Since Elliot Rodger went on his rampage this past weekend after writing a manifesto detailing how since a “pretty blonde girl” in middle school bullied and mocked him (wouldn’t go out with him) he hates women and sought violent revenge on them, the media has been abuzz with commentary about the rampant misogyny in our culture. Story after story of women who have been sexually violated by men in one way or another flooded the internet reminding the world that women have ample cause to fear men because so many men see women simply as bodies they can use for their own pleasure. Rape culture is alive and well and this most recent (deadly) temper-tantrum of this boy who didn’t get to play with all the toys he thought he was entitled to is just one more scene in that ongoing narrative.
I’m appreciative that the pervasive misogyny of our culture is being called out. Women are speaking out that their bodies are their own and that is a good thing. But as I’ve watched this story unfold, I can’t help but think that what is being addressed here are symptoms not causes. We can raise our voices, perhaps get better laws protecting women from assault, but all of that simply scratches the surface. There is an entire cultural narrative at work here shoring up the systemic violence against women and until we change the very way we think about things, little will actually change.
So basically we need to be talking about sex.
How we conceive of sex is broken and results in acts of violence. Sometimes that violence is physical, but much more frequently it simply appears in the form of violating the humanity of a person by turning them into a commodity. And I’m not talking about casual visual objectification or even using porn here. That’s a scapegoat. The root of this is much deeper and pervasive in our culture.
Arthur Cho’s brilliant response to the shooting pointed out the failings of this mentality. When guys think that by being strong, rich, or powerful or even by being the sweet supportive friend they are doing things to earn or win the right to sex with a woman they are promoting the idea that women (and sex) are commodities. Seeing that pattern it becomes easy to call out the guy who calls girls bullies and bitches because they won’t have sex with him. He thinks he is entitled to sex and gets pissed off when his actions don’t earn him what he wants. Women don’t want to feel like a conquest or a whore to be bought, but having already been cast as such a commodity in the eyes of the guy, that he then resorts to whatever means necessary to get what he thinks he deserves is not all that surprising.
That aspect of rape culture is easy to spot. But we rarely go further and see that the idea of women (and sex) as commodities is pervasive in our culture. For most of Western history, women were blatantly stated to be the property of a man. They belonged to their father who then arranged a deal to transfer that ownership to her husband in exchange for power, influence, or simply hard cash. Women and their sexuality were therefore something to be guarded and used as bargaining chips in this economic exchange of goods. Fathers and husbands owned the woman, and so treated her sexuality especially as an investment to be preserved until it was possessed by her new owner. In the Western world today, this exchange is perhaps not so overtly economic, but nevertheless remains in different guises. Relationships are still arranged through State controlled legal contracts or else they are seen as incomplete or even sinful. The father often still gives the man permission to marry (or date) his daughter and then gives her away to him in front of witnesses as the contract is signed. Girls are taught to preserve their virginity above all else as their most precious commodity to be preserved for “the one.” Some girls are even encouraged to pledge their virginity to their fathers until the time when it can be transferred to their husband. It is a romanticized version of the historical buying and selling of a woman’s sexuality, but it is a commodity exchange nonetheless.
At the core of this commodification of sex, is the notion that sex itself is a necessary evil which therefore must be regulated and highly controlled. That such an idea pervades Western culture is not that surprising given our roots in Greek Platonic thought that bifurcated the mind and body disparaging the base natural functions of the flesh. That the early Christians threw out Jewish notions of holistic selves and bought fully into the Greek view ensured that sex be cast as evil and therefore have such strange economic regulations applied to it. It was begrudgingly admitted that men might have sexual needs that should be met (erections can be difficult to hide…), so women were bought and sold to meet that need, but it was still cast as a source of shame.
The problem here is that we can rail against the objectification or commoditization of women in rape culture all we want, but what is really at issue here are our cultural attitudes toward the body and sex that created (and preserve) the system in the first place. What if instead of letting our fear of those who see sex as an entitlement cause us to continue to cast sex as a corrupting force of evil that we must transcend, we (like Maslow) embrace our bodies and admit that sex is a basic physiological human need. It is a need all people (yes, even women) have that is not shameful and that we should not be embarrassed to desire to have met. Not that anyone is responsible to meet that need for us, nor that we are entitled to use others for our needs, but that we simply start to admit that our sexuality is an integral part of ourselves.
This is a far cry from the culture of shame that held well into the 20th century that women were not even capable of having orgasms and that at times insisted that a woman be sent to prison for witchcraft or to a hospital to be treated for hysteria if she showed signs of sexual arousal. If women are mere objects of economic exchange that men win or earn to meet the man’s needs, of course any sign of pleasure on the woman’s part is dangerous. Far better to teach her to be ashamed of her sexuality, to preserve her virginity at all costs, and to limit her physical activities to only the man with the right to own her (and slut-shame her if she dares to meet her own needs as she will). Keep yourself pure, preserve and conserve, conceal don’t feel, are the mantras thrown at women to keep them in their place. Let them get riled up about people finding pleasure in the human form and rage about how that objectifies women as long as they remain blind to the fact that their very lives (and especially their attitude of disgust toward the erotic) are the result of their complete and total objectification and commodification.
Thing is, it’s a lot more complicated to let people embrace their bodies and their sexuality. Instead of being a source of shame that turns sex into an economic exchange where there are winners and losers leading to attitudes of entitlement and resentment, people come to know their personal needs, desires, and boundaries. Sex can be celebrated and given not only for one’s own pleasure but as a gift to another. No one has a right to anyone else, but no one can also force someone to shut down or hide their sexuality so that they can horde that commodity for themselves. Each person having his or her own boundaries and expression of sexuality is of course far more complicated than one-size fits all shame-based regulations, but it is also far healthier than the rape culture of objectification that we currently have.
The question is, how much do we really want to change the way things are? Is eliminating rape culture worth rethinking the entire culture of shame our society is built upon? Or is tweaking the status quo and feeling like we have done something good enough? Change takes time and effort and is resisted at every turn. And as we have seen so often in this country, such equal distributions of wealth, agency and power challenge the hegemony of the rich and the powerful who want to keep it all for themselves and so they call equality evil and parade out various harmless scapegoats to be attacked instead. Will we let that happen yet again in this country? With our very bodies? Or will we stage the cultural revolution necessary to put an end to rape culture?