Who does nuance belong to?

In Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification our beloved Victoria Coren Mitchell discusses a new book by Samantha Geimer (the woman that Polanski drugged and raped as a thirteen year old girl). Much as I adore VCM, she confuses a fact about child sex abuse, and abuse generally, and a despicable lie that regularly gets in the way of reporting and justice:

  Fact: Abusers are human beings and thus are very complex, possibly with talents, virtues, their own pain, strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us. Victims are often well aware of this.

  Lie: If someone has talents, or has suffered in some way, the wrongness of their crimes somehow becomes more complicated.

Child abusers are rarely terrible people in every aspect of their lives. Victims will be particularly aware of this because usually, a victim knows their abuser; these are their parents, their family friends, their priests, teachers and mentors. What's more, victims are heavily invested in the idea that their abusers were not monsters because, from their point of view;

• If he were a monster, I wouldn't have liked or trusted him. 
• If he were a monster, other people who cared for me would not have let him alone with me. 
• If he were a monster, what he did to me is without meaning or explanation.

None of this is irrational.  Abusers are human beings. Victims (and the people who care for them) are not stupid, careless creatures who wander naked into caves past signs reading, "Rapist Troll Lives Here". Unless you look at the fundamental humanity of abusers, then you can't understand why this happens or how this happens. The idea that rapists and sexual abusers are monsters is one of the chief reasons that victims are so often met with disbelief; this nice family man has no horns, this talented sportsmen has no forked tail.  

And VCM would have done very well to write an article about that - to say that Roman Polanski is a man who has suffered in his life and he is very talented (though honestly, he's no Kubrick) and yet he still committed this monstrous crime. We need to see that and take note; people who are virtuous in some respects are monstrous in others. But she loses her way. Any article which discusses a rape and has the line 

"A second complicating factor is that Polanski's work is filled with beauty and humanity."

is going to boil a lot of blood. Gandhi beat his wife at least once - we don't think that was okay, and he was Gandhi, for goodness' sake. Polanski is just a film director, whose reputation has been elevated beyond his talent by his history of personal suffering. I think story-telling is nearly the most important thing on Earth, but there's nothing he could ever do in the creation of a movie that would somehow mitigate the rape of a child. VCM talks about Geimer's book:

"She says that the police investigation, hospital exams and reporting of the case were more traumatic than the attack itself. She says: "I did something wrong, I was stupid… To pose topless, and to drink and to take the [sleeping] pill." 

"It is so easy and tempting to knock this into a pigeonhole: the misguided self-blame and denial of the victim."

Only, this is not self-blame or denial.  I was abused as a young adult, so I can tell you about all kinds of foolish things I did, positions I put myself in, misplaced trust and loyalty, and I don't get to wipe that all away with, but I was a child; children are daft and don't know any better. However, none of those things make me responsible for what was done to me. None of those things make what my abuser did less serious because I made a few bad choices.

Geimer was a thirteen year old girl, who chose to pose topless, drink and take a pill she was offered. Some might judge that as stupid (I have very little context). But to think that could be read as self-blame suggests that a thirteen year old girl can do stupid things that make her to blame for her rape. She can't. Rape just isn't that complicated.

"It is the complication that we need. People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes."

But deeds can and should be divided in this way. I like yarn-bombing. I dislike child-rape. For all I know some yarn-bombers are complete bastards and I'm sure that there are some lovely child-rapists. Except for, you know, the raping children thing, which I struggled to see past.

"So what is to be done with Samantha Geimer's story? She does not condemn Polanski nor exonerate him. She does not blame herself nor refuse to examine herself. Her voice is strong and complicated. You cannot simplify her, or him."

No we can't. But we can simplify the crime he committed towards her - which Geimer does herself. She describes it as "rape, in every sense of the word" because that's what it was. Roman Polanski is a rapist. However complicated he is as a human being, this crime was not and our response to that needs no nuance whatsoever.

Geimer's reaction is nuanced. Like all victims, Geimer is a human being who has reacted, coped with and confronted her experience in a unique and personal way. She's done it bravely, and has written a book that people say is well-written.

But the nuance of what happened to her belongs entirely to Geimer.  It doesn't belong to anyone else. 

5 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Violence

Content warning for references to fictional depictions of extreme violence.

One of the many things the late Iain Banks could do that few other authors can or choose to do, is to write about depravity like it's something that human beings do to other human beings. In his novels, I read about rape, torture and murder - including child rape and murder - but I always felt safe enough to carry on reading. Okay, so squeamish people need to avoid some of those books entirely, but Banks took me places I wouldn't have followed most other writers.

I was thinking about this when we watched the first episode of The Fall (which as of writing is still on iPlayer, thus the odd timing), a television detective drama that's come into some criticism for the depiction of violence against women. We gave up after the first episode because neither of us could trust the writer; it was going to get nasty and it wasn't going to be worth it. Allan Cubitt's defense in the Guardian confirmed to me that we'd done the right thing.

Human beings do not have an insatiable appetite for viscera and violence and it is not the case that folks who have the capacity to be nauseated, offended or triggered by fiction are somehow unsophisticated (my gut feeling is that our tolerance for violence and gore peaks at around the age of fifteen). Almost everybody has their limits, but good writing stretches those limits. We're not going to win them all and sometimes graphic, horrifying events are necessary to tell a story. But it's a reasonable desire that we use these elements to best effect.

There's also a moral and social justice element here. Handle these subjects badly, and we're in danger or perpetuating stereotypes, glamorizing certain types of violence and desensitising people to terrible things. Fiction is not a platform on which to preach, to talk statistics or analyse sociological trends. But can be a tool for telling truths and lies about the human condition.

So, then things writers need to remember when writing about violence:


1. If it's not telling the story, it shouldn't be there at all.  

In that Guardian article, Allan Cubbit, writer of The Fall, claims

"...there were several decisions I made early on to help deal with my own concerns about having women as victims. The first season of Spiral starts with a mutilated, naked female corpse in a skip. The first season of The Killing opens with a girl running for her life through a carefully lit wood. I never felt – even in 20 hours – that I got to know that victim."

I strongly disagree with his assessment of The Killing especially, but there's also a big point being missed. At the start of Spiral, the victim is dead and the team set about discovering her story. At the start of The Killing, the victim is running for her life, free and alive, hoping to survive. In the first episode of The Fall we saw brief snippets of the victims life before a lengthy scene of the killer generally enjoying himself while the victim lies, tied-up, gagged and without any hope or power, doing nothing. You can't humanise a character by, well, dehumanising them.

This isn't about social justice, but story-telling and trauma. While the victim is helpless but not-yet-murdered, there is no story going on. We already know that this guy takes pleasure in the helplessness and suffering of women. So what's the point but to shock, upset or possibly titillate the audience? Because if taken seriously, it is upsetting, far more upsetting than a mutilated corpse or someone who, however slim their chances, is still fighting for her life. (I'm not dismissing the possibility that this scene is, in fact, being played for titillation, that the idea is for the audience not to take it too seriously and therefore get a thrill from a scantily-glad attractive woman tied to a bed. But this isn't 1968 and Vincent Price didn't appear dressed as Dracula - an earnest crime drama is not the context in which to play those games.)

Even showing a mutilated dead body is better than showing someone helpless and suffering for no reason. There are plenty of stories, especially detective fiction, which successfully humanise a character who is already dead (something The Killing achieved in part by showing the victim's film-making skills).

Meanwhile, one of the most graphic rape and murder scenes I can recall, in Stephen King's Bag of Bones, justifies its considerable word-count because it is a plot-defining fight; Sara Tidwell continues to fight until she is dead and, of course, battles on for vengeance in the afterlife. There is ongoing interaction between Sara and her attackers, even when she is being raped and thus, this is part of the story.


2. Good and bad things, funny and sad things, happen to everyone, all the time.

Only in the deepest depression - when a person more or less stops feeling - does this stop being the case. Fiction's business often lies in negative dramatic events; either in the descent into tragedy or the diversity heroes must overcome. But people who experience nothing but suffering are not real. They are total victims. They are difficult to invest in because when they are killed horribly, they've not exactly lost much. Meanwhile, unrelenting misery is jolly hard work to read.

I recently read Belinda Bauer's Blacklands which has, at its heart, a great story; a young boy trying to extract the location of his dead uncle from the paedophile convicted for his murder. However, this kid's life sucks so much that when he was thrown into peril, I found myself thinking, "Well, at least his suffering would be over and his god-awful family might finally notice he once existed."

