This article, via Jezebel, is fascinating, disturbing and sad: Pennsylvania prosecutors labeled Jeffrey M. Marsalis the worst rapist in the state’s history; investigators say that authorities have identified 30 victims; and there may be hundreds more.
Marsalis was just acquitted by two juries, and held responsible for only one crime.
Twice the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has put Marsalis on trial, alleging the rape of a total of 10 women, all of them college-educated, sophisticated, successful, good-looking and white. Twice a Philadelphia jury has heard the same scenario repeated — the women blacked out at some point during their dates, and either woke up incapacitated to Marsalis assaulting them or in the morning, naked — and decided that in every case, the women hadn’t been raped. For all but two of the women, the jurors believed that in fact no assault whatsoever took place: in effect, that the eight others fabricated their stories, and that Marsalis — who, his own defense team conceded, concocted fantastic lies and adopted fake personas — was more believable. If the authorities are correct, if Marsalis is so depraved, how could two juries — 24 people — in two separate trials have believed him over so many accusers?
The answer lies in the way we construct the rape narrative, versus the way that women actually experience and live through rape.
Jeffrey Marsalis knew his victims. He met them online at Match.com, drugged them, brought them back to his place and then had sex with them against their will. Some continued to date Marsalis afterwards. Some had sex voluntarily with him after the rape.
And that’s the problem — rape, as most people understand it, is an act of extreme violence perpetuated by a stranger. Even the term “date rape” paints a picture of a woman attacked by a male friend. Women themselves have difficulty identifying their own experiences as rape — something that Moe at Jezebel writes compellingly about in her post about Marsalis:
I don’t want to harp on my date rape, but yeah, it happened to me in Philadelphia, the same summer I was covering some of the city’s most gruesome crimes, among them a particularly heinous string of serial rapes, and if the thought had crossed my mind to call the cops on the guy — which it did not — I probably would have abandoned it pretty instantly upon the thought of trying to convince a jury in that town that I was a “rape victim.” Fuck, I didn’t feel like a rape victim; I felt annoyed.
So yeah, I fought back by talking about it, which is why I don’t disapprove of terms like “gray rape” if they enable us to speak more frankly about such douchebags, but then a story comes up like this that is just so horrific and foul and depressing and manifesting of the deep disconnect between what is accepted behavior and what is moral behavior in this country that it makes someone like me, a total know-it-all, think “Fuck, maybe I was wrong.”
She makes important points about naming and ownership of experiences. We don’t want to tell women what happened to them when they don’t agree; but as Amanda pointed out a while back, just because you weren’t injured by a car accident doesn’t mean that the accident didn’t happen. Just because you don’t feel like a rape victim doesn’t mean that a rape didn’t happen.
But the definition of rape itself is a sticky one — not because the concept is actually difficult, but because of all of our assumptions and prejudices when it comes to sex, courtship and gender relations. If your idea of sex is something that women have and men want, and your idea of courtship is men trying to somehow “get” the sex that women are so selfishly withholding, then situations like this — where women voluntarily go out with men who later rape them — are just part of the deal. According to this view, if women are aware of the rules of dating, then they are aware that the goal of the date is penetration, and it’s their job to protect themselves (physically and reputationally) by either not going on the date, or not being in a situation where they could be forced, coerced or drugged into sex. So if this is your outlook and a woman comes back to your home with you, the assumption is that she’s sexually available — and if she says no or if she’s unable to consent in the first place, then her post-rape objections amount to her “changing her mind” the next morning.
I wish I could say this is a minority view, but it’s not. This exact argument was used in the Marsalis case:
[Marsalis's attorney] conceded that his client had told tall tales, that he might even seem unlikeable. But, he told the jurors, “He’s not a rapist. He’s a playboy. Everybody knows him, he might have taken it a little further with the stethoscope than you might expect. But he’s just a playboy.”
He said that Marsalis had been punished enough for the sins of his embellishment. He called the women liars. “You need to stop saying that a criminal courtroom is the forum for a woman who regrets having sex with you and who is upset because you lied about your profession,” he told the jury. “Throw a brick through his car window, slash his tires, get online and tell the rest of the world he’s not a doctor and a liar. But you don’t come up with this kind of nonsense and play with this man’s life.”
Another view of rape is that it’s always extremely violent, and that women who are only forced into sex against their will aren’t rape victims like women who are attacked and brutally beaten or killed in addition to being forced into sex. Now, in any crime there’s going to be a division of horrors — that’s why some kinds of murder have higher penalties than others. Rape is the same, and I don’t object to a system that takes aggravating factors (like the use of a deadly weapon or a beating) into account. The problem, though, is that socially, the rape in itself isn’t automatically considered an assault. The assault, for a lot of people, is the beating or the threatening with a gun or the tackling a woman to the ground; the rape is just sex under those bad circumstances. And so the horror in rape isn’t being penetrated against your will; it’s all the stuff that Law & Order says comes along with it.
