Markie L C Twist. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy. Volume 33, Issue 2. April-June 2021.
Introduction
In April of 2015, I (MLCT) was invited by a university to give the keynote speech at their annual “Take back the Night” gathering and march. What follows is my speech (Blumer, 2015) and then a more recent update on my experiences as they relate to the post-rape age. I share this piece to further academic writings in the spirit of feminist forms of transparency in scholarship like researcher reflexivity (Blumer & Murphy, 2011; Love, 2019; Merriam, 2002; Twist & McArthur, 2017) and narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 1989; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Twist, 2016). Through these forms of academic writing, reflection and re-storying is encouraged for the author, as well as for the reader (Clandinin & Connelly, 1989; Twist, 2016). The hope is that readers of such writings will benefit from reading “like truths,” which may empower them to tell their own related narratives, and hopefully experience growth through their telling (Clandinin & Connelly, 1989; Twist, 2016).
Beyond the Numbers: A Demand for a Post-Rape Age
“I was going to do a traditional academic talk full of numbers and research and scholarly literature and data and clinical information and then I felt like this was not right for this presentation because that kind of talk is rooted in exactly what this one should not be – patriarchy – cisgender male-dominant ways of being and making meaning (Heckman, 1990). That kind of talk appeals to logic and there is NOTHING logical about sexual assault.
I have decided that I am just too tired and angry to use logic and patriarchy-based understandings of sexual assault in this presentation. I mean I could tell you numbers like 20% of college women experience a sexual assault while in school and only 1% are reported to law enforcement (Kessler, 2014), and that according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-System (UW-System) report on sexual assault the system rates are consistent with state and national data that show sexual assault is predominately a crime committed by someone you know and not a stranger (case in point in the 2013 report of the 362 cases of sexual assault reported to law enforcement across the UW-System, 232 were committed by someone the survivor knew), which is roughly 65% of the assaults (University of Wisconsin-Madison University Health Services, n. d.; University of Wisconsin-System, 2013). I could tell you that in some studies researchers have found that 2.5% of cisgender man college students have reported perpetrating sexual assault and a very small percent of these men are repeat perpetrators (Yoffe, 2014). I could tell you the rates of sexual assault for sexual orientation and/or gender identity minorities on college campuses, however, this is not data (numbers) that are readily available; we do know they are higher than heterosexual and cisgender counterparts (Paulk, 2014). I could tell you all these numbers, but many people know the numbers and yet we are still here holding “Take Back the Nights” and have been since the roots of this movement in 1877 (Randall, 2007) – almost 210 years later. Why? Because nights to take back are still happening. So, instead, what I am going to talk about is feelings and stories reflecting a culture that enables and excuses sexual assault to continue.
My feelings are exhaustion, restlessness, depression, tired … why? This is not my first “Take Back the Night.” My first was roughly 20 years ago while I was in undergraduate schooling. I was there as a supporter of one of my very good friends who happened to be a traditional college-age, Filipino cisgender woman, and bisexual who had been assaulted. She wanted me to be there with her, so I went, I listened, I marched, I protested. I wish I could tell you this was my last friend who had been assaulted. I wish I could tell you this was my last “Take Back the Night” before tonight. I cannot tell you this.
Since this first “Take Back the Night” I have had countless friends, partners, colleagues, students, clients/clinical participants, children – people share their stories of sexual assault with me. I have been to several “Take Back the Nights” and like events including “Slut Walks”, and “Walk the Walks”. My feelings are anger, pissed, frustration, and just downright being OUTRAGED! I am outraged that it is still necessary to hold these events (as much as I appreciate them). I am outraged that sexual assault is continuing to happen.
I am outraged that the only difference between myself and those who are survivors of sexual assault is really nothing more than luck. You heard me – luck! I am not a survivor of sexual assault even though I met and meet many of the demographics for assault (Centers for Disease Control, 2010; James et al., 2016) – I am an androgynous, cisgender woman, bisexual, who was in college for a decade and was an athlete. I partied, I dated. I wore scant clothing. I stayed the night with people I barely knew. Why was I not sexually assaulted then or since then? It is not because I was better, or smarter, or more willing, or whatever people say are reasons why some people are assaulted while others are not. It is simply because I was luckier! I am outraged that my sexual safety at the end of the day has really boiled down to luck. Because it is not something special about me that has prevented my being sexually assaulted, it is not knowledge of the numbers, it is not even attendance to events like this. It is luck.
Well, I say it is time for luck to be not the only way to keep people like me and you safe. It is time to change the culture, to change the collective consciousness, it is time to end the silence around talking about sex, and it is time to end patriarchy, sexism, cissexism, and cisgenderism. It is time to do more than gather data and talk numbers. It is time to talk the talk about what needs to change to enter into what poet Christine Marie (n.d.) calls, “the postrape age.”