Contrast this with Donna Tart's brilliant The Little Friend, also about a child trying to solve a child murder that destroyed her family. Harriet is incredibly vulnerable and surrounded by inadequate friends and family members, but it's a far more mixed bag - it's far more realistic. Even though she has no rock solid adult allies, there are adults who are kind to her and she has friends who care about her even if they're not always capable of doing the right thing. Whereas for Stephen in Blacklands, everyone he meets either exploits or rejects him. (I had a similar problem with Lionel Shriver's We need to talk about Kevin - no way did that kid never do anything cute!).

Even Frank in Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory has a friend and funny experiences (often very darkly funny), and he's got problems.


3. Character's voices are often more effective than authors. 

In Anthony Burgess' The Clockwork Orange, Nabokov's Lolita and Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, many horrible things - animal cruelty, child abuse, rape and murder - are narrated by the perpetrator. These writers knew how you can get into the mind of a monster without exploitation. All these narrators are articulate and passionate yet completely unreliable. In The Clockwork Orange, Alex speaks a poetic slang which obscures the horror of his crimes. In Lolita Humbert Humbert is unable to read other people's blatantly obvious feelings, while The Wasp Factory's Frank doesn't even understand who he is.

In other books, for example E. Annie Proulx's brilliant The Shipping News, extremely grim events are described by characters in speech, often by the characters who had these terrible experiences. Naturalistic speech is often far more effective than an authorial voice because if your friend tells you a story about something awful that happened to them (or even something awful they did);

• They'll only give pertinent details. Some of this pertinence may be personal (e.g. they noticed the carpet, they didn't notice what colour the walls were.)
• They won't use verbal flourishes that may romanticise or eroticise the events described, unless that's how they feel.
• The emotional emphasis of what happened will be unambiguous.
• The way they tell the story will be emotional, because the subject matter is.

I imagine the most disturbing way you could learn about a murder, for example, would be to real a police report, all detail but no emotion. This would be disturbing, but it would also be unaffecting; it might turn your stomach but would you really feel for the victim? Would you understand what happened and why? Fiction is about communicating intellectual and emotional ideas, not merely documenting made-up events that are a bit like events that happen in real life.

Going on from this...


3. The way characters respond to nasty things makes the world of difference.

In real life, events are made more traumatic when we face them alone or when people around us react very differently. Some of the most unpleasant experiences I've had through fiction have been when horrific events are not treated as such by the other characters - when we see someone suffer a horrible death in graphic detail and nobody seems very upset or, perhaps most commonly, when someone is raped and nobody calls it rape (a famous filmic example would be High Plains Drifter where the rapist gets to be the hero of the day).

Iain Banks and Stephen King - two very different writers, but both with a tremendous capacity for dark writing - manage to write about horrific and weird events whilst having their characters respond with every ounce of emotion that you'd expect. This places violence in its proper context, which is both about telling the truth as well as reassuring the reader that they are on a journey and haven't been thrown into hell for the sake of it.

In modern detective stories, there's often such an attempt to portray a hard-as-nails and cold-as-ice detective who has seen every horror the world could throw at them, that they respond to the most outrageous crimes with cold detachment. This can be a big problem. For one thing, there's a reason why senior detectives often come on the telly to say this was the worst case they'd ever had to deal with, without a serial killer, and sometimes without even a murdered child in sight. There are realistic limits to the degree of professional detachment anyone is capable of.

But if the reader or viewer is to understand events through the eyes of a particular character - whether or not this character is wholly sympathetic - there must be some emotion there. If not, then we're back to reading police reports, gaining images for our nightmares without any hope of catharsis.



4. You don't make up for mishandling violence against women by having "strong female characters". 

Skyfall surpassed all our expectations, but the heavy use of Judy Dench and a well-rounded new (black British!) Moneypenny doesn't magically make up for one woman being treated as a pretty object that James Bond steals from his enemy, only for the enemy to destroy it. Allan Cubitt's defense of The Fall rested heavily on having a "strong" female detective (played by the glorious Gillian Anderson) who demonstrated her strength of character in the first episode by propositioning a lower ranking officer she'd just met in front of their colleagues (which in real life, would be seen as aggressive, embarrassing and intimidating).

In fact, too often writers contrast weak passive victims with a physically and mentally tough female protagonists (or at least, more important characters). The tough woman may be thrown into danger, but she will stay safe because she's smart and brave (and often, sexy enough to attract a rescuer). Victims, on the other hand, float into harm's way like leaves on the breeze. They've pretty much got it coming to them and so their fate matters less.

Given that we live in a culture which repeatedly dismisses violence against women on the grounds that only certain types of women are in any danger (whether because of their sexual behaviour, race or immigration status or because of ideas about their character (she has a "type", she has low self-esteem etc.), these fictional dichotomies are almost as bad as scenarios where women are always victims.

That having been said,


5. If you're going to write about sexual violence, positive representations of consensual sex is going to help.

There is a long shameful tradition in fiction of a muddying of normal romantic and sexual behaviour and sexual violence (something I've written about at length). Brilliant writers can play with these boundaries - Angela Carter's rich fairytales often do and Bram Stoker writes passages of erotica, thinly disguised as horror for his Victorian audience. However, too often rape and other violations are seen as indicative of overwhelming romantic love or sexual desire, rather than the power trip these things are all about. Beautiful women are seen as vulnerable to men in general, on account of their irresistible charms.

Banks' Complicity is particularly good on this because it portrays kink - even pretend rape - where everyone enjoys themselves alongside rape and torture. Both are written about graphically and skillfully and the difference is absolutely crystal clear. Writers who write realistic consensual sex (especially good sex), where people talk to each other, where characters respond to verbal and physical prompts, are extremely unlikely to blunder when it comes to sexual violence.

In horror especially, but also elsewhere (such as in the Bond movies - see above), consensual sex is so often an act of hubris, especially on the part of a young woman, who will later suffer some dreadful physical indignity and probably death. Sex becomes part of a person's downward trajectory, joined together with really bad things. Not only is this a troubling message, but the connection means that both sex and death will be given the same titillating treatment; we were enjoying those breasts jiggling about a little while ago, and here is the naked woman once again, covered in blood.  She was only a body to begin with.


See Also:
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Sexuality 1-5
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Sexuality 6-10
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Disability 1-5
10 Things Fiction Writers Should Remember About Disability 6-10

Sexual violence & the practical presumption of innocence

Includes discussion of rape and childhood sexual abuse.

Sorry to launch back on such a subject, but this is a source of great frustration.

There's a principle in social justice that is important, but sometimes badly worded and often misunderstood. The principle is usually worded something like this:

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should believe them.

I have written before about the importance of believing people when they talk about their experiences, unless and until you have a good reason not to. This particularly matters when it comes to sexual violence, because our trust can make the difference between a dangerous abuser being allowed to continue, committing worse and worse crimes, and that same person being brought to justice and taken out of circulation, discouraging others who would follow that path.

Yet our society is particularly bad at this. We are skeptical about rape. We are over-anxious about the idea that innocent men* may be subject to false-accusations. Sometimes, our principle is read as

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should condemn the suspected perpetrator. 

This sits against one of the most important principles in law: a person is to be presumed innocent, until they are found to be guilty. Although this is usually a pernicious misinterpretation, some people actually word it like that. Some people do, for example, believe that we should condemn all the famous men arrested under Operation Yewtree, because they must all have been accused by someone.

There then follows an argument, which pitches the rights of a rape victim against those of a person accused of rape. This is a really big problem, a thorn in the side of any constructive discussion of justice and sexual violence, so I'm going to try and unpack it.


We've moved beyond trial by combat.

In days of yore, if a chap had been assaulted, had his cattle rustle or had someone trample a crop circle in his field on a drunken Saturday night, he would be given a big heavy stick. The person accused of these crimes would be given a similarly heavy stick and they'd be expected to decide the case by fighting it out. People knew it was a very stupid system, even at the time, but they were superstitious about lawyers and saw little alternative.

There is nothing that resembles this in UK criminal law. We have an adversarial trial system, where lawyers actively argue with each other, and sometimes with witnesses (another big issue around justice and sexual violence) but criminal cases do not pitch the accuser against the accused.  The victim of a crime (who may not be accusing anyone in particular) goes to the police. The police investigate. If they find enough evidence, they consult the Crown Prosecution Service, who may decide to take the suspect to trial. It is then the Crown that prosecutes, not on behalf of the victim but on behalf of the state, since a crime against one person is a crime against us all.