Further, sex, power and pain have long gone hand and hand for women, and it can be hard to parse through all of the associated issues. Pain in childbirth, after all, was our original curse, right? In our collective histories, women have, in large part, been property. Of course sex was about power — and it was clear who held all of it. Marital rape is a relatively new concept, because the very idea that a woman had a right to say no to her husband/owner about anything is a relatively new concept. Even today, sex is supposed to come with a litany of punishments — a “bad reputation” is just the start. Those who support traditional gender roles want to see involuntary pregnancy and childbirth leveled as a punishment against women who have sex (and if you’re desperate enough to try and avoid it, death is your lot). I don’t want to get into the pornography wars, but a quick perusal of mainstream het porn online will make some pretty clear statements on the current view of sex, power and pain (and whose pain we’re getting off on). When it’s “alt porn” that stresses consent and enjoyment of all involved, you know something is going on in our mainstream view of sex. When the some of the biggest porn-makers have gotten rich off of videos of coercive sexual activity marked by humiliation and inability to consent — see Girls Gone Wild and Bang Bus for two examples (and those are links to work-safe and very good articles, not porn sites) — something is wrong.
Something is wrong when sex, as it is imagined in movies and magazines and advertisements, can look a lot like rape.
In this system, is it any wonder that women don’t self-identify as rape victims? That when you wake up in bed with someone who you voluntarily went on a date with, who you feel like you know, who didn’t hurt you in any way other than sexually (and when being hurt sexually isn’t so abnormal), you don’t see it as rape?
Feminists have done a lot of good in expanding social views of rape to include acquaintance rape and non-consensual, drugged sex. But where it gets even trickier is in the victim’s post-rape response, and how social constructions of rape and of personal strength and of sex influence our behavior and come back to bite us in the ass in the court room.
Rape, the feminist line has long gone, is a crime of power. It is. But the popular (i.e., not feminist) understanding of that argument assumes that it’s a crime of male power exerted over women; there’s little recognition of the myriad responses when power is so thoroughly stripped away.
Some women, like Moe, don’t call it rape and search for another term — not assault, exactly, but certainly not consensual sex either. And so we substitute terms like “gray rape,” “date rape,” or phrases that don’t include the word “rape” at all. He’s a creep. He’s a sleaze. It was a “bad situation.”
Other women take active steps to get that power back. When you’re a woman like me who considers herself fairly intelligent and who sees sex as both a fantastic pleasure and an important responsibility, it’s incredibly confusing to be party to a sexual act that falls outside of your vision of the kind of sex you have. The automatic response, for a lot of us, is to want to want it — and so the next morning we initiate it, or we accept it, or we go out with him again, or we otherwise struggle to take what happened to us and turn it into something we did. There’s a desperation to feel like an actor in your own life, to not feel like sex happened to you.
I can relate to that feeling. I have a feeling that that’s what’s happening here. This section of the article really illustrates the dynamic:
Standing in the dark bathroom in her bra and panties, her hand to her mouth, she sobbed. Strange noises came from her, grief unfurling from someplace inside her. And yet, at the same time, her mind was racing. It determined, almost independent of herself, that she must immediately get beyond what had happened. She reasoned that he hadn’t threatened her life, hadn’t borne a knife or a gun. The city was an unfamiliar place. If she left now, where would she go? What would she do? Most of all, she became instantaneously determined that she would not suffer from this — she would avoid the post-traumatic stress she’d seen firsthand as she studied to become a counselor. She would accomplish this by ignoring, by attempting to discard, the few distinct images that had managed, somehow, to make inroads deep in her mind, into memory.
Her naked feet trod back across the tile. In his bedroom, she pulled back the covers, slid back in bed with him, beside him. …
In the morning, she awoke once again, finally, fully, if groggily, to sunlight: a bedroom painted white, Ikea furniture, a bookshelf full of medical texts, blue-striped Nautica-brand sheets. And to his face. His green eyes stared across the pillow at hers. He smiled.
He moved his naked body toward her, pulled her closer to him, tucked his body into hers. Once again, his hands crept over her. This time, she says, she let him inside her willingly.
Unprotected, once again, he climaxed. They lay there, side by side. As the room filled with morning light, they talked, enjoyed each other’s company. They had sex again. Again he finished inside her. At last, well into the afternoon, they got up and dressed, she in the same clothes from last night, he in a fresh pair of scrubs.
He told her he’d like to see her again, and how much he’d enjoyed her. To the man she was sure a few hours ago had raped her, the man with whom she was about to embark on a three-month relationship, she said Me too.
How, I asked Rachael one day last summer, how could she do it? “I don’t know,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “He had taken away my power. I guess it was an attempt on my part to regain some of the power I’d lost. But honestly, I don’t really know why.”
