Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape Read Online Free

the ability to say yes when we want it, just like men, and should feel safe saying no—even if we’ve been drinking, even if we’ve slept with you before, even if we’re wearing tight jeans, even if we’re naked in bed with you. Anti-rape activists further understand that men need to feel empowered to say no also. If women have the ability to fully and freely say yes, and if we established a model of enthusiastic consent instead of just “no means no,” it would be a lot harder for men to get away with rape. It would be a lot harder to argue that there’s a “gray area.” It would be a lot harder to push the idea that “date rape” is less serious than “real” rape, that women who are assaulted by acquaintances were probably teases, that what is now called “date rape” used to just be called “seduction.”
     
    But building that model requires us to dismantle traditional notions of female sexuality and femininity itself. Doing that poses a direct threat to male power, and the female subordination it relies on.
     

A Culture of Fear
     
    So why do some conservative extremists—and even some regular folks—want to maintain a culture that enables and promotes rape? Quite simply, because women pose a threat to entrenched power structures, and the constant threat of rape keeps both men and women in line.
     
    The social construction of rape suffers from a marked disconnect from the reality of rape. Sexual assault is routinely depicted along the stranger-rape storyline, despite the fact that 73 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. 16 Further, rape victims are almost always depicted as female, despite the fact that one in thirty-three men will survive sexual assault. 17 Prison populations are especially at risk, and especially invisible—while statistics are hard to come by, conservative estimates suggest more than three-hundred thousand men are sexually assaulted behind bars every year. 18 Assaults on male inmates are seen as somehow not as wrong as the stranger-rape of women, perhaps because we have little sympathy for convicted criminals (a significant proportion of whom are not violent, thanks to punitive drug laws), or because men of color make up a disproportionate percentage of prison populations and the experiences of incarcerated brown and black men are generally deemed unimportant. Men, then—even men who are likely to be assaulted—are left out of the narrative of fear that women live. The one aspect of the rape narrative that actually reflects reality is the fact that 99 percent of rapes are perpetrated by men. 19
     
    Unlike other forms of assault or even murder, rape is both a crime and a tool of social control. The stranger-rape narrative is crucial in using the threat of sexual assault to keep women afraid, and to punish women who step out of the traditionally female private sphere and into the traditionally male-dominated public one. Portraying rape as something that happens outside of a woman’s home enforces the idea that women are safe in the domestic realm, and at risk if they go out.
     
    There exists a long history of conflating female exodus from the home with female sexual availability—for quite a long time, the “public woman” was a prostitute. The defining feature of the “common woman” sex worker was “not the exchange of money, not even multiple sexual partners, but the public and indiscriminate availability of a woman’s body.” 20 Public and outspoken women today are still routinely called “whores” as a way of discrediting them. Street harassment remains a widespread method of reminding women that they have less of a right to move through public space than men do. And rape serves as the ultimate punishment for women who move through public space without patriarchal covering.
     
    While the threat of rape has hardly kept women indoors, it does keep women fearful. If a woman is raped by a stranger, her decisions are immediately