Yet so often, when rape and abuse cases are discussed, they are spoken about as if the victim and the suspect are two sides of a naturally ambiguous legal dispute. Folks argue for the anonymity for rape suspects or the removal of complainant anonymity in order to establish parity between the two parties, as if their respective positions can possibly be compared. They cannot.


Anonymity is a very simple issue, so let's clear that up. 

People who report rape and sexual abuse are given anonymity - that is, nobody is allowed to publish or broadcast their name or other personal details - for three very good reasons:

• Even if we could do away with the colossal stigma, sexual violence effects people in uniquely personal and complicated ways, and should be treated like the most private medical information. Lose anonymity and reporting would plummet.
• Rape victims are extremely vulnerable to intimidation and coercion, especially when they have been raped by people they know or by people with power and influence. Even without anonymity, many rape victims drop cases because they have been explicitly or implicitly threatened by their rapists and their allies. Lose anonymity and this would be even more commonplace.
• A rape victim who has reported a rape that didn't result in conviction is more vulnerable to experiencing rape again, and less likely to report another attack. Lose anonymity, and provide rapists with easily identifiable potential victims who are much less likely to report.  

Complainant anonymity is not about making rape victims avoid embarrassment, but is a tool for justice which helps protect fundamentally personal information, makes rape victims more likely to report and follow through the legal process, as well as helping to prevent rape happening again.

Anonymity is not awarded to adult suspects, outside exceptional circumstances (e.g. those involving state secrets), although the police and courts make decisions about releasing names to the media. It would be a particularly bad idea to award anonymity to rape or sexual abuse suspects for two very good reasons:

• Most rapists have multiple victims, each of who tend to believe that they are the only one. Especially in cases where a rapists has power and influence, evidence around a single instance may not be enough for a conviction. As soon as a name is published, other victims know they are not alone and have the opportunity to come forward and a stronger case is forged. 

(This doesn't mean the media handle such information at all well, and their mistakes can not only permanently damage the reputation of innocent people, they can jeopardise a fair trial and undermine the legal process.)

• The percentage of reported rapes that result in conviction is rather low. If suspects were granted anonymity, a rape victim would have a choice between effectively awarding their rapist lifelong anonymity on the chance he or she might be convicted, or else side-stepping the legal process and maintaining the freedom to discuss their own experiences in whatever way they saw fit.

Thus, granting suspect anonymity would result in less reporting, fewer convictions and, since rapists would feel altogether safer, a higher incidence of sexual violence.

Presumed innocent until proven guilty does not mean treated as innocent.

When someone is suspected of an offence, they will be obliged to speak to the police and they may be detained in custody whilst being questioned.  If a person is charged for an offence, a court will decide whether or not they should be allowed to be released on bail. Some people - still innocent in the eyes of the law - will be imprisoned for months awaiting trial.

Outside the criminal justice system, there are obvious steps that other people need to take when someone is suspected of a crime, whether the police are involved or not.  As human beings, we observe and listen to folks reactions, thoughts and experiences with other people all the time, and we'd be foolish if they didn't influence our behaviour.

Whether or not the police are involved, there's a big leap between treating a suspected rapist with caution - allowing their alleged victim distance from them in social settings, for example, not leaving them alone with potential victims - and organising a lynch mob.

In fact, there's a difference between believing someone when they say they have been raped and believing an accused person to be a rapist. After all...


The innocence of an accused person and the honesty of an accuser are not mutually incompatible.

Rape victims cannot always reliably identify their attackers, whether it is because they are complete strangers or because alcohol, other drugs or head trauma are involved.  In such cases (when they are taken seriously), the police are likely to question many innocent people; people who drive certain vehicles, people who were at a particular party, people who look a little like the attacker. People are occasionally charged with rape due to straight-forward mistaken identity.

Meanwhile, and especially with childhood sexual abuse, we have issues around memory.


Someone with inconsistent memories is not necessarily a liar.

Imagine someone was abused by her uncle as a child in the 1970s.  Nobody knew at the time, so she buried it in the back of her head.  She never spoke about it, so never called it abuse, and now, forty years later, she doesn't really remember why she doesn't like the uncle she sometimes still sees at family occasions - it's just like a very strong gut feeling. She may have other PTSD symptoms, but as they have been going on since childhood, they are a normal, part of who she is.

Then the news about Jimmy Savile hits.  She reads other people's experiences of abuse which chime with her own.  She sees images and hears descriptions that remind her of that time, of her childhood, accompanied by stories of abuse. Everything she buried so thoroughly has been stirred up.  Memories begin to come back, only in a form that she can actually cope with. If she was abused by a famous man she once met, then she will be validated by a shared experience that she's heard so much about. She can get help. She can even tell her family and friends without breaking anybody's heart or splitting the family. So it comes out like that.

This is not to say that this will be happening a lot, but over hundreds of cases, it will be happening a bit (and the police know this). Many victims of child sexual abuse know exactly what was done to them and by whom, but because it is such a bloody awful thing to happen, usually committed by trusted and influential adults and often kept secret for years, many children's minds produce (or are guided towards) more palatable versions of events.

Sometimes, something like this can happen when adults are raped.

There is only room for one overarching principle for lay folk and it's not "Innocent until proven guilty"

We have no moral obligation to remain impartial - we can't police our instincts and opinions, only choose what to do about what we believe.  We have no moral obligation to presume that a person is innocent, until they are proven guilty. We have no moral obligation to believe a story which does not ring true to us. But...


We do have moral obligations around what we say and do. 

To tell someone who has been raped that they are lying about their experience is obviously a tremendous and wanton act of cruelty. It discourages reporting, it discourages victims from confiding in others, let alone pursuing justice and it makes the world a much safer and more comfortable place for rapists.

Whenever someone expresses doubt about a specific rape or reported rape in general, you run a very high risk of doing the above. In a public forum, you can guarantee that's what you're doing. This doesn't mean that folk can't defend an accused person's character (that's fine) or talk about false-reporting, but we absolutely have to take steps with language and generalisations to make sure that rape victims know you're not talking about them. These steps are rarely taken; protestations that a man is innocent almost always hinge on a defamation of the alleged victim's character and discussions of false reporting make sweeping statements where anyone but the perfect victim (nun held at knife-point by stranger) could feel discredited.

This isn't just about people's feelings, it is about justice and crime prevention.

Meanwhile, there's precisely nothing to be gained from letting a false-accuser know you're onto them. Anyone who reports a rape knows that some people will not believe them - the same must apply to those who haven't been raped.  So there's really nothing to be gained from that, and everything to be lost.

See Also: Some Things We Could Actually Do To Prevent Rape

This is too often about protecting men and masculine sexualities.

In fiction, only very evil men commit rape. Good men are often sexually forceful, but that's always somehow okay - because they're good! Men themselves cannot be raped, because sex is always a good thing for them. Our entire culture is invested in masculine sexuality - particularly heterosexuality - being a great thing, a source of both humour and pleasure, an expression of desire, love and all that is good about being a man.  And to the greatest extent, it is. It's no more magical than the sexualities of other genders, but most things most people do sexually are about pleasure for all concerned. Sex is wonderful. Sexual organs are both amusing and beautiful, according to context. Sexual desire doesn't hurt anybody, and most people's sexual behaviour is entirely positive, often loving, sometimes creative and occasionally procreative.

Unfortunately, bad behaviour is not as exceptional as our culture would like to think. Our culture is automatically skeptical about rape, and especially skeptical about the idea that a likeable man, or even a man who doesn't have any scales or horns in view, could behave monstrously in this way. Some people call this skepticism Rape Culture, and it certainly runs deep.


If a close friend or family member of mine was accused of rape, I would be instinctively skeptical.  I would need an awful lot of proof (although I wouldn't seek out the alleged victim and demand it from them). In some cases, I'd perhaps never believe it to be true.  This is not a bad position to be in.

However, if you have the same instinct about almost any story of rape, then that's probably programming.  We grow up with that.  We learnt that rape is a terrible crime and being falsely accused of such a crime is very nearly as bad.. But rape is rare and false accusations are perceived as so very common that the subject should be raised every time sexual violence is mentioned.

