I would say a sense of "entitlement" on the part of the rapist would be part of the problem, wouldn't you? They desire something, they feel they are entitled to it, so they go and take it, be it power, pleasure, control, or some combination therein. Thus, part of the problem is the person committing the act and how they view the world at large.
The big challenge within this is the address of privilege in general; whether it is a pro football player stealing donuts because he's stoned and hungry, or an international financier chasing chambermaids. Because it's not just the spectacular. Culture of privilege is generally pervasive; there are days it seems everybody wants a piece. There is a level of office management, for instance, where certainly this person isn't bourgeoisie proper but they're going to try to act like it. Sometimes it is pressure from above; sometimes it just is.
Here's another challenge, one that actually might even be larger, but is even more difficult to classify: People behaving according to culture of privilege and entitlement generally view what they are doing as some manner of necessity or other natural outcome that has nothing to do with privilege or entitlement. Go back and read
Russell Simmons' statement↱, for instance, and wonder as sarcastically as you might or not why (
ahem!) the innocent so frequently behave just like the guilty. I mean, Simmons issued a
terrible statement; and when they lead like that, watch for the hook: In the first paragraph he denies the allegations and asserts all his relations are consensual. The second paragraph asserts his innocence and attacks others. The third paragraph acknowledges his exposure while shining himself up as some sort of sacrificial hero. It's an awful statement, and, damn it, his attorneys, at least, can be reasonably expected to know how terrible it is.
Imagine for a moment, please, someone who is not Mr. Simmons. Imagine a star staging a sham marriage to a fifteen year-old; it was "consensual". Or denigrating sexual relations with an underage girl including the manufacture of child pornography; that, too, was "consensual". And now there is a story circulating that he keeps a small harem, but even the alleged victims are pushing back, so that, too, is "consensual". Society will need a lot more to move on that last, but even if we can prove he is guilty, as we already know with the other issues, process did not achieve justice. And in this case, there are some strange results; I encountered the other day a subsequent artist borrowing from the star, and for the sake of our own senses of irony, doing so in an explicitly "romantic" context. Now, I get it, though: It's "okay", as such, to keep working with and paying tribute to the star because we had process and he was not convicted. But that's the thing; we all know he's guilty. Process is as process does.
This is part of why, in the face of the crisis, some will fall back to "process" instead of "justice". Process is important; it is part of justice. You weren't specifically wrong
to ask↗ about the context of whether "legal procedures are or should lead to justice"; it's just that the answer is a known affirmative value insofar as that is supposed to be the point of due process, and, the question of whether process is justice is one of those fundamental building blocks.
So part of what is happening is that it is
not supposed to be okay. Stars are already called out for working with Woody Allen; soon enough they will be called out about R. Kelly, or will they?
The normalization of predatory behavior manifests itself in many forms. It’s not yet clear how the black community will respond to the news that icons like Russell Simmons and Tavis Smiley are among those men who have been accused of sexual misconduct. (Both deny the accusations.) Unlike when the accusations were made against Harvey Weinstein, however, we have yet to see a flood of prominent figures publicly stand with the victims. What is clear is that too many of us still perform mental gymnastics, of the sort deployed during Woody Allen movies, to justify attending R. Kelly concerts, despite years of reports about him victimizing young girls. For some of us, the basis for this cognitive dissonance was established at a very young age.
(Hubbard↱)
In other questions, I sometimes point to an old article about Islam and tyranny, but the underlying device seems hard for people to grasp; the author,
Yvonne Y. Haddad↱, begins by exploring the idea that, "the time has come to try Islam"; for our purposes, what she meant in 1982 was that various political archetypes were trying on Islamic trappings in hopes of achieving this or that. And, indeed, rape culture, like any such dynamically nebulous idea as authority and especially tyranny, can express itself in particular forms according to circumstance; the shape of such perpetual transition and flux includes reflection of its constraints. So if we run through government tyranny, like Stalinism, Nazism, two-bit strongmanning, and so on: Why not Islam? Well, now we know what it looks like when Stalinism dresses up in Islamic robes, and, these years later Iraq is now mired in post-counterrevolutionary Islamism, which is its own fascinating question that is hard to define; I recall Riesebrodt's comparative examination of fundamentalism among American Christians and Iranian Muslims; I might wonder if in twenty years I might read an article comparing whatever Daa'ish becomes to tales of the Official IRA falling into gluttonous mobster habits manipulating construction, sanitation, and transportation contracts, versus the Provisional IRA seemingly continuing to fight, and I have no idea what to make of what I call the "spacemonkey" element.
And if I had a better library on rape culture, I could probably write a similar paragraph about variations on the theme. But it's true; rape culture has common ingredients about its iterations, but reflects its circumstance.
Shanita Hubbard's↱ tale defies me; I cannot conceive of living this way, yet I already know it happens in my society.
I came to believe—wrongly—that a person can be a victim only if those committing the offenses against her had great power. By any definition, the corner guys had very little power—and they themselves were victims of those who did. They were victims of a type of power that drove through that same intersection, snatched people away from their families and out of the community for decades. This type of power could stop and frisk them, and return to its patrol cars and proceed with its day. On a good day, if these guys were alone and remained silent without resisting, the consequences wouldn’t be as severe. A few cops would pull up, pat them down, curse at them, beat them up and scream for them to get off the corner. On other days, especially if the corner guys were in a large group, things could escalate quickly. Sometimes a corner dude wouldn’t make it home that night.
This state-sanctioned abuse at the hands of police evoked, and continues to evoke, a community response that literally and figuratively calls for the protection of these young men, and rightfully so. A community is right to fight against over-policing and brutality. It should encourage victims of police violence to speak up and put pressure on local politicians to take a stand.
But when your community fights for those same people who terrorize you, it sends a very complicated and mixed message. Even worse, sometimes the community members fighting back consist of young women who were once the little girls walking home from school doing their best to be invisible in hopes of avoiding what nobody ever called sexual assault. This sends the message that your pain is not a priority. It tells you that perhaps you are not a victim, because those who are harming you are also being harmed and we need to focus our energy on protecting them. After all, their lives are at stake.
Sometimes my job is to pay attention and learn.
And there are times when it is clear: What I have learned is to not begin to speculate about "rape culture in the [_____] community", because functional valences of intersectional truth reveal and reiterate with kliegs and neon and inherent radioactive spectra, that it all starts with empowerment. That is the one element of Hubbard's tale I can grasp in a familiar context. And I already know the corner guys aren't just black. In another community they're Hispanic. That legendary white working class has a corner here and there, too; the underlying question transcends those identifiers; in many cases the identifiers might be helpful because they point us to the historical base for a given iteration, but the actual phenomenon we're chasing is more fundamental and seemingly universal.
Some days, then, we remember what we have learned because it is important to learning something new.
So we start by making our stand, here and now. It's the first "only" thing we can do. Understanding what is going on is extraordinarily difficult, which becomes all the more reason that here and now is the where and when. But if you can imagine some day in which rape culture is an isolated and understood minority attitude, that civilized society has somehow largely transcended and figured out the real definition of having better things to do, or whatever vague phrase we might use, then it ought to be somewhat apparent that when we get there, the solutions will be a bit easier to conceive, or, at the least, recognize particular shapes of. We need to get there, first.
