Words for the Wise
A casual chat with your local bartender might be enough to reveal the deep-seated actions that endorse rape culture.
A friend of mine often jokes about his government position in the CBD, and how it isn’t what he does there, but what he doesn’t do. He works hard — on shredding files and covering up the fact that what he is actually doing all day is looking up pictures of dogs on the internet. His latest craze, though unoriginal, is pictures of animals with captions.
“Sloths,” he said to us at a friend’s exhibition, and I choke a little on my wine.
“Sloths?”
“Yes, sloths. Except it’s horrible, they have started using all these sloth images to portray rape culture. It’s really awful.”
I choke on my wine for the second time. Another friend is so perturbed by her favourite animal representing sexual violence that she has to leave the conversation and go and sit down.
“Roses are red, Violets are blue. Be my fucking Valentine, or I’ll rape you.”
The idea of these pictures seemed preposterous, but I had to see for myself. I searched “Sloth funny” in Google images, and lo and behold, a bombardment of sloth images appeared, many of them featuring the animals pulling faces that humans would identify as sleazy and perhaps a little stoned. It was anthropomorphism at its finest.
I looked at one image. It was a close up of half a woman’s face, with a small sloth close up to her ear, insinuating the whispering of the words boldly printed at the top and bottom of the image: “Do you like Dragons? ’Cause in a minute I’ll be dragon my balls across your face.”
To the left there is the exact same image, except this time the caption reads: “Do you like Japan? ’Cause I’m trying to get into Japanties.”
Underneath these two, I read another: “I like to play games and stuff. Like rape.”
I spent a few more moments investigating, and as my eyes fell upon one last image, I somberly switched off my computer. Roses are red, Violets are blue. Be my fucking Valentine, or I’ll rape you.
*
Rape culture: Two words that provoke emphatic response, and acute discomfort. A relatively modern phrase, it is one that has been met with both feminist gusto, and resentful examination of its relevance.
Penned by US feminists in the 1970s, ‘rape culture’ is a term constructed to show the ways in which sexual abuse victims are blamed or mistreated, and the ways in which sexual violence is often normalised by society. Organisers believed that by accepting and perpetuating this normalisation (jokes are a good example) we are feeding the idea of rape as an acceptable part of our culture, and as less of an atrocity than what is experienced by the victims of sexual violence. In our society, rape culture suggests that we are mistakenly taught to “not get raped”, instead of “Don’t rape”.
Emilie Buchwald, author of Transforming a Rape Culture, explains it as “a complex set of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself.”
According to statistics compiled by the United Nations, over 250, 000 cases of rape are reported globally each year. That’s roughly 685 sex attacks a day. And those are just the ones reported. Society and law acknowledge the crime of rape yet although we publicly condemn it, sexual abuse remains an active part of daily life throughout the world. Sexual discrimination on a global scale is still as frequent as words or laughter.
Jokes, and captions, are not the only thing to perpetuate the issue. Advertising (women as “ornaments” in magazines and adverts), television (the roles of women as objects in shows like Two and a Half Men), videos (modern pornography where women endure brutal sex), language (“slut”, “bitch”, “housewife”, “good woman”), laws (illegal abortion), and everyday comments (“You should smile more!’) are entrenched in the construction of our social norms.
Women in the work force experience it every day. Hospitality may be a profession full of women, but behind the scenes it is a male-dominated industry. In decades past, women were the “bar wench” or the “maid”, and to this day there are very few bars, clubs or pubs owned by women alone.
“I work in a late night pub in Collingwood. Very few of the women are completely happy with the treatment they receive,” hospitality worker *Dawn Lee says. “But they put up with it because we might lose our jobs. I often hear the girls at work say ‘well it’s better than most places’, because we are paid legal rates. We still have men call us ‘sweetheart’ and ‘darling’, a language reserved for female staff members. We still have men sit at the bar and stare at our legs and our breasts. We are still frowned upon for talking about ‘women’s issues’, such as periods. I hear men all the time calling women ‘bitches’. They joke about not wanting to appear gay, or ‘girly’. But yeah, women still make comments that it is better than some places, where they might be physically interacted with. It’s almost like the old days, when women weren’t allowed to work, and they shut their mouths when mistreated, lest we cop it even worse.”
Another woman comments “I quit my job in a café recently because I found out my boss had made comments to a customer about the size of my breasts. I had worked for this man for over a year and considered him a friend. I called him the next day and told him I knew he had said it. He had nothing to say. I quit right then. He never apologised.”
Catcalling, an issue recently causing controversy after a ten-minute video of a woman walking the streets of New York City went viral, has become a much more frequent activity.
“You can just be walking down the street, doing absolutely nothing of interest.” states *Lee. “It happened to me the other day. A man at the traffic lights looked at me and started moving his hands as if he was rubbing my body with them. He had his tongue out, and was in the passenger seat with a friend. They were both laughing. It was a hot day and I was wearing a skirt. As if by not wearing a fucking ski suit I was inviting that kind of behaviour. What woman responds well to that? It’s not about attracting women. It’s about abusing them, and it’s so commonplace that no one does a thing. Guys who see their mates do it and do nothing? In my opinion, they’re just as bad.”
The NYC street-walking video was made be a US community organisation called Hollaback!, which aims to stop the harassment of women. In bringing light to the issue, however, the hundreds of thousands of comments have become an accumulation point for misogynists, and is a thriving congregation of those perpetuating sexual violence and endorsing a culture that normalises abuse.
“A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.”
In some ways, this is fear mongering at its finest, to stop people from trying to fight for change. In other ways, it is an imperfect attempt at battling indifference, to a deeply embedded problem.
As Buchwald says “A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm . . . In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable . . . However . . . much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.”
In recent months the western world has seen much feminist backlash. Not only from men, but from women who are confused by the modern interpretations of feminism and are afraid of being labeled as man-haters. Melbourne writer Clementine Ford disregards the notion of “man-hating” and holds that, in order to truly affect change, we must demand it, not bargain for it with men. “Our anger is not the PROBLEM of understanding how gender inequality and oppression leads to violence against women,” Ford writes. “It’s the fucking CONSEQUENCE of it.”
My mind wanders back to my dismay at the sloth images, and the anger that bubbled in me in response.
“It’s funny,” says *Lee. “People are being so defensive about street harassment, saying men are now too afraid to approach women because they don’t know if they will appear creepy, or be harassing them. But come on. If you don’t know the difference between a safe and considered approach, and a guy dry-humping his windscreen, then you’ve got bigger problems.”