This is borne out by responses to Operation Yewtree. Despite the fact that the police and Crown Prosecution Services have acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was a prolific paedophile who should have been put away long ago and the confessions of Stuart Hall to various acts of child abuse, I have seen it said that:

• This is a "Celebrity Witch Hunt"
• These historic allegations are driven by compensation culture. These people just want money.
• These historic allegations are driven by attention-seeking behaviour. 
• The 1970s were a less politically correct time, when all men committed a variety of sexual crimes and nobody minded - we can't judge what happened then by the standards of today!
• Too much time has passed - if these allegations were true, we'd have heard of them by now.
• Too much time has passed for any of this to matter to anyone. Victims need to get over themselves.
• The entire inquiry is about some kind of twisted sexual purity movement that seeks to persecute any innocent rich old man who happened to molest a nine year old in his younger days. Lower the age of consent! Remove complainant anonymity! Problem solved!

(This post is just about the possibility of false accusation; we're equally programmed to seek out extenuating circumstances on behalf of a rapist: What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Was she flirtatious? This is stuff that many of us have had to unlearn.)

But this is sometimes just about power.

There is great power to be derived from treating a vulnerable person, desperate for validation, with doubt and disbelief. Way too many people get a kick out of that, whether they are expressing doubt to the face of an individual victim, or expressing doubt in a public forum or a newspaper column where they know victims will be reading.

Sometimes, people really do express disbelief because they want a slice of the power a rapist has. Sometimes, it is alarmingly obvious what they're doing.





* The reason this is mostly about men being accused of rape when women may also commit rape and be accused of it, is that we don't take women rapists seriously at all. If a woman is accused of rape, we don't worry about her reputation being damaged - in fact, when female teachers have been convicted of raping their male pupils, there are comments of "Wish she was my teacher when I was at school." and so forth. All this is terrible, and all of it is interconnected. Our terrible attitudes to rape - of whoever, by whoever - come back to our expectations of masculine and feminine sexuality.

How Not To Talk About Domestic Violence Towards Men

Content warning: As well as domestic violence, brief discussion of suicide. 

Help for men victims of domestic violence can be found at Mankind and Men's Advice Line who explicitly offer support for gay and bisexual men as well as straight men. 

Men victims of domestic abuse are almost invisible and that is a problem for everyone.

Whenever I've written about domestic abuse in the abstract, I've tried to use gender-neutral language, partly because of fairness and partly because gender is such a big problem in abuse.  Presenting victims as necessarily feminine - usually young, straight, white, non-disabled middle-class archetypes - alienates a lot of women, as well as excluding people of other genders. Presenting all perpetrators as men makes men's violence seem natural, something good men must actively resist as opposed to something anyone, of any gender, may choose to do or not.  It makes violence committed by women seem aberrant and trivial.

As I've said before, hearing stories of abuse from male friends and family was a huge help in recognising my own situation for what it was. Whenever I read or heard stories about women victims, I found reasons that I was not that kind of woman (i.e. one much more vulnerable and typically feminine than myself).  All the stories matter.  All domestic violence is connected - abuser's behaviour is often so similar, regardless of gender, sexuality, class or cultural background.  As a society, we should be ensuring that we support all victims and do what we can to prevent all kinds of domestic violence.

But whenever I read about domestic violence on-line, on newspaper sites or blogs, there's a great deal of commentary that amounts to "What about the men?"  These comments are almost always problematic. There's the standard misogynist nonsense, of course, but the comments that disturb me most are by folks - apparently men and women - who seem to genuinely care about the problems of men victims being ignored and side-lined, but seem to believe that attention on violence against women detracts from their cause.

It is because I believe that there is no way to tackle domestic violence unless we tackle all of it that I find these comments so deeply infuriating and wanted to address the ones I see time and time again:


1. It's especially hard for men who are abused because they have been taught never to hit a woman. 

I'm sure there is a particular humiliation in being beaten by someone who is smaller or physically weaker than you - or is regarded by society as gentler, softer and more physically vulnerable than you - but there is no problem in the idea that you shouldn't hit a woman.  You shouldn't hit people.  Of course, there are circumstances where I concur with the law that it is okay to hit any person, if it is necessary to prevent a rape, serious physical injury, a kidnapping or violent death. But hitting a person because they are shouting at you, or because they hit you first?  Never okay.

People who are abused by men may also consider retaliation and resist the temptation because they've been brought up not to be violent at all (as is the case with many women), or because they don't want to hurt their abuser, or because they are afraid of their own strength or capacity to inflict damage, or because they feel sure that if they hit back, they're only going to prolong the attack and get hurt all the more seriously themselves. All these things passed through my mind during abuse, but the greatest of these was quite noble; I felt it was fundamentally wrong to hurt someone - anyone - unless somebody's life depended on it.  The one time I was truly afraid for my life and tried to find a way to defend myself, the prospect of causing the necessary harm was almost as scary as what might happen to me.

Whenever the comment is made about men being taught not to hit women, it suggests that intimate violence is sometimes the answer and men victims are disadvantaged by believing otherwise.  Or maybe that a society in which women fear the violence of their partners would be a better place?  Whether it is against your nature or your conditioning to hit your loved ones, that is something which helps you not to be an abuser (and gives you the prospect of happy and healthy mutually-loving relationships).  It does not make you any more vulnerable to abuse.

I imagine that some abuse victims do sometimes hit back in circumstances that fall short of immediate self-defense, but I guarantee that this will not have made their situation any better.  Relationships where both parties are violent towards each other can only end in disaster.

On a similar theme...


2. Stories of abuse which include the sentence "I never hit her once."

I think I understand why some men say this; because they feel defensive.  Discussion of domestic violence which focuses on the dynamic where men abuse women seems to make some men feel as if they have been personally cast in the role of abuser just by being a man.  No serious or sensible person believes this to be the case.  Many women survivors of abuse by men gain a more positive attitude towards men in general after they have escaped and realised that their experiences were exceptional and abhorrent, as opposed to the way men are.

However, whenever someone says "I never hit her once" it strongly suggests that hitting one's partner would be a normal response. The idea that it would be somehow natural for men to hit women who mistreat them lies at the heart of many of our problems with domestic violence; the idea that violence is simply more difficult to resist for men and a natural consequence for women who (deliberately or not) make life difficult for them. It says men abusers can't help themselves, and the violence of other abusers must be trivial, if not entirely fabricated.

You never hit her once?  Of course you didn't.  I never hit my abuser either.  If I write about my experiences of poverty, I don't have to state that I never took money from my Granny's purse.


3. Domestic Violence is not a gender issue because men are victims too.

This is partly a linguistic problem, but one that really matters.  Gender does not mean, about women, or  the sole concern of women or indeed, something men do to women.  Men have a gender too!  There are other genders!

Gender usually plays a massive role in domestic violence.  Almost whenever men who have been abused by women tell there stories, the abuse is heavily laden with gendered language and ideas about what it is to be a man; their natural inadequacies as men or their inability to live up to some ideal of manhood.  The same applies to people abused within same-gender relationships and even non-romantic ones.  Abusive parents tell their sons to man up or their daughters to be more ladylike or else they criticise they sons as insensitive men and their daughters as over-emotional bitches.  All of that and much much more.

Domestic violence is not exclusively a women's issue (even if only women were abused, it should still concern us all).  But talking about gender in domestic abuse is not the same as saying it is all about women or that it is something that men and only men are responsible for - an accusation repeatedly made towards anyone who writes about domestic abuse, regardless of the language they have used.


4. Women abusers make false accusations and everyone believes them. 

This is a circular argument.  All abuse victims will be disbelieved by someone, either specifically or, as such comments demonstrate so well, generally.  Marginalised people are routinely disbelieved when they describe their own experiences. It's particularly offensive to see mention of false accusations under the harrowing personal accounts of abuse victims who have been brave enough to describe their experiences, as the implication seems to be that any woman who speaks up about abuse may be covering for her own abusive behaviour.  All abusers lie, but it is extraordinarily unlikely that a lie should be taken this far.

All abusers blame their victims, lie about their crimes and try to present themselves as the victim of at least something; abuse itself, other mistreatment, cheating, lies, disloyalty etc.. Women abusers are almost certainly more likely than men to threaten to make false accusations of violence, but male abusers have their own arsenal of effective dismissing and discrediting strategies.