Sexual assault survivors are supposed to be Lifetime Movie victims. They should be crying, in pain, desperate to go to the hospital or to the police. When their reactions don’t match that model — when they do the exact opposite of what we expect a rape victim to do — their credibility is damaged. Even when what they do is totally normal for people in their situation:
There is voluminous psychoanalytic literature that corroborates the seemingly strange behavior of sexual assault victims, who often act in counterintuitive ways, blaming themselves, showing inappropriate emotions such as laughing about an assault, even reengaging their attackers, in hopes of legitimizing or ignoring what has happened. Pennsylvania law, however, forbids prosecutors from calling experts who could attest to this, leaving it to jurors to determine how victims ought to react. It is the only state in the nation to expressly preclude such testimony.
Still, if she could do it all over again, Katie tells me, she wouldn’t have contacted Marsalis after the fact, certainly wouldn’t have involved him in her pregnancy. “But,” she says, “there was a certain part of me that felt like I needed to regain my control, which I don’t think you could understand, because you have to have everything taken away first. It’s hard to say now, but back then I felt like I could have cared less if I lived or died. I can understand wondering why from a perspective of not being in the situation. When I heard about some of the stuff the other girls said or did, I realized, nobody will understand, they don’t understand this guy, they don’t know what it’s like to have this happen to you.”
Men like Marsalis are well aware of the situation women are in when reporting rape. He knows that by establishing personal connections, he makes it nearly impossible to convict him. He knows there’s a way to situate sexual assault as mere courtship, as a normal part of male-female relationships.
And that’s where all the rape apologist arguments lose me — I cannot for the life of me imagine a decent person doing what so many argue is “normal” in heterosexual relationships. I cannot imagine what kind of person would have sex with someone who can’t say yes, and who just lays there, paralyzed. I cannot imagine what kind of person would hear their partner say “no” and refuse to stop. I cannot imagine what kind of person would try to have sex under conditions that were anything other than consensual and mutually enjoyable.
Yet we fail to approach sexual assault from the angle of the perpetrator’s actions and intent — instead, we look at what the victim did or didn’t do and decide accordingly. As if the victim’s reaction determines whether or not a crime occurred. As if our own ideas about how we would react somehow define reality.
Thanks for posting on this. I did last week, and I definitely think that the word needs to be spread.
Very well-written post.
I haven’t read the book yet, but if I understand correctly the various analysis and reviews I read about it, it’s one of the key points of Andrea Dworkin’s essay Intercourse, a point that has been often misunderstood as her stating that all heterosexual sex is rape.
Some things are hard to change.
This has particular resonance with me today, because of a recent rape here on the campus of a Large Pennsylvania University. A football player raped a girl who came back to his apartment with him–he had sex with her while she was sleeping, after she told him there would be no sex. She woke up when he tried to “initiate sex.” When she tried to get up, he hit her. So she laid back down and he raped her. His defense attorney (the biggest sleaze in the area, btw) has argued that since she didn’t cry for help, it was consensual.
Pennsylvania has seriously fucked-up rape laws, including a legal code that says it’s only “rape” if there is a weapon involved. Everything else is “sexual assault.” I fully expect this guy to walk away with no idea that what he did was wrong. I wonder if the asshole in the above story has any sense of his crime?
Rape is certainly one of the most difficult legal lines to draw, since the moral line and criminal line in the crime don’t fit together as neatly as murder (since some view the victim engaging in sex as immoral itself v. roughly 99.9% of the American population agreeing that being a death victim = never immoral, absent justification/excuse, of course). You raise a good point in the last sentence: by viewing rape only from the point of the victim, it’s quite a paternalistic view of the crime. Specifically, it takes the view that the victim needs to be avenged, rather than the society also looking at the intent of the perpetrator, which is would amount to society announcing, “we aim to deter this type of action because we find it’s intent to be abhorrent,” which is your point made with premeditated murder v. lesser forms of “passionate” murder.
I wonder how much of it is society’s unwillingness to deal with the “darker” sides of sex. That is to say, that power is always an element of sex (and from all sides, too, as not everything boils down to misogyny–though it is probably the biggest culprit, and certainly in the case of rape). The reality America doesn’t want to deal with is to openly announce that there is sex beyond the high school sweetheart that we publicly romanticize; the type of sex so widely consumed in reality/gonzo porn market. It’s the line of thought that says, “Sure, those Sex and the City girls lead chic lives, but if they end up tricked/drugged/charmed into unwanted sex, isn’t it possible they deserved it by being such hussies in the first place?”
I think your point is apt. Unless we tailor the law to also focus on the intent of the perpetrator (like we do when we have dead bodies) and have juries look objectively at the factors surrounding the level of premeditation that went Marsalis’ actions, the defense attorney will never have to do more than shine the focus onto whether his client was the kind of guy who could clearly charm the pants off any pretty girl. If that test is passed, then the defense attorney changes the from whether the perpetrator had the mind to engage in what we should view as a societally abhorrent act, but instead to whether she should have known better or did she “get what she wanted (deserved?)” as evinced by the victims immediate and subsequent actions.
A little bit of interesting news: Here in Buffalo, a man just got a 50 year sentance for raping his wife. The first marital rape conviction in years.
