MeToo. Meenakshi Gigi Durham
must be corroborated by evidence of resistance on the part of the female victim. This myth places responsibility for rape on the victim and eliminates the possibility of marital rape, rape by an acquaintance, same-sex rape, male rape, or rape of trans people; it also misses sexual violence that does not involve heterosexual intercourse. Although the US Department of Justice currently has a much more expansive and reasonable legal definition of rape,13 this myth is still culturally prevalent in the United States and in many other societies.
Other rape myths refer specifically to racial and class stereotypes: “the placid Indian ‘squaw’ who readily gives her sexual favors, the passionate Black or mulatto woman who is always ready and sexually insatiable, the volatile Mexican woman who is fiery eyed and hot blooded, and the languid, opium-drowsed Asian woman whose only occupation is sex.”14 Racialized rape myths also specify what counts as a “credible” survivor and as a “credible” account of rape. In recent research, factors such as the race, class, gender, and sexual orientation of victims and perpetrators are found to play a significant role in the treatment of victims by the police, as well as in prosecutors’ decisions as to whether to accept a case.15 The ways in which race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability are used to discredit and trivialize sexual violence survivors leaves some of them with fewer legal protections than others and inhibits the reporting of sexual violence.
The silencing of sexual violence survivors as a result of the influence of rape myths is one of the most serious consequences of rape culture. Sexual assault survivors are reluctant to report for a range of reasons, many of which are related to fears created by rape myths. It is telling that such fears are reflected in studies across a wide range of countries and cultures, races and identities. Worldwide, a pitifully small percentage of sexual assaults are reported to the police or other authorities: the estimates of reported cases of sexual violence range from 5 to 25 percent of the number of actual cases.16 Even for rich and famous white women in the global North, a culture of silence allowed multiple incidents of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment to continue unchecked for decades in some of the world’s wealthiest corporations.
In the chapters that follow I will trace the specific strategies and structures of rape culture that harbored and hid sexual predation in the media industries, silencing the capacity of survivors to disclose their assaults. Delving into these processes requires a multifaceted analysis of the media environment: the workplace conditions that condone and conceal sexual violence, but also the mediated representations and images through which rape culture is circulated and interpreted and the ways in which the media—especially social media—have become a catalyst for silence breaking and for feminist activism against rape culture.
To think about media culture in this way frames it as a social apparatus in the sense defined by Michel Foucault: as an assemblage of interconnected images, discourses, laws, policies, philosophies, and other forms of social knowledge that operate strategically in the service of power.17 Sexuality is, for Foucault, “a domain saturated with power,”18 constructed through mechanisms such as religion, law, or the media, all of which claim to offer the “truth” about sex and thereby exert control over its meaning. The media are saturated with sex, as well as with sexual violence. In this book I explore how the media environment serves as a prime conduit for both silencing and silence breaking around rape culture.
Understanding the media environment involves paying close attention “to the production of culture, to the [media] texts themselves, and to their reception by the audience.”19 In conformity with this logic, the present book is divided into three chapters that address different facets of rape culture in the media, especially in terms of silencing and silence breaking. My starting point in chapter 1 is US media corporations, as these were the epicenter of the revelations that fueled the global spread of #MeToo and the current engagements with rape culture. Scrutinizing the media corporations in which rape culture ran rampant yet was deliberately hidden from view provides insight into the institutional framework of sexual predation at work. To say this is not to presume, blithely, that the way things happened at Fox News or in the Weinstein Company can be mapped directly onto a meatpacking plant in Iowa or a casino in Macao, even though those workplaces are just as likely to abet sexual violence. Plainly, that would be too easy a leap. But there is also evidence, given the rise of #MeToo/MeToo movements globally, that the sexual predation exposed in Hollywood and New York bridged systems and structures of workplaces in the United States and around the world. Sandra Pezqueda, a working-class Latina woman, observed in TIME magazine: “Someone who is in the limelight is able to speak out more easily than people who are poor. The reality of being a woman is the same—the difference is the risk each woman must take.”20 Those differential risks are, of course, significant; the life consequences—financial, familial, physical—are much greater and potentially more calamitous for poor women, women of color, lesbian women, transwomen.
This is even more alarming in light of the uptake of rape culture and endorsement of sexual violence, particularly against women, at the highest levels of political power, in parallel with the global rise of despotic populism.
The second chapter shifts the focus from organizational structures to media content, examining how rape culture has been systemically incorporated, resisted, and reinforced through representations, from pornography and sexual cybercrimes to news reporting. Some of these representations preceded and gave rise to the MeToo moment, some coincided with it and energized it, and some unfolded after #MeToo made its mark; some functioned to reassert silencing strategies, while some reinforced the structures that consolidate rape culture. My analyses center on forms of media that have had a global impact, from revenge porn to the work of the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team.
The third chapter takes up the backlash against MeToo/#MeToo that has arisen after the hashtag went viral and runs from accusations of a “witch hunt” to intersectional critiques that challenge the movement’s whiteness and its links to criminal justice systems that oppress marginalized and minoritized communities. These provocations and perceptions are important to the evolution and constant metamorphosis of MeToo and to the breaking of silences around rape culture.
The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire writes of a “culture of silence” in situations of domination, where subordinate groups are rendered mute by those in power. Breaking this enforced and subjugating silence will, he believes, create the conditions for the oppressed to enter into dialogue with the oppressors, so that together they may create a vision for collective social change.21
#MeToo/MeToo called out the “culture of silence” that rape culture has imposed for centuries on sexual violence survivors. The silence has been broken. For all the ambivalences, tensions, and confrontations of the “MeToo moment,” by breaking the silence, we are beginning to see our way toward transforming a rape culture.
Notes on Terminology
The MeToo/#MeToo movement’s core concern is for survivors of sexual abuse, assault, and harassment, in the workplace as well as in other spaces and places. The term “survivor” has largely displaced “victim” in feminist writings on sexual assault; this is a consequence of the feminist conviction that those who experience sexual violence are never responsible for its occurrence. The sociologist Liz Kelly argued for the need to shift “the emphasis from viewing victims as passive victims of sexual violence to seeing them as active survivors.”22 While I concur completely with this view and support attributing to survivors of sexual abuse the overtones of courage, self-determination, and strength that attend the term “survivor,” I find power in the term “victim” as well: the fact of victimization calls out the reality of a perpetrator, an assailant who deliberately sexually violated and harmed another being. “Survivor” seems to move past the harm done by the assault; “victim” re-centers it. In addition, not all people who are sexually attacked survive. In this book, while I use the term “survivor” most of the time, I use the word “victim” as well, not with a pejorative sense but to honor the fact that sexual violence