Anyone who has children with an abuser has reason to fear a custody battle, because those people see children as a legitimate weapon, and our family courts are a bit of a mess. There is a bias towards women as primary caregivers, but mothers still sometimes lose their children to abusive men who are able to manipulate the system (especially if they are in any position of authority - a police officer or a doctor, for example).

Custody battles aside, abusers are extremely unlikely to take false accusations very far, for exactly the same reasons that victims are unlikely to talk openly about or pursue justice for the crimes against them; identifying oneself as a victim has a massive social and psychological cost.

Part of that cost is the doubt of others.  Part of that cost is paid if you ever write about or speak about your experiences of abuse in a public sphere, only to be told that people like you are motivated to lie in order to keep the house and children you never had, or to cover up the abuse that you never committed.



5. More men are killed by domestic violence if you count suicide.

This is in response to the indisputable fact that women are much more likely to be raped, hospitalised or killed by their partners or former partners - two women a week in the UK.  This doesn't mean that men cannot be raped, hopsitalised or killed by domestic violence - a man is killed by a partner or former partner once a fortnight. The naive idea that men's experiences of domestic violence is necessarily minor and cannot sharply escalate is deadly dangerous.

Domestic abuse is a common, massively underestimated cause of mental ill health. Abuse victims do sometimes kill themselves, sometimes long after the relationship has ended.  However (a) suicide is absolutely not the same as murder, (b) casual discussion of suicide as a direct consequence of certain experiences can be very dangerous for survivors of those experiences and (c) threats of suicide are common weapons abusers use, especially as control over a victim begins to slip away. We should always take care when talking about suicide.

Suicide threats* are probably extremely common during messy break-ups and terrible rows even between otherwise reasonable people, when one party feels their world is falling apart and will say anything to try to persuade the other to stay. This is always a very bad thing to do, but fortunately, it is rarely meant or taken seriously. There are significant differences for abuse victims because

• The threat may come from someone who is no stranger to violence. 
• The threat may come from someone who has made outlandish threats and carried them out in the past.
• Victims are used to being blamed and taking the blame for their abuser's unhappiness and misfortune.

My ex's declared capacity for suicide had hung over me for years, especially as I was the main cause of his depression. During the months after I left - despite removing the supposed source of his unhappiness - I genuinely expected him to kill himself.  He talked about it at great length (it's a tragic myth that talking about it means a person won't go through with it). In order to carry on with my life and proceed with the divorce, I had to accept that he could die and hold me responsible.

Honestly, with hindsight, I do not know whether the threats were all bullshit or not.  But I'm describing behaviour that took place when I was at the strongest I had been in my whole adult life, and even then, there's no way I can pretend to have been indifferent to the idea that my behaviour could be even a contributing factor in someone's violent death. I had lived through the guilt of having a close friend attempt suicide years earlier. The threats would have been quite enough to regain control over someone with only a little less going for them. (Our culture tends to romanticise scary obsessive self-destructive behaviour by rejected men.)

Threats of suicide are a major red flag in violent relationships; someone who threatens suicide as a weapon of control is more likely to take someone else's life.  Meanwhile, there are all kinds of other things we need to concentrate on if we wish to prevent suicide (like ditching this casual pop psych cause and effect model of suicide) and take care of the mental health of all people who have been abused. Using suicide to have an argument about the relative damage caused to men and women? Pointless, crass and dangerous.


6. Women receive all this support and men receive none because people keep talking about violence towards women. 

Provision for victims of domestic abuse is poor. Provision for victims who aren't women is appalling.  This is definitely not the fault of women victims. It's not the fault of people who advocate for women victims or talk about violence against women. Domestic violence is simply not spoken about enough in our culture. Anyone who speaks up about it is making the world a slightly better place.

Same with cancer. Research into various cancers gets far more funding than any other medical condition, including those which are more common, or more commonly deadly or disabling. Dementia, for example, costs the economy much more and is, often though not always, a much more unpleasant condition for both the person with it and their family.  But dementia receives a fraction of the funding and attention that cancer receives. Are people who work or raise money for cancer charities and cancer research facilities to blame for the limited research into dementia?  Would it ever be worth having an argument about which group of very sick and dying people are more deserving of attention and help?  Would it ever be less than odious to respond to an account of someone's life with cancer by saying, "It's okay for you with your fashionable disease..."?

There are loads of reasons why provision for victims who are not women are so very poor.  Some of these are to do with numbers; typically, women are more likely to be in danger of their lives and less likely to have the financial and practical means of effective escape.  Some of this is to do with accidents around how and when refuges and charities have been set up (disabled and queer women can also find themselves shut out).

However, most of this is cultural and we're all part of this culture. We have an almost adversarial model of heterosexual relationships, where men and women are having to fight or deceive one another for their mutually exclusive needs. Men and women are not supposed to get on. People ask explorers who are in love with one another how they manage to be alone together for months together without killing each other. There is more mainstream humour around violence towards men**.  My straight women friends and family are much more likely to joke about slapping or hitting their partners if they misbehave (although others do sometimes make those jokes).

But perhaps most of all, as a culture, we struggle with the idea that men can be hurt in these ways. We treat violence (along with verbal aggression and other controlling behaviour) as something that belongs to boys and men; that boys and men will both be violent and cope with violence. In movies, men are beaten, stabbed and shot and are seen to survive all manner of violence without trauma. The idea that an intimate partner can take control of a man's life through verbal aggression, humiliation, criticism and a level of violence which might not even leave a bruise, doesn't quite fit.

Anyone who talks about domestic abuse as some kind of battle of the sexes issue, where they make generalisations about men's or women's attitudes and behaviour, where they paint a picture of the world divided into warring heterosexual couples, when they suggest that members of one gender cannot be trusted on their accounts, then they're making the whole situation worse. They are perpetuating the myth of a natural conflict between men and women - a myth that is a gift to all abusers. They are silencing victims who are already taking big risks to speak out. They are shutting down these discussions.


7. It's all the fault of feminists that male victims of domestic violence are ignored.

In my corner of the world, the only people I see talking about domestic violence towards men are feminists or people who share the values of feminism.  There's no point making a blanket defense of feminism and claiming that feminists have never said or done spectacularly stupid and harmful things on this and many other issues (ha!). But people who cause a fuss about violence against women are not the enemy when it comes to tackling violence against people of other genders.

In fact, if you want to borrow my stolen Tardis and head back before Second Wave feminism, to a time where little short of murder going on within a household was a private family matter, men victims of domestic violence had even less hope of escape, support or justice. Increasing attention on and discussion of domestic violence as experienced by women - together with increasing attention on sexual abuse and violence - has made room for, rather than stifling, discussion of intimate violence experienced by people of other genders.

Yes, people still imagine a woman (a certain kind of woman) when they think of a victim of sexual or domestic violence.  But at least folks now have some consciousness that these things aren't confined to newspaper stories or soap plots, that these things happen all around us.  Feminist discussion allows us to define abuse far more broadly that physical domination through brute strength. All this benefits everyone.

More needs to be done, but it is everyone's responsibility.  It is not up to people whose focus is violence against women to shift their focus.  It is up to all of us to talk about all the problems society has and see about ways we can change it for the better.


* I hope it is very obvious, but just in case, a suicide threat is not the same thing as someone reaching out and confessing to suicidal thoughts in order to seek help, comfort and support. This doesn't mean a threat is always framed "If you do X, I will kill myself."  In my experience it is often "Fine, you do X as you want to and I will kill myself." or "Now you have done X, all that's left for me is to kill myself."

**Although when it does crop up, humour around violence towards women tends to be more serious, e.g. rape jokes, as opposed to "I'll give him a slap." jokes. Only this weekend, there's been another issue with t-shirts with "humourous" slogans about violence towards women.

The Sessions: Discussing Disability & Sex Work

When I began reading the essay that inspired The Sessions (via @emmajtracey) by the late writer and poet Mark O'Brien, I expected to cringe in much the same way as I have cringed at all the other articles or forum posts I have read about disabled men paying for sexual services. I didn't.

I expected:

(a) Disability as an overarching explanation for sexual drought. There's nothing wrong with expressions of sexual frustration, romantic longing and loneliness (well, you know, there's a time and place), but many people experience these things for a great variety of reasons. Disability can be a massive factor, but it is also a complex and immeasurable one. O'Brien writes;

I had fallen in love with several people, female and male, and waited for them to ask me out or seduce me. Most of the disabled people I knew in Berkeley were sexually active, including disabled people as deformed as I. But nothing ever happened. Nothing was working for me in the passive way that I wanted it to, the way it works in the movies.