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/168206.html?imw=Y
Thank you for the links and the careful analysis. This was deeply disturbing/upsetting/unsettling.
In the context of this debate I think it is very important to use the correct terminology and descriptives. As I see it, the facts are bad enough and need no embellishment. So let me explain why this is wrong:
In a civil case, the standard is “more likely than not;” or “greater than 50%.” So if these accusations were made in civil court, then and only then would a verdict of “not liable” mean that they believed the women less than the accused.
But this isn’t civil court. This is criminal court, where the standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Unlike civil court, that standard has no mathematical analog. Various folks have tried to study it with varying results; it seems to be somewhere in the range of 90% and AFAIK is almost certainly considered to be above 80%.
Using the 90% number serves to illustrate how problematic the article is. The jury does NOT need to believe him more than the women. They only need to believe him a little bit. They can think the women were “probably” right or “very probably” right and still be legally and morally obligated to give a verdict of innocence if they maintain a reasonable doubt.
That is why the conviction rate for rape is so low. A verdict of not guilty doesn’t mean (as some writers imply) that the victims aren’t being believed at all, or that the accused is being believed more, or anything like that. It simply means that the defendant created reasonable doubt.
And there are no “partial credits” in criminal court There is no way at all for the jury to say to the accuser “well, you know, we think something really slimy happened here, and we want to let you know we’re on your side.” They can’t say “we were so close to convicting and sending him away for 10 years, we missed only by one vote, can we compromise and jail him for 5 years instead?”
They are constrained–by the rape law, by the Constitution, by the judge. As a result, PLENTY of people who get verdicts of “not guilty” are actually guilty (that’s part of why they call it “not guilty,” as opposed to a ruling of “innocent.”) This man may well be guilty of each and every crime of which he was accused.
That doesn’t make it any better for these victims. But it would be incorrect to think that they were not believed at all.
This is an absolutely fantastic post. Thankyou. *bookmarks*
As a result, PLENTY of people who get verdicts of “not guilty” are actually guilty (that’s part of why they call it “not guilty,” as opposed to a ruling of “innocent.”)
Though why do I get the feeling that some rape apologist down the line will take the “not guilty” verdicts of this guy as examples of false accusations?
I think situations like this are the result of cultural crossed wires: women are still intensely socialized to be “nice,” submissive to men, pleasing, and not display anger or agressiveness.
However, these attitudes were traditionally coupled with lots of messages to “never let a guy get you in a compromising situation,” to be gatekeepers and be vigilant of men being sexual predators and always wanting to go too far, and that it was their duty and their right to say “STOP! We’re not doing that until [we're married, going steady, engaged, etc].”
That aspect has been done away with, while adding some half-baked “feminist” ideas such as “you should want and pursue sex as much as a man” and that it’s expected that you’ll have lots of sex with guys you date, and there’s no shame in engaging in sexual activity.
The problem is that women are operating with half traditional nice-girl training and half modern-sex-positive training! These two things together contribute to these disgusting situations where men are raping and getting away with it. Women should either be entirely traditional and be very vigilant about being gatekeepers (and have the confidence to say no based on her idea that he should be a gentleman and she should be pure) OR be ACTUALLY modern and assertive, seek out sex for her own pleasure, and not take any shit from anyone (including have the confidence to own her body and not excuse male assholery like the situations above).
Half measures result in tragedy all too often. This kind of thing happened to many of my college friends, and it was ALWAYS a combo of “I must go out and hook up to be cool” and “I’m too nice to express any misgivings about this guy even though he’s being sleazy.” Without a firm foundation to object to male sexual pressure, whether traditional or feminist, women don’t have their full strength for dealing with assholes.
Sorry for my grammar being rough, English is not my first language.
Sailorman, how can the jury have believed the victim’s testimony ‘a little bit’? Either they were fucking raped or they weren’t. If you believe them, you believe them. If you believe him, you believe him (and you’re a fucking asshole).
You can’t believe 60% of their story. You believe them, or you don’t. The jury didn’t, because they are products of a fucked-up misogynistic society, as this post amply and eloquently demonstrates.
That should be victims’, yikes.
This post means a lot more to me now than it would have 3 months ago… I had a very similar experience. I had sex with a man consensually one night (though I was drunk, I did initiate it). I thought I’d never see him again, but he found out where I lived. He came to my house one night and… Yes, I let him inside… No, I didn’t tell him to leave. But I did not want to have sex, but in the situation, I didn’t know what to do. I blame him, I blame myself… I have a hard time thinking about it clearly. All I know is I felt like he masturbated in me and I did nothing. I didn’t move, I didn’t speak, I felt like I wasn’t even there. When he got out of me, I curled up and stared at the wall. He started to try to get in me again and I just said “please, no” and he left. That night, I got roaring drunk, took sleeping pills and called a suicide prevention hotline. They called the police who called the paramedics who took me to the emergency room. The police asked me if I wanted to report it, and I said no. What could I say? How would I not look like I let it happen, or even wanted it to happen? The next month was a blur of depression and misery, until in desperation I started to see a therapist and got on a good dose of antidepressant drugs. I feel OK now, but it’s still hard to think about. I tend to try to avoid thinking about it at all, which seems to work for now.
