This Kind of Storyline Needs to Go
“She didn’t like it at first, but then her body couldn’t help but respond.”
In the James Bond classic, Goldfinger, 007 wrestles with Pussy Galore in a hayloft, holding her down and kissing her while she tries to fight him off until at last, she realizes that she actually enjoys it and kisses him back willingly. This kind of scene, based in the ubiquitous rape culture of a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, has long been a part of popular media and it is still deeply ingrained in our cultural narratives today.
Somebody submitted a story to a publication I edit recently that had a similar narrative, and I’m surprised at how often I still run across it. Occasionally, women even write these kinds of storylines, because they’ve been presented to us all for so long as an archetype of male sexiness — that if a dashing man presses his attentions on a woman, she will eventually begin to like it, even if she doesn’t at first. This is a problem and because I don’t want to keep perpetuating this rapey narrative, I declined to publish the story.
Of course, many men realize that, and would never consider forcing themselves on a woman, but for too many guys, it is something that they do seem to believe, based on their actions. Approximately 25% of male college students self-report engaging in some form of sexual coercion by the end of their fourth year of college and even guys who self-report an understanding of active consent and Yes-Means-Yes also often describe sexual encounters that meet the legal definition of sexual assault.
Date rape is the most common form and one in six women will be raped. For most of them, there is no weapon, or violence, although sometimes there is. But for the most part, date rape looks like the scene from Goldfinger, except for the fact that the woman never enjoys it. Not taking No for an answer is not sexy. In fact, it’s dehumanizing, although due in part to some of this media-driven narrative, a lot of women haven’t been consciously aware of how much they have tolerated in the past until recently, because they’ve been repeatedly told this is just how people behave.
Yael Wolfe has written extensively about not truly understanding all of the ways that she had been violated by men who claimed to care for her until the #MeToo movement. She’d been raised to believe that she just had to accept what men wanted to do to her, and so for the most part, she did.
In fact, my dad, who was raised deeply entrenched in the values of the patriarchy, told me that I had to learn to “put up” with what men wanted to do to me. That I should be careful, because if I wore certain clothing or said certain things, a man would expect me to put out — and I would have to, whether or not I wanted to.
I Didn’t Understand Consent Within a Relationship Until #MeToo
In a related concern, she details some very clear examples of how the culture of “you know you want it” dismisses body autonomy for women. Yael describes how a former partner sexually assaulted her and laughed about it as if it were a game because according to the James Bond school of dealing with reluctant women, it was.
I can remember one distinct encounter with my last partner in which he tackled me to the floor after I said no. He kissed me while I was pushing at him — I was so angry that he was trying to overpower me after we had been fighting for weeks about several instances of dishonesty on his part (that later revealed an ongoing infidelity). My trust was broken and I wasn’t feeling safe enough to be intimate, but he acted like it was a game, saying, “You know you want this; you know you’ve missed this,” and laughing in an attempt to distract me from the obvious violation of his aggression.
To this day, it angers me that I didn’t make a bigger fuss. I shouldn’t have had to, but I wish I had known I deserved the right to scream my no, to make him hear it.
He had complete disregard for her body autonomy — something which is not so much about the unwanted touching itself, but what it communicates to the person being touched about their right to control their own personal space and what happens to their body. It was saying to her, “I control you.” The purpose of all rape, sexual assault, and unwanted touch of any kind is to convey to someone else (even if it’s subconsciously) that their body does not belong to them. It’s an act of exerting domination.
Many women find the idea of being sexually over-powered very arousing, and it is a common fantasy, but the difference between fantasy and reality is that in the world of fantasy, the woman has already given consent because it’s taking place within her own head, or she’s already told her partner that she’d like to have him do that. She’s imagining someone so overcome with desire for her that he can’t control himself, and that is sexy when it’s what the woman wants. The organizing principle of female sexuality is the desire to be desired, but she only wants that from someone that she’s given permission to do it and at the time when she is receptive to it. Being forced to have intimate contact of any kind with someone else against your will is rape. It doesn’t matter if you had consensual sex with him 10 minutes before.
Continuing to create storylines for books, movies, and other media that portray this bulldozing of a woman’s boundaries as what she actually wants is very irresponsible and dangerous. It’s sending the wrong message all around. No means No and that needs to be respected. Depicting it as masculine and suave to transgress a woman’s boundaries until she realizes that she actually enjoys it is not only a horrible lie, but it perpetuates rape culture.
Sometimes a rape victim will have an orgasm as they are being violated. This doesn’t mean that they actually enjoyed what happened to them. A physical response is not tacit consent or a subliminal desire to have your body autonomy disregarded, and we need to stop putting that out into the world as if it were. We are highly influenced by what we see represented in the media. TV advertising alone is a multi-billion dollar business because conscious thought makes up only 2% of our thinking. The rest comes from what we store in our unconscious mind that we’ve picked up from just this type of pervasive cultural messaging.
Romance often involves a bit of pursuit — someone has to make a move, after all. And there’s certainly a spectrum of pursuit: Sometimes supposedly romantic gestures in pop culture veer toward the horrendous or illegal; sometimes they’re just a bit creepy or overzealous. But revisiting some of these fictional love stories can leave one with the understanding that intrusive attention is proof of men’s passion, and something women should welcome. In a number of cases, male characters who were acknowledged to have gone too far — by, for example, actually forcing themselves on women — were quickly forgiven, or their actions compartmentalized and forgotten.
This type of messaging teaches a woman that she should be flattered when a man won’t take no for an answer, but as Yael described, that isn’t how it feels to be forced into sexual acts, even with someone that you care deeply about. Marital rape wasn’t a crime in all 50 US states until 1993. Before that time, it was just assumed that a wife’s body belonged to her husband. He could access it any time he wanted to, with or without her consent.
The belief that underlies that is that women are on earth for the pleasure and enjoyment of men. Making the men around them happy is what makes a “good woman” feel good. Whether he pins her in the hayloft or grabs her crotch in a crowded bar, the woman is supposed to be receptive to that, because it’s what the man desires. She demonstrates her receptivity by getting turned on by his appropriation of her body for his own uses.
But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it ever works.
And it’s high time that we stop portraying that it is. Most girls start getting sexually harassed beginning at the age of 10 or 11, often from adult males, but also from boys their own age. Their bodies are commented upon, touched without consent, and leered at, and this continues for the next 20 or 30 years, and sometimes even beyond. It teaches girls from a young age that their bodies do not belong to them — they belong to the males in their vicinity. Reinforcing that in the media is both disgusting and unacceptable and it’s time for those kinds of storylines to go. You know what’s sexy AF? Respect!
