunk. My regular readers know that I know more about living
with substance abusers than I wish I did. Drunks avoid the hard
decision to get sober until the consequences motivate them. We don’t
shrink from throwing drunks in jail for drunk driving when they hurt
people because we just can’t have them crashing into people. Well, we
can’t have drunks raping people either, and if there were consequences
they’d have to make tough choices. As long as we focus on how women can
change their own behavior, we’re not going to do that.
But he’s not every drunk. Every drunk doesn’t rape. Drunks rapists
rape because getting drunk allows them to give themselves permission to
do things they know are wrong, to push the conscience into the corner
and keep it there. If rape just happened when people got drunk, all
drunks would rape. This guy’s hard-partying friend does not say, “hey,
it’s all good” when a prospective partner is too bombed to recall his
name. But this guy does.)
A lot of well-meaning people are, in my view, acting as part of the
problem by accepting as a stated or unstated premise that we should
erase the rapist’s agency from the discussion. If we assume that
rapists are like hurricanes, that we can’t stop them from forming and
can’t control their movements, then the only thing left is to control
the victims’ behavior.
That’s wrong for two reasons. First, rapists are not hurricanes. If
we could dissuade hurricanes from hitting the coast by fining them or
jailing them or kicking them out of the dorms, wouldn’t we? Of course
we would. Second, to reference the Ben Franklin quote, “those who would
trade essential liberty for a little temporary security deserve
neither.” Or, as Golda Mier put it when a curfew for women was proposed
to protect them from a serial rapist, why not give the men a curfew?
Curtailing women’s freedom by policing their behavior has a cost. By
making that the focus of prevention, we’re imposing that cost on women.
That’s not a logical necessity. That’s a policy choice.
Amanda Marcotte said years ago that if we are serious about a problem
we tackle it systemically, and if we just want an excuse to blame women
we tell them its their individual responsibility. She was talking
about recycling or food politics or some such, but it goes for rape,
too. Men use alcohol and excuses to rape. If we were serious, we’d
look at those dynamics and find a public policy solution to interrupt
the cycle: increased policing, better rape reporting, consent education
aimed primarily at men around their drinking – not so much to educate
the rapists but to make them stand out; this is a major point in my
Predator Theory writing. But we don’t do that. We tell women not to go
out and drink so much. Well, we tell women what to do and not to do
with their own bodies a lot, and I don’t think anyone thinks we can make
a damned bit of difference by doing that more. We’re not going to stop
any rapes by scolding women. But we are going to build in an excuse,
an i-told-you-so that, however good the intentions, is going to be used
to club rape survivors. Don’t we all know that by now? We must know.
I’ve said what we need to do. We need to strip away the Social License to Operate, the cover we give these guys.
Alyssa Royse says her friend is a rapist, but she doesn’t say he’s
not her friend. She tells the story in a way that is openly sympathetic
to him. While she repeats the verbiage of opposition to rape, it’s
manifestly inconsistent with the tone – almost as if she made a series
of flashcards of things I would say or Jaclyn or Jill would say, and
made a set of flash cards of things someone says when they’re making
excuses for rapists, and then shuffled them together and included them
in her piece in whatever order they appeared in. (The cognitive
dissonance between saying nothing excuses fucking her in her sleep and
saying that she led him on by describing her history of sex work is so
powerful that if we could harness it we could eliminate the need for
hydraulic fracking.) We need to stop doing that shit. She said herself
that the way she talked to the survivor had the effect of
victim-blaming and alienated the survivor. That’s the problem. We know
that some of the rapists are the people we know and like, we know that
survivors get bomber with accusatory questioning, yet when it was her
friend, she did exactly the same thing, and now instead of feeling angry
at the rapist and mad at herself for falling into the same dynamics,
she feels sad for him and wants to understand, and seems not to accept
that her victim-blaming, however intended, was victim-blaming and made
her part of the problem.
Whatever the intent, the effect is to excuse him, to create a rape
that “just happens”, a rape without a “rapist” in the morally culpable
sense, the kind that we all agree belongs in prison, the kind we can no
longer be friends with or say nice things about.
And the drunk rapist GMP gave a platform to needs to stop. He
certainly needs to get sober, and he needs to stop raping. But nothing
GMP did helps put him in a position where he, or anyone like him, needs
to make these tough choices. Their version of “understanding” has the
effect, whatever your intent, of coming across as sympathy, making
excuses for him as a poor drunk who isn’t really culpable the way the
predators are. But he is them. He did it, he’ll do it again, he knows
it, and he’s not willing to stop because he likes how it works out for
him.
We need to stop being okay with rapists. Understanding is a word
with multiple meanings. I am all about understanding rapists in the
sense of being able to make policy effectively to affect them. But I
don’t want to understand them in the sense of empathy. They’re not sob
stories and they don’t need our warm fuzzies. They need to stop. We
need to give them reasons to stop.