So, according to some, I just regretted consenting to sex. All I know is I never felt like that during or after sex before in my life. So I understand, I think, where these women are coming from in a way I might not have been able to before. It’s traumatic mentally and emotionally, but people only believe you if it’s traumatic physically.
I’m just coming to terms with an “almost rape”. I’m not sure what to call it since I technically consented.
I was pressured a LOT, and this guy was a very old, very trusted friend. I was also in a bit dependant on him for that week since I was visiting him….
Jill, this is a really good post.
The legal system is administered by people: police, prosecutors, judges and most importantly juries. Almost regardless of what rape statutes say, the system will only recognize as “rape” what those people will agree is rape.
Here, the police, prosecutors and judge did their job; but two juries refused to convict on all but one count (read the article: the first jury acquitted him entirely; the second took an initial vote to aquit 11-1 and the one holdout for conviction eventually got them around on just one count, the second assault on one of the victims. They convicted on another because the jurors were still discussing it and the court officers hustled them in thinking there was a verdict).
The jury is a microcosm of the culture. They imposed on the victims all their preconceived notions about what “real” rape is.
The second jury was eight women and four men. That is a powerful example of what is necessary for patriarchy to operate. Seven of eight women refused to accept the testimony of woman after woman about their experiences, when they knew for a fact that this man was willing to lie and cheat to get laid.
We need to totally rewrite the script for how sex works, if we want things to change.
Yes, they certainly will. I don’t know how many “no, a finding of not guilty is not proof of innocence” posts I’ve written so far, on a variety of blogs, but that argument shows no signs of slowing down.
There’s nothing much to do about it when folks raise that protest, except to keep saying that it’s incorrect (and make sure as many people as possible know the truth.) Most of it IMO is malicious MRA-type behavior, but some (small) fraction of those protests are made by people who simply don’t know how the system works.
dinogirl, juries don’t think in black and white. Generally they consider both sides to be telling some lies and some truths, and try to figure out what the “real” truth is. It’s not uncommon for them to believe the prosecution in general, but hold that belief as legally insufficient to satisfy the charges.
Basically, people look for any reason to excuse rape—now you can be gang-raped at gunpoint and it be considered “consent”. Because I think that it’s just impossible for people to conceive of why rape is wrong, since women’s bodies are public property.
It seems like if more men merely paid attention to the women they end up “gray raping,” it would happen a lot less often.
Most of these women’s stories involve a man using them as a masturbatory tool while not even noticing the women are living people! They don’t notice the blank stares, the lack of participation, the tears streaming down their faces.
Even if women aren’t able to say “no” or get away for whatever reason, you’d think the fact that they freeze up and aren’t active/enthusiastic during the act would give these oh-so-innocent men pause. If your partner fucking freezes while you go to town on her body, it may be because you are raping her.
I urge everyone to follow the link Amanda posted:
A judge in Philadelphia, named Theresa Carr Deni and up for reelection this November, threw out a charge of rape. The woman was held at gunpoint and penetrated (without a condom) by four men. But the judge thought, since she’s a sex worker, that’s just “theft of services.”
Can we get a campaign for a “No on Judge Deni” this November? This has to be doable.
Oh, SarahMC, they definitely notice. They know. Nobody out there has ever raped by accident. They just don’t fucking care.
I fucking hate it when apologists make out like oh, the wimmins, with their crazy emotions and hormones, who knows what they want? We poor mens can’t be expected to keep track of all their feelings! We just kept on doing our thing, and if they were freaking out, how are we supposed to tell?
BULLSHIT. You can ALWAYS tell if your partner is not into it. NOBODY RAPES BY ACCIDENT.
Excellent post. I was really dissapointed by many of the commenters on Jezabel who expressed how they could not possibly conceive of the act as rape if the victim/survivor agreed to continue with the perpetrator after the rape happened. I feel like you responded to these commentors and the sadly common misconceptions about rape. Thank you for such a good post!
That’s what I’m saying, dinogirl. Sorry if my tone wasn’t more clear.
My point is that rape is never a “misunderstanding.” Because sex is supposed to involve TWO people (or more!), not one using the other as a doll. So anyone who claims that “Oops! He just didn’t get her signals” is a liar or an idiot.
If an alleged rapist were truly a caring, harmless man, he’d have noticed his victim was frozen or that the color had escaped from her face while he used her body. And then he would have stopped.
I think dinogirl is completely right. I don’t know why people seriously believe rapists go around raping people by accident.
“In this system, is it any wonder that women don’t self-identify as rape victims? That when you wake up in bed with someone who you voluntarily went on a date with, who you feel like you know, who didn’t hurt you in any way other than sexually (and when being hurt sexually isn’t so abnormal), you don’t see it as rape?”
