THE WAR ON RAPE BEGINS WITH US

BREAKING THE SILENCE AND USING OUR ENERGY

IN THE DIRECTION OF TRUTH AND LOVE FOR OURSELVES

 

by Janet Cheatham Bell

The night after I read "Reframing the Victim," an article in the September 13, 2015 New York Times Magazine, I woke suddenly from a sound sleep with the realization that I had been raped.

For years I had been smug about the fact that, although a couple of guys had tried to force me to have sex while we were on a date, I had successfully fought them off. I was also proud that one night when I was visiting another country, a man who lived there and whom I barely knew, maneuvered himself into giving me a ride, without my traveling companions, back to where we were staying. On the way he got "lost," which meant we "had to spend the night in a hotel." I was a woman in my thirties so I knew what his end game was. Whether he sought to seduce me, or intended to use force, I was ready when he approached me. I lied that I had a really nasty American venereal disease that I didn't want to spread in his country. He  backed away immediately and didn't try to touch me again. The next morning he drove quickly and directly to where my friends were waiting.

When I was reunited with them, they asked, "How did you get out of that?" My two friends and I were women who had learned not only to take care of ourselves, but also to make our own way in a world that overwhelmingly advantaged men. A world where we expected most men to make some attempt--whether feeble or forceful--to have sex with us, no matter whether we had known them for years or minutes. 

Counting these victories as part of my experiences, I was rather pleased with myself for not ever having been through the horror of rape. Reading that article, however, unlocked a carefully hidden memory. It wasn't really that I had forgotten the rape, I had simply refused to acknowledge or speak of it. Being a "rape victim" did not fit my image. 

Once I came of age, and by that I mean, once I figured out that I was capable of shaping my own life, I have preferred to see and present myself as a person with personal power. This was a departure from the first 25 years or so of my life when I believed I had no ability to determine how I lived. I liberated myself by deciding what other people expected of me was not how I had to be. 


In my childhood I was being prepared for a lifestyle dictated by my race and gender. Making this matter worse, I grew up at a time when sexuality and sensuality were only vaguely alluded to and never spoken of openly. Even married couples could not be shown in bed together on television because that could imply intimacy or sexual activity. I was told not to touch my own genitals, called "private parts." When I began menstruating this rule was suddenly and uncomfortably reversed. A new rule was introduced to never "fool around with boys." Whatever that meant. 

Eventually, my hormones demanded that I "fool around with boys" and, unsurprisingly in my ignorance, I got pregnant. I barely had any idea how women conceived, and knew absolutely nothing about contraception; not sure I'd ever heard the word. (This was before The Pill.) I was certain about one thing, however; I wasn't ready to be a mom. A couple of friends had already become parents and their lives had no appeal for me. (This story is covered in detail in "Choosing a Life in the Dark Age" an essay in my collection, Not All Poor People Are Black.) 

This was long before Roe v. Wade, so my abortion was illegal. Our family doctor, who confirmed that I was indeed pregnant, helpfully gave me the name of a competent abortionist and promised to take care of me afterward to be sure it went well. He even made a house call a few days after the abortion was completed. After I had healed, I went to him for a final exam. When he finished the vaginal exam and while I was still on the examining table with my feet up in stirrups, he raped me. Without a word, he slid his penis inside me. I couldn't believe it! What in the world was going on? I was all but naked, legs spread wide and the man who had been my family's physician for years was sticking his penis in me. 

I didn't know what to do; but, like so many women, I decided it was somehow my fault. It was because I was now a "fallen woman" that he felt free to stick his penis in me. I thought: if I hadn't had an abortion, he wouldn't have dared do this. I was so confused and ashamed for bringing this on myself that I started crying. He seemed surprised and asked why I was crying. I didn't have words to respond. I knew what he was doing was wrong, but I didn't try to get up or tell him to stop. Who was I to defy our doctor!?

Either my tears unnerved him or he had finished what he set out to do, because he stopped, told me to get dressed, and left the room.

When this memory came rushing into my consciousness, I was furious, livid! I wanted to confront him and backhand his face as hard as I could! My fury was thwarted because I couldn't find him on Google. (He's probably dead because he raped me nearly 60 years ago, and he was probably 20 years older than I was at the time.)

When he raped me, I felt helpless because I had surrendered to the belief that women had no strength. That I lived at the mercy of those who were in charge. I also knew that in American society physicians were/are considered to have unquestioned knowledge and power, especially over our bodies. I accepted the rape as my shame and did the only reasonable thing: shoved that shame into the box of sexual-things-that-are-never-to-be-mentioned, along with my abortion, and buried it as deeply as I could.


Several years later, after receiving my degree and a divorce the same month, I began to reinvent myself by doing what I wanted. I determined not to allow anyone else to define, limit or take advantage of me. I would decide who I was and what I wanted to do. In other words, I began to "use my energy in the direction of truth and love for myself."

I have learned much during this process of self-discovery that continues to this day, some fifty years later. My most important lesson is that each one of us has to claim her/his own power.


