Freedom has a price that we all must pay together. It’s not going to happen if the stats used to combat rape culture are based on the harm done to marginalized women, but the beneficiaries of any advances are only those who have some measure of protection via white privilege. We know that trans women of color are especially vulnerable to violence; we know that whole communities of Indigenous women have nowhere to turn for safety. We know that danger comes from the very people who are supposed to be our protectors, whether that be the police or men in our communities. Rape culture is pandemic and must be fought unanimously or we will never defeat it.
We must look at the fact that even in emergency situations, white bystanders are less likely to help Black people than each other. We have to ask ourselves why the study “White Female Bystanders’ Responses to a Black Woman at Risk for Incapacitated Sexual Assault” shows that even young white women in college are less likely to help potential victims of assault if they are Black. We have to ask why white undergrads said to researchers that they would be less likely to help Black women because they felt less personal responsibility for them. Or why they perceived Black victims as experiencing more pleasure in situations that they recognized as dangerous for white women.
Although white women are aware that they are also at risk because their privilege doesn’t protect them from sexual violence, a combination of racism and sexism lends itself to a significant number of them ignoring the consequences of their actions for other communities. Whether it is contributing to hypersexualized narratives around women of color, ignoring the dangers faced by those communities, or undermining those who come forward, they sometimes flex what power they do have in ways that are oppressive while they continue to imagine themselves as victims with no power to oppress.
When you can’t count on solidarity for women in danger, when bystander intervention isn’t a solution because white female bystanders may feel that a Black woman’s plight doesn’t deserve their attention because race has a more powerful effect than gender, then we aren’t really battling rape culture. And the battle will continue to evade us until we fight the internalized -isms inherent in the movement.
When Lena Dunham felt the need to dispute the claims of actress Aurora Perrineau, a victim of sexual assault who happened to be Black, because the accused was her friend, it had everything to do with race, whether Dunham admits it or not. Perrineau had accused Murray Miller, an executive producer on Dunham’s Girls show, of having sexually assaulted her, and Dunham flew to the man’s defense, citing “insider knowledge” that rendered the claim false. A year later, Dunham was issuing an apology, one that tap-danced around the ease with which she seemed to offer support to everyone who was the “right” kind of victim, or more accurately, the “white” kind of victim, until she was challenged repeatedly. Most of the apology centers on herself, and even the part that specifically addresses Aurora Perrineau centers on Dunham and her own journey.
To Aurora: You have been on my mind and in my heart every day this year. I love you. I will always love you. I will always work to right that wrong. In that way, you have made me a better woman and a better feminist. You shouldn’t have been given that job in addition to your other burdens, but here we are, and here I am asking: How do we move forward? Not just you and I but all of us, living in the gray space between admission and vindication.
It’s painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what. Something in me still feels compelled to do that job: to please, to tidy up, to shopkeep. My job now is to excavate that part of myself and to create a new cavern inside me where a candle stays lit, always safely lit, and illuminates the wall behind it where these words are written: I see you, Aurora. I hear you, Aurora. I believe you, Aurora.
Public acts of racism appear bolder and more numerous in the Trump era, but it’s important to remember not only that they’re not new but also that the real harm is often done in private. When we ask why victims don’t report assault, why conviction rates are so low, and whose fault it is that rape culture persists, the answers are disheartening and interconnected. “They won’t get justice,” “We don’t care about protecting victims or punishing their attackers,” and “Everyone’s,” because ultimately it is all down to the insidious ways that rape culture is built and sustained in some of the same places, from homes to schools to churches, where it does the most harm.
And though I have largely focused on the objectifying narratives around the bodies of women of color and how mainstream feminism fails to engage them, I am in no way saying that sexual violence is only a concern of cis women. While cis women experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault, trans and gender-nonconforming people also face a heightened risk. And from a college campus to the military to a prison, no place is safe. Mingled among the victim-blaming tropes that position location as a factor for victimization is the reality that rapists attack in any environment where they think they can succeed.
And attempts to place bans on women in the military and trans women in bathrooms, or to assert that people who have been imprisoned deserve to be subjected to sexual violence, is just feeding into rape culture from different angles. Assertions that sex workers can’t be assaulted or that they exist as a release valve to prevent sexual violence are fundamentally rooted in narratives that render bodies disposable without interrogating how deep into rape culture these so-called feminist narratives have fallen.
We must remember that every victim of sexual violence does not deserve it, did not invite it, and is not responsible for the culture that would blame the victim instead of the perpetrators. We must understand that not only do we have a responsibility to not blame victims, but that we must actively work against cultural memes that render it acceptable to foster the hypersexualization of potential targets based on skin color, gender expression, or age.
I’m not raising any young girls, but I do have plenty of them in my life. As part of my commitment to changing the way that we talk about young women’s sexuality, rape culture, and gender, I’ve gone out of my way to teach my sons about consent. To talk to them about respect as well as the basic decency of not being a harasser. It’s a tiny step, certainly not a solution to the problem. But it is a place where I can begin to intervene on a personal level. More important, as a whole, feminism has to focus on change inside individual communities as well as across the world. We have to shift the focus on anti-rape narratives away from what victims can do to prevent it and toward teaching people not to be predators in the first place. We have to stop ignoring the cultural messages we are complicit in transmitting that say some people deserve to be sexually assaulted.
Feminism must challenge these narratives, or risk yet another generation being told that respectability can save them while they watch admitted harassers and assailants face no consequences for their crimes. The problem has never been the ways that victims don’t tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren’t seen as valuable enough to protect.