Is this right? My reading of the article is that these women didn’t self-identify as rape victims, not because of any cultural scripts they were following, but because he had drugged them and this had fucked their memories of what had happened.
Sommeliette, while there is a disconnect between being a “nice girl” and not being a “prude”, that’s not the problem when it comes to rape, it doesn’t cause it and it shouldn’t be used as an excuse. The problem is that men rape, not that women do… whatever. A man doesn’t have the right to rape a woman irregardless of what she does, how “confusing” she acts or even if she herself is confused. If she says no, or if she is physically incapable of saying no, then he’s a horrible human being if he rapes her and he deserves no sympathy or excuses. Even if she didn’t say no, but didn’t say yes and just lay there and hated it the whole time, my only question is how the hell did he not notice and was able to enjoy himself inside someone who was hating it so bad she felt like it was rape? How do you miss those signs when you’re that close to someone? Really, the burden should be on men to make sure they don’t rape anyone. Putting the burden on women to either be demure “gatekeepers” or assertive and take no shit won’t stop rape. The women that Marsalis raped never got the option to do either. But they’d knew they’d be blamed, if they weren’t already blaming themselves, so they tried to make it “not rape” so they couldn’t be blamed. But now they’re blamed for being “stupid” and “fickle”, having “sour grapes”, while he gets acquitted of his crimes, because there is no good to come out of blaming women for rape. We need to hold rapists wholly accountable for what they do, instead of judging how traumatized victims act in horrible situations.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I am just now coming to terms with my own “grey rape” 11 years ago, and having others understand and speak eloquently about my reactions makes a world of difference.
I know we’re just starting to explore prostitution from the (male) demand side instead of trying to figure out why certain women engage in prostitution… when are we going to start attacking sexual violence from the perpetrators’ angle?? I mean, I totally support the survivor-focused agenda (I work for an agency that does a lot to help survivors heal), but there are SO MANY people (including, of course, many survivors) that focus so intensely on women not drinking too much, or walking home alone, or meeting a guy from Match.com… and indirectly laying the blame on the victim. Yes, we need to try to keep ourselves safe, but IT ISN’T WORKING. Where are the anti-rape education programs for young men??
Marle, I’m not putting any blame on the women in this case especially since it seems straightforward (he DRUGGED them! how could it get more criminal?). I do apologize for imperfect English.
I will try to phrase myself better: it is not women’s jobs to prevent rape, because nothing you can do will 100% prevent you from being a crime victim. But this weird cultural tension between being nice, but no longer being entirely in the old-skool patriarchal gatekeeping-purity-getyourhandsoffmeyoucad and expected to be sexually wild and not prude, it makes women more vulnerable to predators. Rapists will exploit this uncertainty, and use it to their advantage.
I do not understand when people say the expectations should be on men not to rape. The expectation is on every person not to steal, murder, rape, already because of the social contract. But people do these things anyway. It is assumed that if you are reading this blog or you are a law-abiding person, you do not think like a predator/criminal — therefore to ATTEMPT to protect yourself (doesnt always work, and if it doesnt it is not your fault, but it’s sensical to try right?) you must think like the target of a predator instead, to counter him. To be vigilant for the person who will try to break the social contract.
The most important thing, in my view, is to destroy the cult of the Nice Girl. Women should be raised to get angry at outsiders instead of take it out on themselfves, and to fight back. And to outsmart bad people who even though they don’t use a gun and leap out of bushes at them, would pressure and manipulate or drug them and rape them. To change the way boys are raised too is important, but it’s much harder because of the patriarchal culture.
It is easier to arm, train, and educate victims of crimes to protect themselves than it is to make a criminal in jail reform himself and not do bad things again when he gets out. The only thing that will stop that person is force and being fought back against, since he has a violent mentality that violates social contracts.
Can we get that printed on a t-shirt? “Feminism: Destroying the Cult of the Nice Girl.”
I’d wear it.
This reminds me of a blog post I’ve been meaning to write.
Quite a few years ago (9 or 10) my roommate and I threw a party. I went to bed alone and woke up with one of the male party-goers. And he had peed in my bed. I was furious but I didn’t identify it as assault and certainly not as sexual assault. I just thought he was a careless drunk.
I yelled at him, took a shower, and then smoked a bowl with him. The pot didn’t mellow me out and I was still mad at him. Thing is, everyone else who had spent the night (politely in the living room, not in my private bedroom) told me I had no right to be angry, not even about the property damage to my mattress. They all said he was sloppy and I couldn’t be mad since I still hung out with him in the morning and didn’t rush to the police.
Only a few people later in the week said I was right to be mad and that in fact I should be even madder. They told me they thought he had gone in there rape me but was too drunk to get it up and peed instead. Or that he peed on me deliberately to “mark” me. They said I should go to the police. I didn’t. I wanted to move past it, get on with my life, get a fucking lock for my door, and never invite him to another party.
Turns out my experience isn’t uncommon. It’s happened to lots of women – we get fucking peed on.
[...] (Inspired by this post.) [...]
