16 Days of Activism & a Personal Note

November 25 kicked off the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.

A few things have coincided lately that got me thinking about some things, which I felt compelled to talk about. One is personal “old life” stuff popping up again with certain people, another is an episode MadMen I saw last night (that probably should have come with a trigger warning), and the other is my charity anthology Nothing But Red finaling for an EPPIE Award.

I want to talk about a little thing called “grey rape”.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard about the whole myth of grey rape, but it’s the idea (perpetuated in a major womens’ magazine by the batshit crazy Laura Sessions Stepp) that there is a grey area regarding rape. That if it’s not violent, or it’s committed by a date/intimate partner with perhaps coercion but not violence, it’s not “real rape.”

This doesn’t hold up to logic, in a lot of ways, but the myth continues. I think in part, the problem is the emphasis on “no means no” and NOT “yes means yes.” Women are treated—in both real life and the fiction we encounter every day—that their default setting is “yes.” “If she doesn’t say no, then she must mean yes.” Um...no, actually. And if we—men and women—could shift our perspective of consent, I think the myth of grey rape would disappear. If you’re in bed with a woman, unless she says, “Yes, I want to have sex,” and starts tearing her clothes off (while sober, I might add), don’t sleep with her. Don’t just start stripping her clothes off and listen for “no.” Don’t touch her unless she says YES.

However...

There is a lot of talk in modern feminists circles about how we should have no tolerance for the term “grey rape” and how we should call it what it is: rape. And logically, I agree with that. But I think a lot more care has to be taken when speaking to survivors if that’s how they identify their experience. YOU may call it rape and say it’s wrong and illegal, and that she did nothing wrong, and her rapist is a bastard that should rot in hell. But that invalidates the feelings of the rape survivor. When it comes to rape by an intimate partner, you risk silencing a survivor by defining for her what her experience was like before she’s able to process it. Given the choice between defining her experience as rape (a very loaded term) or not at all, many would chose to say they were never raped.

Who wants to accuse their intimate partner of that kind of thing? Maybe you were drunk or high. Maybe you said yes, but don’t remember. Maybe he was pressuring you a lot and you felt like you didn’t have a choice. Maybe he didn’t notice you were crying. Maybe it was just your wifely duty to “put out” regardless of how you were feeling. “But it wasn’t rape.”

As soon as you define what happened to a survivor before she does, it’s another violation. It’s taking the power away from her. AGAIN.

So that’s why, when we’re talking about gender violence, rape, and domestic abuse, it’s important to keep dialogue going and not re-silence survivors.

Please take time—not just during these sixteen days, but all year around—to do something to SAY NO to gender violence. Check out some of the links on this page for more information, and be sure to buy your copy of Nothing But Red. http://www.lulu.com/nothingbutred