O'Brien acknowledges that not all disabled people have difficulties in love or sex. The isolation of having to spend most of his time in an iron lung, together with his shyness and anxiety around sex and romance are acknowledged as the main reasons for O'Brien's lack of sexual experience. He doesn't, as others have done, rail against society in general and women in particular who have "mistreated" him by not being all that interested.

As Mik Scarlet says in his post entitled Brothels for the Disabled? No Thanks!

The effect of this false belief that disabled people need the services of prostitutes more than anyone else is the second reason why I am opposed as it causes issues for the way society thinks about disability... For disabled people, it means they grow up in an atmosphere that makes them believe that they just aren't sexy or potential sexual partners and for the non-disabled community it plays a part in continuing the prejudice around disability. More than that, as all non-disabled people are just disabled people before an illness or injury, it means that if they acquire a disability part of the grieving process they will have to go through revolves around the loss of their sexual confidence.

I decided not to link to any of the uncomfortable articles I refer to, because they are by vulnerable men, usually anxious young men, who are nervous around women and have been quite brave writing about their experiences.  My input to their personal circumstances would probably not be helpful, so it would certainly not be kind.

But just now, there's a young disabled man campaigning for the British government to fund sexual services for disabled men. Apart from the what? how? and given that social care and essential benefits are currently being slashed against a backdrop of stereotypes of disabled people as entitled layabouts, why the hell now?, there's a real problem with defining what experiences are unique to a disabled person. Campaigner Christopher Fulton says

"I have been to nightclubs in Birmingham but they are no good for me. When I tried to use dating agencies as soon as they heard I was disabled they didn’t want to know."

Any other twenty-nine year old man stating this would receive shrugs, commiserations and then maybe some good advice. But because he is a disabled man, this gets in the paper like it is a special experience, extraordinary, part of the tragedy of his situation. It's not. There are aspects of Fulton's life experience which are not normal and must interfere with life significantly - like having no choice about his bedtime (the bane of disabled adults, especially night owls, who rely on state carers to put them to bed). But not getting lucky in a nightclub? Having a demoralising time with dating agencies?

Not only does this encourage the idea that disabled people are especially unattractive (which not only makes us feel less attractive, but reinforces the idea to others), this raises a really obvious ethical point around sex work.  If disabled people are inherently sexually unattractive, and nobody wants to have sexual contact with us, why would a sex worker feel differently?

After all, almost every other article I have read by a disabled man who has paid for sexual services include;


(b) Wild assumptions about the inner life of a sex worker. In regular sex work, one principle objective has to be be to make the client imagine that the sex worker is having a wonderful time, even when she is miserable - even when she is being coerced into the act. The more she pretends to enjoy it, the sooner the ordeal should be over. This doesn't mean all sex workers are miserable or coerced, but this possibility makes it extremely uncomfortable when disabled men who have used prostitutes describe these women's enthusiasm - often in terms borrowed straight from pornography - as a justification for what they have done. Which is a confusing message next to disability as a sexual deal breaker: I am completely unattractive, but I was irresistible to her, because there was money involved. 

O'Brien's physical descriptions of Cheryl, his sexual surrogate, are sparing and as for her feelings, he mostly only reports her expressions and the things she says. Cheryl explains when she doesn't like a particular activity, but that other women may do and it is always important to ask. When asked whether she has had an orgasm, Cheryl gives an honest answer. O'Brien doesn't speculate, let alone make assumptions, about why she does what she does. This makes me feel happier about the physical and psychological safety of Cheryl than any other sex worker I have read about in the third person.


(c) A sense of enormous entitlement. At no point does O'Brien claim that having sex with another person is a right, a fundamental human need or any such thing.  His priority in seeing a surrogate was to sort out some of the psychological baggage he had around his body and sexuality, not to get an orgasm.  He talks about his hopes for the future but without providing an idealised account of the kind of woman he would like to have a relationship with - in fact, he sees the matter of his future desires as very complicated. He acknowledges that he has not often found disabled women attractive without framing that possibility as "settling for second best" (which I genuinely read in one article by a disabled men who had paid for sex).

O'Brien's essay was published in 1990 and he died in 1999 (I know for sure that had he still been here, the internet would have revolutionised his social, sexual and romantic prospects). I would be the last person to suggest we need to turn back the clock on attitudes towards sex and sexuality, but there is a tone to O'Brien's essay which is seldom seen in the discussion of disabled people and sex work today. All the reasons I usually cringe and feel uncomfortable about these discussions are to do with reducing sex with another person - a very human, very organic behaviour - to a consumer right.  It is not fair that I can't have the long-legged blonde of my dreams, just because I'm in a wheelchair. It's my right.

These arguments feel as if they are borrowed partly from the disability rights movement and partly from pornography (which is, of course, a medium of fiction). O'Brien offers a reason why he is particularly disinterested in hiring prostitutes, despite having paid for sexual services from Cheryl:

Hiring a prostitute implies that I cannot be loved, body and soul, just body or soul. I would be treated as a body in need of some impersonal, professional service — which is what I’ve always gotten, though in a different form, from nurses and attendants.

I wonder if this is why some disabled men so readily and publicly enthuse about the idea of paying for sex - because they are used to having their more immediate bodily needs catered for in exchange for money?  There is even less nuance in our discussions of the highly nuanced business of personal care than in our discussions of sex. Meanwhile, disabled people's bodies are so often seen by the people around us as passive things to be fixed or taken care of, as opposed to tools we can used to express ourselves and potentially, give pleasure to others.


Usually, I leave these accounts feeling that there has been no consideration for the rights of sex-workers or women in general. A person's right not to have sex or engage in sexual behaviour, without financial, social or physical pressure, trumps any amount of sexual frustration.  It's not sexism to only be attracted to one gender and it's not racism or disablism if you prefer tall athletic able-bodied blondes (it can be, however, be a double standard and a quirk that will significantly narrow your chances of sexual fulfillment). Sex-workers are not exempt from these freedoms just because money is involved. Thus, sex with another person can never ever be a "right" and any time it is framed that way, makes me deeply uncomfortable.

But O'Brien's essay struck me as very important, and I recommend you read the whole thing. He recognises the complexity of disability as a potential obstacle to sex and love - practically, socially and psychologically - without making it any less personal or less complicated than it really is.


See also: The Undebateable Undateables

A Culture of Dubious Consent

[Content warning for rape and sexually explicit language. Also overlong - I wrote this in tiny bits over the course of a tough week and it will probably take you even longer to read. Consider reading this instead.]

The sex in Christopher Brookmyre novels is pretty good as sex in fiction goes, mostly because of the light-heartedness of it all. Sex, written about with too much earnest, is often hilarious. In A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away, we hear about the loss of the hero's virginity to the woman he will later marry. Everything is wonderful until, at the last minute, the boy withdraws and ejaculates on his lover's face, just like he's seen in the porn films. Only then does he witness her shock and revulsion, and realises his terrible mistake. Between them, they sort it all out and live happily ever after. Until years later, when her ex-boyfriend tries to blow up a Hydroelectric Power Station on the day of the Highland Games*.

There's been an almighty row this last week or so after Alyssa Royse wrote an article called Nice Guys Commit Rape (originally at the Good Men Project). When I first read this, I was extremely angry; Royse talks about how her friend raped a woman at a party while she was asleep, and despite repeatedly stating how this was rape and there was no excuse (who knew?), she nevertheless discusses the victim's flirtatious behaviour at length, talks about grey areas and tries to defend the rapist as a nice person who made a simple mistake. The Good Men Project went on to try to back up her argument by publishing an anonymous post by a unrepentant rapist, which is possibly even worse than it sounds, but has been demolished thoroughly by No Sleep 'Til Brooklands, Ozzy Frantz, Ally Fogg, Yes Means Yes and Cliff Pervocracy, among others.

At this time, I spoke to a friend who felt frustrated that Royse had raised an important point that had since been thoroughly lost, partly in her delivery but partly in the argument - about whether someone can rape people and still be a good person somehow - that ensued. My friend talked about a rapist she knew and how he would be mortified at that label. And while what he did was wrong, there were cultural reasons he was able to frame it differently in his own head. Examining that, she said, isn't the same as condoning the crime.