Part of the problem with this logic is that far more people are rapists than are murderers, thieves, etc. I guess an issue for me is that people know when they’re murdering, when they’re stealing, but they don’t seem to know when they’re raping. That seems ridiculous, but how else do we explain the vast numbers of people who are raped by friends and boyfriends?? Or maybe men don’t feel it is part of the social contract not to rape. That seems more likely. It is something that women owe them, that is theirs to “take”. Which certainly seems like something that could be addressed societally, via public education campaign, more explicit family education, or whatever.
Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve slept with enough guys who were terrible lovers. Once giving up hope that those guys had the slightest knowledge of or interest in getting me off, I just laid there not moving. I think it’s possible (at least in theory) that that type of guy could rape a woman without knowing it. She would just behave like all the other women who ever consented to have sex with him.
Anyway, if Marsalis isn’t convicted on the Idaho charge, I’m going to kill myself. Does anyone here know anything about Idaho law? Could his other arrests, charges, conviction be admitted as evidence for sentencing? I’d love to see that bastard get the absolute maximum sentence.
After being raped by a friend while drifting in and out of consciousness due to alcohol, I kept up a friendship, even a flirtation with him. I didn’t parse it as rape for a few years. In fact, my first thought the next morning was “I must have been a terrible lay!” I mean, how could he be enjoying himself when I was repeatedly blacking out? I have since cut off all ties with him, but I didn’t and won’t press charges. I simply have no chance of being believed, and the time lapse doesn’t help.
I so appreciate this blog and, especially, this post. So often I’m frustrated and angered by the ways in which people think and manifest their thoughts about women, and coming here and reading posts like this renew my faith in progress and in feminism. Thank you.
“I guess an issue for me is that people know when they’re murdering, when they’re stealing, but they don’t seem to know when they’re raping. That seems ridiculous, but how else do we explain the vast numbers of people who are raped by friends and boyfriends??”
I think they do know.
It’s important to realise just how high stakes this debate is. Most feminist attempts at rape prevention are based around the idea that men go around raping without realising it, and that we can educate them out of this by changing the culture and doing things like giving lessons about rape in schools and universities. I personally think that’s totally misguided.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that’s really the case. Just like thieves and murderers, rapists know what they’re doing is wrong. They will make post hoc excuses to try and mitigate what they’ve done like thieves and murders (people are unwilling to just come out and admit they’re evil), but they knew what they were going was wrong and did it anyway. I think feminists are way too misguidedly optimistic and moderate, you should be more man hating.
Can I ask–and please, please believe me when I say I am not trying to assign you responsibility for these guys’ loathsome actions, or to tell you what you should have done–but can I ask why you did this, went on having unpleasant sex, instead of getting up and going to watch tv or read a book or something more entertaining? I am afraid this will sound noxiously judgmental and smug, and I don’t want it to; I did a similar thing once myself, and it’s the single most nauseating, infuriating memory I have, but I don’t know if other women do it for the same reasons I did.
(My reason basically boiled down to fear of social embarrassment, and it was a degrading enough experience that I would rather risk that embarrassment than ever do it again. But that feeling of embarrassment was based on the rule that says, once a man starts, you’re obligated to help him finish. It may be painful, boring, humiliating, and pointless for you, but by God he needs his orgasm. So you have to give it to him. Because it’s just what has to be done.)
As for the issue of whether or not the rapist knows they are raping in these cases, I would argue that they may not label the action as rape themselves and then justify the action to themselves because they feel entitled to their victims’ bodies.
I think our culture is so caught up with the idea that rapists are only strangers who jump out of trees and brutalize their victims in ways beyond the rape, that recognition of what rape actually is in most circomstances is often both unknown by both the rapist and the victim. If there was a pre-established relationship or freindship, the victim does not always recognize it is rape and blames herself. I’d argue the same could be true for the rapist, given the pre-established relationship, as well as our cultural misogynistic attitudes towards women’s bodies, a rapist may be convinced he is ENTITLED to her body.
This is what happened to me. The guy I was dating at the time felt he was entitled to have sex with me, even when I said no. Just like the story above, I tried to gain control over my experience by acting as if it was ok afterwards, and continued the relationship as though nothing had happened, despite this self-destructive pain tearing me apart inside. It took years after the fact and ending the relationship for me to recognise that it WAS rape. I absolutely beleive he has no idea that that was rape. Like my saying no didn’t count because we were in a relationship, because he felt entitled to my body, because his feelings of entitlement outweighed his respect for what I actually said to him as a woman in this misogynistic society. The “awesome” part is he later blamed me for hurting him because I was not interested in sex with him.. and I too blamed myself for this rather than recognizing that this was rape.
The stranger jumping out of the bushes to rape and further brutalize and/or kill victims does happen. But the vast majority of the time, rapes do not look like this. We as a society need to acknowledge what rape is and establish at the very least a basic level of respect for women’s ownership over their own bodies.
Amazing, amazing post. I’ll be tracking back from my blog.