Encouraging women to believe they have no ability or responsibility to make their own choices leads to demands for policies that say if two drunk college students have sexual intercourse, the male student is guilty of rape because the female doesn't have the capacity to give consent. How does this policy work if both drunk students are the same gender? Or what if one student was a transgendered woman who had formerly been a man? Would she still be considered incapable of taking responsibility for herself? 

Fortunately, there is a bright light at the end of this very long tunnel of society's approval/denial of our rape culture. The tacit support of "boys will be boys" and the blaming of women for "enticing" boys by universities and colleges are finally coming to an end. Why? Because young women have ended their silence and are using their power in the direction of truth and love for themselves. To see how, view It Happened Here, a new documentary about rape on college campuses.The war is on!

NEXT TIME: More Sex Talk

THE BIG WHITE LIE*

This has never been a "white" country

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me

 

I’ve been exposed to America’s racial paradigm for three-quarters of a century; what I write here is based on what I’ve lived and what I’ve learned from reading history in works other than official classroom texts. As the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion explains, “Race has no genetic basis.” Instead, it “is a powerful social idea that gives people different access to opportunities and resources.” However, scientific data means nothing in the presence of this powerful social imperative.

The murders of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown are high-profile examples of how racism permeates American society. These murders rekindle the fear that I, and most parents of black male children, live with daily. We know that at any moment some person (police officer, random gun-toter) could see your child’s black maleness as a threat that has to be eradicated. And numerous precedents have taught these would-be “guardians” they will not be punished for these murders. These cases remind us yet again that some things haven’t changed in the last 150 years. In 1857 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks “have no rights which the white man is bound to respect . . . .”

It has been dismaying, although not surprising, to see racism’s ugly head spinning wildly after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Having our first black president seems to have unhinged a sizable number of Americans, most visibly those in the Tea/Republican Party, but thankfully they are not the majority. These people are outraged at having a black man in the White House and, in addition to insulting the president in every possible way they can think of, they are passing and pushing for laws to take us back in time, to their “glory” days. Apparently they’re longing for the time when people who were not white and male couldn’t vote, let alone run for president. To achieve that end they are erecting new barriers to the right to vote, especially for black and brown folks. This is one step back to the days they long for when only propertied white males had voting rights. 

For these disturbed Americans, President Obama’s election has concretized the warning that Patrick Buchanan has been issuing for years, most specifically in his book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. “Third world” is his euphemism for people who are not white. That title, and the mythology of a white America that so many want to return to, represent the Big White Lie. 

THE ONLY INVASION

The only “invasion” of America has been by whites—people who looked like Buchanan. This has never been a white country. There were no whites (i.e., Europeans) here when the first immigrants showed up uninvited, but were welcomed. Then these immigrant Europeans utilized their more efficient weaponry to invade and occupy the land, systematically displacing or killing the indigenous people. They succeeded in taking control, but the original inhabitants they dubbed “Indians” survive and continue to have a presence, however marginalized, in their ancestral homeland.

Europeans had been engaged in the capture and sale of Africans for more than a century when they “discovered” the New World. So it was a no-brainer in 1619 to bring Africans across the Atlantic to do the back-breaking work of developing "their" new country and making the most of the land’s resources. Europeans held the reins of power, but the country was not “white” because the original inhabitants were still present, and the number of Africans was rapidly increasing, especially in the South, where much of the slave labor was concentrated. In what was to become the United States, immigrants from Europe gradually set aside their disdain for each other—muting regional prejudices and national differences—to become “white”and thereby establish a cohesive group superiority over the “nonwhites” in their midst. The population of “colored” people expanded exponentially as white males took advantage of their power to rape the “inferior” women. The offspring of these legitimate rapes further diminished the percentage of whites. 

In 1848 the Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo placed a significant portion of Mexico (including what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado and Texas) and Mexicans within the United States, increasing the number of “colored” citizens in America yet again. 

The suffusion continued with the importation of Chinese laborers to build the Transcontinental Railroad completed in 1869. Then the U.S. acquired Puerto Rico (there are more Puerto Ricans in this country than in Puerto Rico) the Philippines, and Guam after defeating Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War. 

American imperialism brought along other “nonwhite territories” like Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Alaska and Hawaii, the latter two admitted as the 49th and 50th states in 1959. The “nonwhite” people living in these territories are all Americans, although they are not allowed to vote in national elections, or the U.S. Congress. (Washington, DC occupies the same dubious distinction, except they can now vote for the POTUS.) U. S. military incursions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have spurred refugees and immigrants from these non-European areas to settle here and more are coming. The term “nonwhite” is itself the perfect indicator of the assumed supremacy of whiteness. 

Now that the national stew is nicely spiced and these people of color are exercising power, a number of whites are hysterically digging in their heels in a desire to “take their country back.” Fear of becoming a “minority” in “their” country is what built the fence on the Mexican border, toughened immigration restrictions, and increased deportations. 

