Rapeshit Revisited: Cry Wolf, Fire, Rape, Whatever.

As much as I’ve tended to embrace the value of (post)feminist self-critique, there’s a problem with lamenting women’s collective inculcation in the rhetoric of our own vulnerability and endless, spiraling victimhood – specifically the danger of finding oneself ludicrously bemoaning how we’ve become victims of a culture of victimhood. Unfortunately, the language of woman-as-victim is the language that traditional Western feminism best knows how to speak.

A common line in self-defense or rape-prevention guidelines is the always-unsubstantiated claim that, when in public and under attack, it is better for a woman to shout “Fire!” than “Rape!” or “Help!” Here are the two most oft-replicated phrasings of this assertion, used in identical form in numerous university, and community-organization publications on the web, and undoubtedly in print as well:

(1) “If you shout ‘help,’ some people will tend not to want to be involved in someone else’s problem. ‘Fire’ concerns them, and they are more likely to respond.”

(2) “Shout ‘fire,’ as people are more likely to come help if you do that than if you shout, ‘help.’ Fire is something that effects everyone, where as if you yell, ‘help’ people may be hesitant to get involved.” 

This reasoning always “clunked” somehow when I encountered it in the past. No support beyond these rather weak explanations is ever presented for this claim, although in other instances the writer may trot out, as a flourish of sorts, a vague reference to “statistics.” How, indeed, would one statistically sort out the relative effectiveness of shouting “Rape!” versus “Fire!” in a sexual assault scenario?  

The more troubling dimension is how this sort of prescription serves to reinscribe an impression of society as largely indifferent to incidents of sexual assault. The society wherein such guidelines make sense would be one in which men – and women who don’t self-identify as feminists – view rape and sexual assault as “someone else’s problem,” something that doesn’t “affect everyone.”  

Frankly, I don’t think this reflection of society is an accurate one, or a useful one. I think that the suggestion that the world is so very senselessly hostile simply reimpresses upon women a fundamental and unshifting status as victims. All feminist practices that lean so heavily on the Cult of Woman as Victim need to banished from the motherfucking temple, post-haste.

Certain strands of the Western feminist tradition have made a prominent place for adversarial social politics, for the carving out of “us” versus “them.” The creation of a “safe” ideological space requires a circling of the wagons. But sometimes in the process of creating this so-called safe space and casting it as absolutely necessary and legitimate (as well as radical and exciting), the overarching task of feminism as a transformation of society as a whole gets lost.

In formulating pragmatic guidelines from the starting point of an adversarial worldview, this particular wing of the feminist movement has effectively made a statement about normative “non-feminist” behavior. In the version of society implied by the recommendation to cry “fire” instead of “rape,” non-feminists are defined as non-victims, and as such they must necessarily be anti-victim, anti-feminist, and anti-woman. This rendering of society-at-large pitted against woman-as-victim is absurd and hyperbolic in itself. But it has a further side effect of lending some kind of credibility to an idea that callousness and lack of basic compassion are normal traits, merely conservative. This leaves us with little hope, little faith in the possibility of change – and that hope is what fundamentally enables change, is it not?

Those of us inheriting the women’s movement must contend is the fact that almost every sword in our collective armory is double-edged. Of course, the tension between (1) the pause inherent in moments of critique and (2) the forward momentum necessarily maintained for activism is not merely familiar to the feminists of the current wave, but to anyone who struggles with questions of social change.

Do I mean, in critiqueing the practices of the rape-prevention machine, to suggest that such action is fruitless, worthless, silly? Not precisely, no. Rape is an event surrounded by shame and injunctions to silence. The repeated recirculation of rape-prevention and rape-survival discourse prevents this silence from taking hold, and swallowing voices that need to be heard. It doesn’t really matter what’s being said, on some level, as long as the bubbles keep breaking the surface of this pond that tends to stagnate.

But activism at its most problematic is a bourgeois practice driven by self-congratulation, a device by which the privileged seek to undo the imbalance of their privilege by “giving back.” Their practice need not necessarily be effective for some activists, because the only important aspect of their work (to them) is that they do anything at all. From this self-congratulation there may follow complacency about methods and practice – or even wholesale rejection or foreclosure of new ways of thinking about the issues at hand. Complacency in this case ultimately means a shutting down, in practical circles if not theoretical ones, of further analysis of what rape is, what it means, how it functions with respect to gender and society, and what it really means to heal. A further schism between practical and analytical feminism fails to serve the best interests of all of society — women and victims, as two distinct categories, included.