Competent adults should know when they're doing is wrong. It's not a question of but... culture. However, rape stats vary a great deal around the world. Certain contexts of rape, like prison rape, marital rape or rape within military service, are endemic in some countries and relatively low in others. This is not because some countries produce better human beings**.

Feminists call this rape culture, but that covers a load of different issues. Royse claims her friend did not understand that the absence of consent or consciousness turns sex into rape. I doubt that very much, but there are cultural messages which enable rapists to make these arguments about confusion. As Cliff Pervocracy says in her excellent post We are the 95% (as in, the roughly 95% of people who manage not to commit rape);

If affirmative, negotiated, freely given consent is the norm, then rapists lose the ability to say "I just didn't know." They can no longer make anyone think "but regular sex looks practically the same." If romance doesn't work a damn thing like rape, rapists can't hide behind "I was trying to be romantic." 

As Cliff says, rapists lie about their confusion and ignorance, but they are lying to themselves as well as the rest of us.  So I wanted to talk about the specific cultural messages we get, not about rape, but about consent and the way that works in heterosexual relationships. Because most of this is about men and women. All these issues bleed out to effect everyone. Men and non-binary people who are raped by women and men are effected by all of this. But it all starts with ideas which help male rapists reason away their assaults on women.


1. Sexual arousal takes over men's bodies so they can't be accountable for their actions. 

The psychological effects of alcohol vary from culture to culture, according to expectation. In the UK, folks expect to become aggressive, so that happens. If you trick British people into thinking they have consumed alcohol, they forget to say please or thank you and fights break out.  Elsewhere, people don't expect this so they drink peaceably until they gently slide off their chairs. In other places, they don't even sit on chairs to begin with, so there are even fewer injuries.

The same goes for sexual arousal. Plenty of people live with frustrated desires, remain celibate or faithful within unhappy marriages, refusing sex when the opportunity arises for various moral, social, medical or religious reasons. Meanwhile, most people have the experience of having to stop in the middle of sex when someone faints, something dislocates or goes into cramp or someone's grandmother walks into the room. Even when arousal is at its absolute peak, it is perfectly possible - if sometimes frustrating and demoralising - to call the whole thing off.

In movies, characters who don't have a great deal of sexual chemistry - and often don't even like each other - frequently become overcome in the moment and have sex, just so there's a little flesh on the screen. Of course, people do sometimes have spontaneous sex in weird circumstances with people they hardly know in real life, but if the aliens had nothing but Hollywood to go by, they might suppose that any time a man and a beautiful woman find themselves in a situation of tension or peril and certainly any time a man and a woman like each other, sex becomes inevitable.

During the notorious Reddit thread where men were invited to discuss why they had committed rape, men (rapists and non-rapists alike) repeatedly stated that men think with their penises. If we were to believe this to be the case, for even a moment, women could never be safe in the company of men.


2. Women want men who want them.  Men simply have to prove the strength of their desire.

We're taught that romantically, a woman is an entirely passive creature.  If she's pretty enough, a man falls in love with her. And so long as he isn't the Sheriff of Nottingham or Prince Humperdinck, his love will make her love him back. Women don't love or desire men for themselves, because men aren't particularly attractive in their own right; women love men because men want and love them.

(In fact, given their supposed passivity, you might be under the impression that a woman would fall in love with the Sheriff of Nottingham or Prince Humperdinck, if only their hearts hadn't already been claimed by other men.)

Thus, there are three love stories in maybe ninety percent of mainstream movies:

1. Boy meets girl.  Boy falls in love with girl.  Girl sees this and falls in love with boy.
2. Boy meets girl.  Boy falls in love with girl.  Girl doesn't see or believe it, so isn't interested until boy has thoroughly proven his love through heroic deeds. Girl falls in love with boy.
3. Boy meets girl.  Boy falls in love with girl.  Girl doesn't love him back and she turns out to be a bitch. Girl is killed or runs off with the bad-guy.  Boy meets new girl.

Unrequited attraction between two people who are both perfectly nice and lovely but just don't feel the same way about each other almost never happens in movies.  Proof of Life is one rather obscure example. There's unrequited love in Love Actually but even then his hostile, creepy and underhand behaviour is completely forgiven when it turns out Andrew Lincoln's character is in love with Keira Knightley. People behave decently with unrequited love in books - Brideshead Revisited and Little Dorrit spring to mind - but much less often than in real life.

Meanwhile, fictional men do tremendously creepy and criminal things which magically work out because the women fall in love with them (as in Twilight and its fanfic Fifty Shades of Grey - though this is by no means the preserve of vampires or sadists). And you think, well, that is just fiction - in real life, people must know this stuff is wrong. Then you read about a guy who dies from cold and alcohol, camping outside an ex-girlfriend's house having harassed and stalked her for a few months, being portrayed as a tragic hero who died of a broken heart.

Talented people have vented the despair, longing and humiliation of unrequited love or rejection into beautiful music and these have become regular romantic songs. People dance to Every Breath You Take or Adele's Someone Like You at their weddings. There's plenty of other popular music whose lyrics are about dark subjects, but we don't accidentally play Don't Fear The Reaper at funerals because we've forgotten what the lyrics are saying (admittedly, my Gran wanted We've Got All The Time In The World at Grandad's, but we talked her round).

Unrequited love, unrequited sexual attraction and rejection are very normal human experiences, very painful as they sometimes are, but our culture gives confusing messages about what folk - especially men - should do about them.  Our stories and songs suggest that a true hero pursues his beloved no matter what, no matter how she feels about it. Common sense, decency and the law says mourn and move on.

Financial sense says write a catchy song about how you're feeling. People will probably play it at their weddings.


3. Women don't know what they want when it comes to sex so men have to decide on their behalf. 

This is a staple of our culture. Creators of film and fiction get away with it because in those universes, the woman is often fighting her own desires.  On the one hand, she doesn't want to have sex on the side of the volcano with a man she barely knows because she is not a slut. On the other hand, she wants to have sex with the hero, because he loves or wants her (see above) and anyway, the volcano is erupting in a poorly thought-out metaphor which will lead to their imminent deaths. So it's up to him to get on with it, before she gets into a lava.

This used to be even worse, when a heroine's hysterical state was fairly frequently resolved by a slap round the face, being carried off kicking and screaming (as in Gone With the Wind, although the film makes it look like rape) or an actually rape (as in Hitchcock's Marnie). Yet even in 2012, Christian Grey tells his victim that she's over-thinking and ignores her when she withdraws consent.

There are reasons why this nonsense exists. Many women are conditioned against saying no. Many women are also conditioned not to ask for the things they want, especially when it comes to sex.  But uncertainty is a legitimate state.  Not yet ready (whether before a first-time or five thousandth time) and not entirely comfortable are also entirely legitimate, even if a person is very much in love or else aching with lust.  These are also inactive states. Uncertainty means No. You don't act before you're sure of your feelings and you certainly don't need others to make up your mind for you.

If there is a person out there who really does say "No" when they mean "Yes", they're not competent enough to be having sexual relationships.



4. Sex is part of a complex bartering system between straight men and women.

Loads of cultural sources, especially men's and women's magazines, trashy newspaper columns, rom coms, certain religious rhetoric, pop psychology and self-help books treat heterosexuality as a system of heavily-encoded interminable bargaining. They say that men and women want completely different things but can never say so, so must instead dance around one another, each pretending to concede to the desires of the other whilst all the time securing their own bizarre goals.  It stinks to high heaven. It makes everyone miserable. It ruins relationships and it is a contributing factor in our rape statistics.

Principally, this message says that sex is something women give to men in exchange for the things they really want, like affection, money, babies or someone to open jars. In the godawful Bridesmaids, for example, sex - including deeply unsatisfactory and outright coercive sex - is something women put up with in order to obtain such glories as having a boyfriend, receiving a compliment and of course, goal of all feminine goals, being and staying married. Out of the six women principle characters in a smutty sweary rom com (that is to say, it is by no means afraid of the subject matter), only one expresses any sexual desire. Which is funny, because she is the fat one! Oh, how we laughed.