Their rage for more prisons had long been fueled by a desire to re-enslave blacks—African- and Hispanic-Americans make up approximately 25 percent of the nation’s population, yet they constitute more than half of those incarcerated in the country’s prisons. Now, however, the hungry and rapacious privatized prison industry is gobbling up poor whites as well. (In 1998 an Atlantic article stated, “The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China.” And the numbers have increased since that article was written.)

What these frightened folk don’t realize is that their hysteria is much too late. Dragging their heels will only create deep ruts. It’s inevitable, people of color will be the majority, and soon. Not because of any “invasion” as Buchanan and others want us to believe. Rather, this demographic shift is a result of long-standing official U.S. policies and imperialist practices that created a racial paradigm in the United States dating back to the first European immigrants. 

Award-winning writer John Edgar Wideman described a racial paradigm as “a vision of humankind and society based on the premise that not all people are created equal and some are born with the right to exploit others.” And this is how it operates in this country that purports to be a democracy.

With the media’s constant barrage of statistics, African Americans are not allowed to forget that we are regarded as not measuring up to the white standard. That makes it easier for officials and others to see African Americans as disposable. For many years we were the defective ethnic group, but as their numbers increase, the alarmists are now focusing on Hispanic Americans. Since 2001, people from the Middle East, or those who look like they could be from that area, have been added to the list of suspects. 

Racism is integral to who Americans are, to what the U. S. has been since its inception and still is. Yet, only in recent months have some tentatively acknowledged its existence, while most are still in denial. What is never mentioned, or hardly even alluded to, is that despite their status as the standard to which everyone else is compared, some whites feel the full measure of their inadequacies until reminded that at least they are not black/Hispanic/foreign, at which time they can swell with pride. 

Many government officials, political leaders, media, pundits and others continue to invoke the Big White Lie because that lie helps them maintain control over those who have no power aside from what their skin color supposedly confers. 

*adapted from the essay of the same title in the collection, Not All Poor People Are Black and Other Things We Need to Think More About.

No Visible Gray Hair

"There is no visible gray hair on the heads of any of the 16 female United States senators, ages 46 to 74.”

I watched Book TV today and learned about a book I hadn't heard of, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law by Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University. Rhode says, "Cosmetic surgery has quadrupled over the last decade. Women still wear stiletto heels that ruin their feet and backs and buy any wrinkle-smoothing cream for any price."

I have long thought that once women achieved a measure of freedom from having their movements and finances completely controlled by men, the new method of control became fashion and makeup. Susan Faludi writes about this in detail in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women published in 1991. This latest method of control makes women lack confidence in the way they look and fear censure if they don't dress in the latest fashions. This is more treacherous than earlier control mechanisms because it comes in the guise of "making you feel better about yourself." It is also insidious because women themselves are major proponents of the "beauty rules," often policing one another.

I am old enough to remember when most "decent" women did not wear makeup. Red lipstick on the mouth and rouge on the cheeks were the calling card of prostitutes. Blood engorged lips and cheeks are a signal of sexual arousal, so it made sense for women selling sex to imitate arousal as a way of enticing customers. I also remember when stiletto heels were the reserve of pornographic magazines.

Now, of course, both these indicators of  sexuality are de rigueur for any fashionable woman, no matter her age. Most women, including those elected to high national office, feel bound by these requirements of "femininity."

Fortunately, this demand that women look and dress within these confines is not legally binding so one woman at a time, we have the option of releasing ourselves from this tyranny.

LEGITMATE RAPE

Last night's episode of Totally Biased with (my son) W. Kamau Bell, opened with a wry comment on Todd Akin's faux paus about the inability of women to get  pregnant when they are "legitimately raped." Bell said if that were true, "Why are there so many light-skinned folk in Alabama?" And he could have added, "Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, the U.S. of A."

Then it hit me: RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE DURING SLAVERY! That's why we have such a large number of light-skinned folk in this country. In order to increase the number of slaves, and his net worth, the progeny born of the white master's  rape of an enslaved woman, was always black, another slave, never counted as white or bi-racial. THIS RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE! 

There wasn't a court in the country that would have prosecuted any white man for forcing any woman to have sex. The custom (and it may as well have been the law) was that white men could do as they pleased with any woman—black, white, married, or single. With a powerful white male protector some women were immune from being considered fair game, but any black man who objected to the exploitation or abuse of a woman could be killed with impunity. RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE!

W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, historian, and activist who was a founder of the NAACP put it this way. “To the ordinary American or Englishman, the race question at bottom is simply a matter of ownership of women; white men want the right to use all women, colored and white.” 

The ownership of women. This is what the Republican War on Women is all about: returning to the days when powerful men could do as they wished with women; to the days when RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE. Todd Akin's casual remark merely referred to what they've been doing for some time now with their attacks on Planned Parenthood, trying to criminalize abortion, forcing pregnant women to have unnecessary procedures. Todd Akin did not step out of line; he merely reiterated Republican policy. This is nothing new. It's a significant plank in their platform for the 2012 election. Todd Akin simply made it crystal clear that the Republicans want to return to the days when RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE.