On Rape
Fantasy author Jim Hines wrote a good post on men and rape today. He comments that rape isn’t discussed enough in society, especially among men. I agree.
As a media scholar, I am well aware that depictions of sexual violence in the media — primarily in pornography, although we see the effect in music videos and other places where showing women being sexually dominated by men may occur — desensitize men to the gravity of rape. Plenty of experimental research shows that, in the U.S., men exposed to such material, especially over time, are less likely to be sympathetic to rape victims, are more likely to think “she asked for it” or “she liked it,” and are more likely to fantasize about rape. Research also shows that rapists are more sexually stimulated by violent porn than non-rapists, who are more stimulated by consensual porn. Moreover, the use of violent porn is a “marker” of higher sexual aggression in high-risk men, although whether the porn causes the sexual aggression or the sexual aggression leads to greater enjoyment of the porn is unclear.
Note that I’m specifying one sort of porn — the kind in which women are forced, hurt, tied up, gang-banged, etc. Research suggests that nonviolent pornography — sexually explicit depictions without domination and violence — doesn’t cause the same level of desensitization. I’m also generalizing only to the United States; sex and rape are culturally entangled phenomena, so what’s true in one country isn’t necessarily true in another. Finally, I’m not saying that violent porn is the only cause of rape. It isn’t. It is, however, one exacerbating factor that lies within the realm of societal control.
A society that makes smoking in public places illegal for fear of getting cancer from secondhand smoke ought to think seriously about making violent porn illegal for fear of rape. And I say that despite my general propensity to support freedom of expression — but freedom of expression has its limits. Look, more people are raped in America than die of smoking-related cancer here. The CDC reported as of 2006 that “each year, more than 400,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking.” The U.S. population is over 300 million. By contrast, the CDC reports that as of 2007, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men will experience an attempted or completed rape at some time in their lives. That’s over 50,000,000 women and 9,090,909 men.
Doing whatever we can to decrease the incidence of rape should be a no-brainer, shouldn’t it? So why don’t Americans talk about it more often? Why are depictions of stranger rape so common in our books, movies, and TV shows when statistics clearly show that most rapists are known to the victim? And why don’t men talk more about preventing rape? The number 1 item on the CDC’s list of “risk factors for perpetration” (that means, “who’s likely to be a rapist”) is — being male. The fifth and last item on its list is “being exposed to social norms, or shared beliefs, that support sexual violence.”
Like, you know, violent pornography.
One thing Jim didn’t address, but that I’d like to get more writers thinking about, is a writer’s responsibility to not promote or romanticize rape in fiction. But that would be another post.
drupagliassotti @ April 21, 2008