This is not my universe, but over the years, I have heard all kinds of theories about behaviours which indicate that a woman is prepared to have sex with any given man (you know, apart from initiating sex or expressing her wishes verbally - women never do that). These include going on a third date, letting him buy dinner, letting him buy desert, letting him walk her home, introducing him to a friend, asking him to go shopping with her, letting him put up a shelf or change a fuse and many more. The meme of the Friendzone is all about men who feel they have fulfilled their part of this mystical bargain but aren't getting the sex they deserve. Instead of dutiful sex, they are saddled with miserable and unending friendship.

The idea that men and women naturally want different things but cannot communicate directly is one of the most dangerous ideas there is in heterosexual relationships.  It allows both men and women to justify abuses by assuming the other party's true feelings, including feelings that directly contradict what has been said.  These assumptions can be about sex (she owes me, it's her duty, men want sex all the time) as well as reproduction (all women want/ need to have babies deep down, no man thinks he's ready to be a father until he is one). They really can mess up lives.


5. Passion is expressed in conflict and violence.

Melissa McEwan spells this out in her afore-linked essay Rape Culture 101 (I've left her links in and really you should read the whole thing some time, even if you don't like the phrase Rape Culture):

Rape culture is regarding violence as sexy and sexuality as violent. Rape culture is treating rape as a compliment, as the unbridled passion stirred in a healthy man by a beautiful woman, making irresistible the urge to rip open her bodice or slam her against a wall, or a wrought-iron fence, or a car hood, or pull her by her hair, or shove her onto a bed, or any one of a million other images of fight-fucking in movies and television shows and on the covers of romance novels that convey violent urges are inextricably linked with (straight) sexuality.

In the movie Red Road, a woman becomes obsessed with the man who killed her husband and daughter in a drug-fueled car crash. It's a bleak and harrowing film, but it nevertheless has great merit - mostly for the use of CCTV (the protagonist is a CCTV operator who spots her enemy on camera). She gets closer to this man who she believes to be a monster and, outraged that he is out of prison, she sees an opportunity to frame him for rape. So they have consensual sex and she tries to rough things up a bit, in order to acquire a few marks and bruises. And that's awkward, because he's behaving normally and is nervous of not messing it up.

I have no experience in this area, but I'm sure most times two people have sex for the first time, both parties will go about this with significant caution. You don't necessarily know the other person's likes and dislikes, you don't know the other person's body, but most of all, you don't want to sing such a duff note that the other party screams, throws you off or laughs in your face.

Yet most of the sex we see in movies is supposed to be the first time two people make love, usually two people who don't know one another all that well, and yet it is almost always forceful and rough - ripped clothing, pinning down etc.. And that's a problem. Because it encourages the idea that this is how it's done and (particularly) first-time sex should feel or look a bit like a fight.  



6. Sex is the grail.

At the end of almost every movie, the hero gets the girl.  She is the physical reward a man receives for saving the world, solving the mystery, winning the game or growing as a human being.  If a man in a movie picks up a woman's scattered groceries, he will most likely get to have sex with her. If he rescues her from a burning building, it's a done deal. Great, good and victorious men get to have sex with whatever beautiful woman happens to be standing nearby.

So first off, there's the problem of heterosexual sex being a reward. Women are human beings with sexual autonomy, varying tastes, interests, codes and feelings of their own, so however great a heterosexual man may be, even if he has saved the world from nuclear apocalypse, he will never be able to do whatever he likes, with whoever he likes, whenever he likes. Yet whenever a famous man stands accused of rape, some fan will always ask the sincere question, "But who on Earth would say no to him?"  Nobody ever says no to James Bond.  Nobody ever says no to any decent, brave or talented man in a movie - at least not for long.

If you're not winning or questing for anything in particular, then sex may become the objective. I'm not talking about folks going out on a Saturday night with the hope of getting laid (or whatever the hi-tech equivalent is). Such people, for the most part, do so because they enjoy the experience. They enjoy the company of friends, they enjoy alcohol and the nightlife and, if they are lucky, they enjoy the experience of meeting, talking to and having sex with an attractive stranger. If they don't get lucky, then there will be other nights and even in the absence of sex, there are always stories to tell. It's what some people do for fun. Sex is sometimes part of that fun. At its absolute basest level, sex is a fun activity that two or more people enjoy together.

I'm talking about the aspect of our culture which treats sex like the acquisition of points in a video game. You don't enjoy the points, but they give the game purpose, they show you are good at the game and you may boast to your friends about how many points you have.  Young men who have no points at all are in real social trouble; their masculinity will be questioned and they may be treated as strange, incomplete. But any man may feel anxious about the points he has. On a recent television programme about how many of us have Neanderthal DNA, the comedian presenter listened to the theories*** about cross-breeding and concluded, "Every hole's a goal!" The Good Men Project's pet rapist joked that the violent rape he committed, cheered on by his buddies, could be described as a "particularly harsh third base". The fact that folks even talk in terms of first, second and third base is pretty grim - especially as there are four bases in rounders.

Sex is not a thing to be acquired, like points in a videogame. Sex is an experience, which occurs when two or more people want the same thing at the same time.  This is mostly down to luck and circumstance.  Given the great variety of people who manage to have sex, it is hardly an achievement in
itself.  Sex can be lots of things, but fundamentally, it is an enjoyable activity.

Edit: Stephen pointed out to me that there was an early computer game which scored points in this way. I imagine there have been many more since, but it sure started early.

7. Sexual Violence or Coercion is a Joke.

We joke about things to make them less horrific, and rape is among them. In A Woman In Berlin, victims of rape joke about their horrendous - but in postwar Berlin, very commonplace - experiences. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where rape victims are usually the butt of the joke. Only this last week, there has been Virgin Mobile's visual rape joke and FHM telling chaps not to wear women's socks:

“If you run out of socks, you have two options: recycle, or go sock-free. No matter how cold it is, it’s never acceptable to wear your girlfriend / mother / victim’s socks.”

Alyssa Royse jokes about her rapist friend's victim "But if something walks like a fuck and talks like a fuck, at what point are we supposed to understand that it's not a fuck?". The GMP rapist titters throughout his piece about how he's going to keep on "partying", whatever. This is humour about massively traumatic incidents in women's lives. Things that can effect them in profound ways for years to come.

Rapists joke about rape to render their crimes less serious.  Rape in humour, especially gendered humour about what men and women are like, normalises violence and rape along with men being poor cooks and women being obsessed by footwear. If it's a joke, then it doesn't count as a crime, it couldn't be too bad. Most people who tell rape jokes are not rapists, but we need to be aware that rapists, as well as victims, might be in the room. And as I've said before on numerous occasions, you need to consider who you might be hurting and who you might be comforting with a joke. 

Most people, including the vast majority of men, do not commit rape. Without needing a discussion, we all understand the absolute basics of consent. Many of us have made small mistakes, misread signals, make a fool of ourselves, even made someone else feel a little uncomfortable and culture often plays a part in that - like the character who thinks all straight sex concludes with the man coming on someone's face. Rape is not like that. It is not a misunderstanding of a situation. But rapists, however, tell us it is like that and, because we're decent and inclined to believe the best of others, we sometimes get sucked in.

Alyssa Royse says "...we're all accomplices in making women's bodies and sexuality a prize and something to which some men feel entitled".  I don't think that's true. But we are all part of a culture which allows a rapist to tell his friends about his dreadful confusion, and to receive empathy and reassurance in return.

The final word to the great Cliff Pervocracy;

"So when you hear all the totally plausible ways it could have been you, realize: nope, probably couldn't have been. Most people don't struggle not to commit rape. Most people don't have trouble understanding sexual refusal. The vast majority of people go through drunken blunders and miscommunication and bad breakups without committing or being accused of rape, just as the vast majority of people don't have trouble restraining themselves from torture or murder.  

And forget the numbers for a second. If you, personally, make a commitment to never have sex without unambiguous consent, your odds of being a not-rapist are 100%. It can't "happen to you" if you decide not to do it."

* My copy is in a box, in an attic, two hundred miles away. So there's a small chance I'm remembering the wrong book or it wasn't quite as I describe in some way.

** Except possibly New Zealand.  Everyone I've come across from New Zealand is lovely. They produced the classic movie Tongan Ninja, the great band Flight of the Concords, everything looks like Middle Earth and they have those funky green endangered owls that tried to mate with Mark Carwardine. If it wasn't so far away from everything, I'd move there!

*** It's not an irrelevant point that all the theories of interbreeding asked the question, "Why would human men decide to have sex with Neanderthal females?" and most of them relied upon human masculine sexual aggression. This is the nature of our cultural imagination.