My feelings are hopeful, empowered, and futuristically minded. Why? Because knowing there is a way to enter a post-rape age makes me feel we can do something to end sexual assault. How? We need to start from the beginning – we have to start with young people – I mean babies or rather prior to becoming a baby. We need to start with how we construct gender and sexuality with the next generation. We need to deconstruct and then reconstruct these concepts because how we construct sexuality and gender are rooted in patriarchy and are not conducive to a reality of a post-rape age. We need to talk about a world where cisgender heterosexual men (who are the world majority that commit sexual assaults) understand that their gender, their body parts, their penises, their being is not better or more deserving or more powerful than everyone else. For instance, we need to talk about how the dominant United States (US) idea of what it is to be a man is as tied to genitalia and what it is to be a woman is as tied to genitalia as it is rooted in patriarchy (Ansara, 2012; Blumer et al., 2013). What do I mean by this? How male a baby is and how female a baby is genitalia-wise is determined by a scale developed by a Swiss medical physician man named Prader (1954). This scale ranks the genitalia of babies as being more penis or more vagina and then sex/gender is assigned. And if you are not man or woman enough you are intersex. Does this sound like what we hear then the rest of our lives, particularly for and from men? You are not man enough! Maybe you are man enough if you can overpower a woman or a transwoman or another man.
So, one thing that needs to change is the medicalization of our genitalia, which sets the stage for genital differences – even before birth – and then genital differences set the stage for sex/gender differences and patriarchy and the power and the privilege that comes from this continues to be perpetuated. Of course, this is one example and it is bigger than this. The point is that we need to co-create the space for people to self-identify their gender and their sexuality and their identity rather than having the patriarchy imposed on them, which identifies these aspects of who we are for us. We need to rise up and say no one has the right to tell me who I am. I will break from the patriarchy, sexism, cissexism, and cisgenderism.
In a path toward a post-rape age, we will be self-designating our gender, our sexuality, our identity, and this changes the way we see our relationships with each other. When we can each be who we are, rather than who we think we should be or who others think we should be, we are freed up to have different relationships with each other – not relationships where a man is stronger than a woman, and a woman is weaker, or a transperson just needs to be assaulted in order to become a real man or woman, or where a man’s worth is measured by how much of a man he is, etc. Instead, we are freed up to write our own relationships with each other. When each of us is empowered to be who we are, how we see ourselves apart from societal constructions and stereotypes of who we are, we are able to have relationships characterized by shared understandings of sex, sexuality and gender. When this happens, we have coconstructed experiences of sex that are stories of responsibility, consent, agreement, education, communication, and pleasure rather than having stories of sex based on numbers, thus putting patriarchy first.
I think “Take Back the Nights” are important, but I am making a plea, no I am making a demand, that we move to a post-rape age – an age where the culture has been changed, and we have ended patriarchy and related “isms” – an age where the culture has been changed and sexual assaults have ended and with them events like “Take Back the Nights.” I invite you to begin the steps in entering into this age by talking feelings and stories with each other and the next generation about sex, sexuality and gender.
When I think about what my 7-year-old child says to peers and adults about sex, sexuality and gender, I have hope that a post-rape age is possible. For instance, my child was talking to one of his cisgender boy peers at our house about cups. His peer did not want to use a “girl” cup. My child shared that it was not a “girl” cup – it was a cup. Cups do not have genitalia nor can they selfidentify their gender, so they do not have gender, they are cups. Thinking about conversations like this gives me hope that maybe one day we will be holding celebrations about the lack of sexual assault rather than sit-ins and protests on ending sexual assault.
So I invite, no I demand you go out there and be preventative, and proactive not reactive to patriarchy – go out there and talk with people about the cultural understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality and help them to see how current dominantly held traditional understandings of gender, sex and sexuality hurt us all, but if we let people self-identify it may empower us all and lead us into a post-rape age.”
One of the Numbers: My Post-Rape Age
Turns out my luck ran out. While I had not previously experienced sexual assault in my lifetime; in the last five years I now have – I have become one of the numbers who have survived a sexual assault. My numbers are not the ones I anticipated, nor are they numbers that receive much attention in the literature, popular culture, and/or courtrooms (Bennice & Resick, 2003). My experience as one of the numbers includes being raped at age 40 (more specifically during the celebrating of my birthday). Although by age 44, one in four cisgender women have been raped at some point in their lifetime – a number that has remained relatively consistent in the literature for almost twenty years now (Axinn et al., 2018) – statistically speaking, the odds of such a violation occurring for a woman in her 40s are less likely than that of such a violation occurring toward a 15 year old cisgender boy (Felson & Cundiff, 2014).
My experience as one of the numbers also includes surviving marital rape. There are no real numbers or words that I can use to describe what this experience is like. It took months for me to even be able to identify the experience for what it is was – rape. Before that time, I knew something had gone wrong around consent and his actions. But, there was no real word for what that was – indeed, I only put together that it was rape in prepping to give a lecture on sexual consent and coercion for my undergraduate lifespan sexuality course. I remember reading that one of the most common posttraumatic effects of marital rape was that many survivors of this form of rape struggle with even identifying the act as rape (Bennice & Resick, 2003; Mahoney & Williams, 1998). I immediately realized this is what had happened to me and I could not believe it. It took some time for my disbelief to wear off.