[...] comment, left in response to my post about rape and power, ruined my morning: I don’t know what kind of women Marsalis targeted, though as the Duke [...]
One of the things that has passed without much comment is the perp’s total megalomania, which makes him a parody of a performative masculine sex role: trauma surgeon, CIA agent, astronaut. This is beyond “issues”, this is megalomania. Given his career status as failed male nurse, one can speculate that there is a kind of sick “American Psycho” fascination he has with the class origins of his victims (Jezebel’s post is consciously about “cute, white, college-educated middle-class women”) and something really dark about gender role career expectations coming out here. (Not sure what it is.) Lots of empowerment/agency/entitlement issues here–Marsalis must have discovered in passing that even a good-looking male nurse just doesn’t do that well in dating due to his low status on the male dominance totem pole, but the sociology gets occluded by his career as an evil predator.
I once read a really good but really disturbing book by a sociologist about serial killers (I think it was called Hunting Humans) and he pointed out that many serial killings have a major class component. They rape and kill the women who are from a “better” class than they are as revenge for their own class struggles. Ted Bundy was a really good example, but there are many, many others.
So how long is it going to be before this guy decides that being dragged into court is too much trouble and he should just kill the women instead?
Erika, I’m curious as to why you didn’t say “quit it, I’m bored” or something? Because I’ve done the same thing (just laid there after I’d lost interest) and I have to wonder.. why, with guys that we know will stop if asked, do we let them go on? It’s like we’re rewarding them for being bad in bed.
I know this is late in the conversation, but I have a post that I just put up at my blog… It sort of touches on rape and torture. It’s my first stab at anything really substantive, so feedback would be appreciated.
Is there a lack of fit here between what a woman experiences as rape, and what the law defines as rape? For example, do women experience sex under false pretenses (eg. fake professions of love) as rape?
I’m married to a male nurse. I make a lot more money. However, being very secure as a man, he does not have any of these issues. Given how many women are in college and getting professional degrees, if that is going to fuel rape culture, we are going to have a war against women on our hands.
Rape is rape is rape. There are no shades of gray. If there is one thing I would like to impress on all of you the blogger and the commentators that you have got to understand that rape is rape is rape. There is no mystery definition. There is no fudging the concept. You have mentioned multiple myths in your piece, and you are mistaking sex for rape. Rape is not about sex at all. It is about someone taking what he wants, and the victim is irrelevant, which is why surviving rape is so devastating because the abused survives knowing that someone decided that their whole existence was irrelevant. I get bloody mad over this mythologizing something that is bestial, crude and widespread. The statistics abound 1 in 4, 1 in 4, that’s your best friend, your employer, your teacher, your mother, your aunt, you fill in the blank. Every time I hear about a rape incident as reporter I get angrier, and I put that anger and rage into a radio show that let’s survivors talk about what happened to them. Everyone who gets to talk about what happened to them then gets doubled and trebled by live callers to the show who talk about what happened to them, or the people who have come up to me and said “Yes that happened to me but know I don’t want to talk about it.” And of course we don’t want to talk about it because it is so widespread, and if we did then what, the ugly truth would be out. That our boyfriends, our husbands, our fathers could be rapist. And if you think the shit stops with the rape talk to someone who has tried to pursue resolution through the U.S.Justice System and they will tell you its a hell all of its own. So I am not surprised the jury went with the rapist, look at all of you trying to find an excuse for an abomination. We are the only animal on the planet that somehow has nurtured this crazy idea of trust. If you watch all other animals on the planet, they are every watchful because they recognize in the food chain they are prey for something. It is no different in the human species.
@Marissa:
I’m glad I didn’t read this at Jezebel then, because I did that. If I could deny it wasn’t rape, I didn’t have to feel like a victim. My first journal entry about being raped was two days later, and started “[Name] and I initiated each other into adulthood Sunday afternoon.”
I tried to pretty it up, because “I’d lost my virginity before I got married” — never mind I’d pulled away and said “no” …
[This comment interrupted by the author's inability to form words due to triggered PTSD symptoms and an explicable urge to kick someone specific repeatedly in the balls.]
I couldn’t fully admit that I’d been raped until almost 10 years later, after another emotionally abusive relationship left me empty.
1. Rape is rape is rape, no matter what you call it. If it’s rape at gunpoint, it’s rape AND assault with a deadly weapon. If it’s rape plus a beating, it’s rape AND battery.
2. They know it, but they don’t care. Their precious orgasm (which can happen outside a woman’s body!) is so much more important than their parter’s involvement/pleasure. If they don’t notice, they don’t care. If they do notice and think it’s normal, they’re P-fucked in the head. If they do notice and don’t think it’s normal and dont’ stop, they’re really sick fucks with no sense of human decency — where woman == human.
My money says at least some of those seven women have been raped and are still in denial about it. Considering the prevalence of rape/sexual abuse among women of my personal acquaintance, I’d say most of them, if they follow the same averages.
I have to go do something physical now. My God, how I hate him.