Sex Is Not The Opposite Of Rape

It stops me in my tracks.

This quote begins showing up in my Facebook feed a couple of weeks ago.  The first time I read it, I exhale deeply and move on.  The next, I feel myself tensing as I scroll past.  By the fifth or sixth time, I have a sick feeling in my stomach.  Everytime I read it the same thought invades my mind.

This message isn't right.

Everything about these words seems in keeping with what we have been taught.  The person who wrote it and those who shared it are trying to make a well-intentioned point.  Yet as I sit here at 5:02 a.m. ten days shy of V-Day - which to many means chocolates and roses but to me means something else entirely - I reread this quote and am consumed by only one response.

This . message . isn't . right .

You drown when you are unable to swim -- unable to stay above water long enough to take in air, so that your lungs are filled with water instead.  There is no swimming.  There is no breathing.  At most, there is flailing and gasping, followed by sinking.  This is true.  But when you are raped, there IS sex.  It happens.  The problem of course is that one of you is unwilling.  One of you is having it done to you, instead of with you.

Rape is sex without consent.  That is what it is.  To postulate that there is no such thing as non-consensual sex -- there is only rape -- detracts from consent being the critical element that deems one type of sex acceptable and the other a crime.  If we assert that "non-consensual" is an unnecessary descriptor, that implies that "consensual" is equally unnecessary because by default, only the consensual exists.  And while this is powerful prose, suggesting that there is no such thing as non-consentual sex -- that "there is only sex or rape" -- obscures the truth.  The truth is that rape is very much about sex.

No it's not!  People exclaim.  It's about control!  It's about power!

Yes.  It is.  It is also about sex. 

But toddlers get raped and disabled people get raped and old grannies get raped, they say. All true.  That doesn't change anything.  I too once bought into and espoused the "rape is solely about power and control" tenet and to be frank I don't know why I did, other than that it was what I heard.  I knew that the message therein was that women aren't raped for their looks, that anyone can be raped, that the "men don't rape women they aren't hot for" argument is false.  I knew that that argument was grossly reductive, and that it called into question the testimonials of every woman deemed "unf*ckable" or unsuitably attractive enough to receive heartwarming flattery of being raped.  I knew that the intention was to make the act about the larger subjugation of women, about male domination, about patriarchy. I knew all that.  I went with it.

What I couldn't see at the time was that it could be about all of those things and about sex too. 

  

The fact is that there are many ways to be powerful.  You can tie a person up and hold him/her against his or her will.  You can beat, bully, threat, impede, neglect, frighten, mislead, blackmail or stalk.  Each of these tactics exercises a tremendous amount of control.  There are easier ways to control toddlers, the disabled and the elderly than to impose intercourse.  There are other ways to make your will override someone else's choice.

Millions of men control women everyday without forcibly shoving their shafts into them.   

The choice to do the latter is a calculated decision.  It is the conscious and deliberate overpowering of another by way of sexual robbery.  To say "that isn't sex, it's rape" attempts to make disparate two things that are powerfully and devastatingly linked.  And while she too may say publicly that "The attack was only about power and control", I do not believe there exists a survivor anywhere who would not admit privately that she was left a sexual shell in the wake of the assault, and that her relationship to sex was knocked upside down and sideways after she was ransacked.  

Rape being about sex does not mean that the assailant is doing it in pursuit of sexual pleasure.  It often means that he or she is doing it in pursuit of the other person's sexual shame. But let us also not believe that there are not men who do rape women for their own selfish urges.  It happens inside of relationships and marriages.  It happens at the end of dates that go well.  It is the immeasurably entitled belief that sexual gratification is somehow owed, either as a sign of gratitude for a $40 steak, or as some inevitable, incontestible obligation tied to the status of a relationship.

It can also be an attempt to make you associate sexual contact with fear, pain and panic for the rest of your life.

The aftermath of rape is walking through life in a body that cannot conceive of sex without thoughts of your violator.  It is bawling, trembling, hiding, throwing up.  It is needing to shower all the time.  It is wishing that you could cut the most private parts of yourself out, because you are incapable of feeling anything other than damaged.  It is like being in a cockpit and seeing one engine shut down, then the other, and not being able to do a damn thing about the fact that your life is ending.  It is trying to imagine skin or lips or warm breath on you as anything other than danger and being incapable of doing it.  It is trying to outrun a shame that is not yours to bear but that clings to you like thistle.  It is being scared that everyone who looks at you can see that you were raped.  It is believing that you will never know that bliss again except maybe in your dreams, and then every one of those dreams morphing into nightmares.  It is every hand pricking like thorns and every mouth burning like acid. 

Sometimes, it is telling yourself that there was the rape - and then there was the first sexual experience - because it is too revolting to accept that your first sexual experience was the rape.

It is the equating of sex with tragedy.

Rape and sex are not opposites.  Rape is sex without consent. 

Now is a time, particularly in the U.S., where mass shootings are on their way to becoming as pervasive an epidemic as sexual violence.  In these cases, we understand that while the ultimate intention of the perpetrator is to kill, crucial to the violence is the means.  There are many ways to murder, but we understand that THAT form of killing is tied directly to the use of guns.  It is the same with rape.  While its ultimate intention is to control, we must understand that there are many ways to control and that form is tied directly to the use of sex.

Guns.  Sex.  Penises.  Bullets.  An array of weaponry used in different ways to pierce and penetrate.

Sometimes the penis becomes a gun barrel.  Sometimes a wooden stick.  Sometimes a dirty finger. Or a steel rod.  Or a beer bottle.  The arsenal is a bounty.  All are aimed at damaging the pre-existing state -- about leaving it injured and bleeding.  The blood is not always visible.  But it is always there.

To rape someone is to alter that person in a way that feels cellular.  It is to change her or him at the most fundamental level.  Our sexuality lives at that level.

The sexual realm is the most powerful, and personal, that we inhabit as human beings.  We are supremely vulnerable in the best circumstances, shatterable in the worst.  Rape nullifies your relationship to your sexual self.  Trust is an indecipherable language.  The portal to pleasure is blocked, eroticism a room behind a door with a stolen key.  The body and spirit become estranged.  Each thought of union cues a racing heart -- a reminder of intimacy to which you have no access.  Every flashback is a cavern of cold.  Every touch is that of a ghost.  And everyday you pray that the person you love or wish to one day love will understand why he or she can have your heart but cannot have your flesh.  Yet.  Or yet.  Or yet.  If ever.

The way back to one's own sexuality is arduous.  That is not accidental.

Those who say that rape is not sex -- I cannot abide it.  In the crime of rape, control may be the goal but sex is the weapon.  We cannot keep unsullied the sexual sphere by pretending that rape is some entirely unrelated thing.  They are separated only by consent. Rape is sex without mutuality.  A lack of consent is the very nature of rape; you cannot have the latter without the former.  Sex does not become not sex because one of the bodies is unwilling.  What it becomes is wrong.  It is not loving, or hot, or gentle, or enjoyable.  But it is sex.  Non-consensual sex.  That is its very definition.  We can not pretend otherwise.  We cannot erase it.  Every person needs to truly understand it.  

Rape is sex.  Sex with a monstrous face.

- TT