I remember thinking I went my whole life without being raped, despite the numbers cited in my speech, which have only risen since 2015, and my exceptionally high knowledge of sex and sexuality as an educator and therapist, to being raped by my then husband. I also began to come to terms with the fact that my not having been raped before this time was not about me (which I never thought it was for people who are raped, but somehow I thought I was just better informed so it had not happened to me in part because my education and knowledge had just somehow made me immune). And while my not having been raped maybe had been a little bit to do with luck, the fact that I had now been raped and others are raped was exactly about what I knew it to be about when I gave the talk above. This rape, my rape, happened at the hands of a white, cisgender, hyper-masculine, heterosexual man, who in an alcohol-induced state, exerted the ultimate form of his expression of anger, reinforcement of his power, dominance and control over me and my body, and need for validation for his masculine identity through raping me. These are the characteristics and motivations that researchers have identified in most husband – rapists and man rapists more generally speaking (Bennice & Resick, 2003; Mahoney & Williams, 1998) – and they were his characteristics and motivations.
Before I could even name my rape for what it was – I had moved into another bedroom – afterward, I legally separated from him. I struggled with whether or not to report the rape for a number of reasons, including concerns for what it would mean for the family system as a whole, fear of not being believed, lack of legal support and related consequences. According to the literature these are very common reasons why marital rape is perhaps one of the least reported forms of rape (Russell, 1990). Indeed, only 14% of married women report being raped by their spouses (Russell, 1990), however, some researchers have found that between 29–39% of all adult rape cases toward women are by husbands/long-term man partners (George et al., 1992; Mahoney & Williams, 1998; Randall & Haskell, 1995). In two more recent comprehensive reviews of the literature (Bennice & Resick, 2003; Martin et al., 2007), prevalence rates of marital rape remain relatively on par with the statistics from these earlier studies. Indeed, Martin et al. (2007) found that 10 to 14% of married women and between 40 and 50% of battered married women experience martial rape. In another review of the literature, across six studies of various sample sizes, between 7.7% and 62% of married women had experienced martial rape (Bennice & Resick, 2000).
Moreover, although all fifty of the US states recognize rape in the context of marriage and allow for no exemptions due to marriage (since 1993) (Bergen, 1999), many states still have an antiquated legal approach to marital rape with some states mandating additional requirements in the reporting of the assault by the survivor (e.g., rape cannot be charged unless the parties are separated and living apart, etc.). Regardless, of the current laws regarding marital rape in the US, there is a long history of marital rape not being considered rape. Laws that predate the birth of our nation, yet are what our laws were built upon, and thus set the precedence for the years that followed our birth. Indeed, the colonizers from which our country was founded believed that a man could not rape his wife as she had “given” herself to him in marriage and there is documentation of this going all the way back to the Chief Justice of England in 1736 making such claims (Russell, 1990). To this day, for many people, including those in the field of law, the closer the relationship between people (like being married versus dating), the less likely an assault will be considered a rape (Kirkwood & Cecil, 2001).
Ultimately, I ended up not reporting the rape to the authorities, but I did divorce him. There are times when I still consider reporting – after all, there is no expiration date on rape, marital or otherwise, and the aftermath that comes from the experience.
Deconstructing the Numbers: Hope for a Post-Rape Age
In the five years since I gave my talk at “Take Back the Night” what I believed would be one of the best ways to reach a post-rape age has begun to be realized not only personally for me, especially in seeing my child growing and their activism, but also in the larger society. Indeed, gender and sexuality are being deconstructed and reconstructed differently, allowing for a new set of numbers (hopeful numbers) to emerge.
We are seeing the deconstruction of cisgenderism, and the reconstruction of gender occurring in much more diverse ways, especially in our youth (Twist, 2019; Twist & Brenmark, 2018). For instance, members of Generation Z (people born since 1996) are reportedly more familiar with gender neutral pronouns and are more likely to know someone who uses gender neutral pronouns than those of other generations (Parker. et al., 2019). Moreover, about six in ten people of Generation Z say official forms and surveys need to offer multi-gender options (beyond the binary man/woman options) and half believe society is not accepting enough of people who identify outside of cisgender genders (Parker. et al., 2019).
In addition, we have seen more women challenging the patriarchy and its representatives through campaigns like the “Me Too Movement” (Murphy, 2019). Although this is a movement that started many years prior to it gleaning so much popular attention, the latter of which began in October 2017 through the following: 1) over 80 women made allegations of sexual abuse committed by Harvey Weinstein, and 2) actress Alyssa Milano used #MeToo on Twitter encouraging victims of sexual harassment to share and “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” The beginning of the “Me Too Movement” can be traced back to Tarana Burke, who is credited with starting the campaign on MySpace in 2006. Burke created the “Me Too” campaign as a means for promoting “empowerment through empathy,” particularly among women of color who had experienced sexual abuse, mainly in underprivileged communities.
These are clear steps demonstrating that patriarchy and cisgenderism are being challenged, and deconstructed. The hope is that what is being reconstructed is a post-rape age. What this age will look like includes a significant decrease in sexual harassment and assaults, and a significant increase in consensual exchanges and more equity for people whose identities, backgrounds, and/or experiences have been minoritized. My hope is that each of us can play a part in this deconstruction and reconstruction – the telling of my story is one such step I have taken in so doing.