Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (15 page)

“Fat is a risk factor,” argues one 30-something New York–based physician who is African American and also identifies as a Fat Admirer. “It’s also a proxy, but also an inaccurate proxy. Some people work out every day and are still fat; some people don’t work out at all and are fat; some people don’t work out at all and are skinny; some people work out a lot and are skinny. It’s very individual. You can’t be so declarative about it.”

“One statistic I’d really like to know is how many people have banged a fat person,” Dan Weiss says. “I’ve heard guys I know say, ‘I wanna see what it’s like to sleep with a five-hundred-pound woman.’ There has to be some idea that it might feel good, or that it could be interesting to say that. You’re not going to say, ‘I’m going to sleep with a porcupine just to see what it’s like.’ It’s not that I defend closet FAs, I’m just very interested in not dismissing them. Let’s say half or more than half of the FA population is dormant and nothing is being done for them.”

Dan likes to imagine a Guys Who Likes Fat Chicks census. “So many girls end up entering the community just because of one guy,” he says. “Just discovering, ‘Wow, I can be attractive!’ and having that change your life. It just never occurred to them before, which is so weird.” He pauses. “That’s why I’m willing to put my life—if you want to call it that—on the line for this.”

The Careless Language of Sexual Violence

Roxane Gay

There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale. I read an article in the
New York Times
about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped by 18 men in Cleveland, Texas. The levels of horror to this story are many, from the victim’s age to what is known about what happened to her, to the number of attackers, to the public response in that town, to how it is being reported. There is video of the attack, too, because this is the future. The unspeakable will be televised.

The
Times
article was titled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley, Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the 11-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a 20-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that 18 men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little of it addressed the girl, the child. It was an 11-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an 11-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. It is difficult for me to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that, and yet it isn’t.

We live in a culture that is very permissive where rape is concerned. While there are certainly many people who understand rape and the damage of rape, we also live in a time that necessitates the phrase “rape culture.” This phrase denotes a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable. As Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver ask in their book
Rape and Representation
, “How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their representations as to appear ‘natural’ and inevitable, to women as well as men? ” It is such an important question, trying to understand how we have come to this. We have also, perhaps, become immune to the horror of rape because we see it so often and discuss it so often, many times without acknowledging or considering the gravity of rape and its effects. We jokingly say things like, “I just took a rape shower,” or “My boss totally just raped me over my request for a raise.” We have appropriated the language of rape for all manner of violations, great and small. It is not a stretch to imagine why James McKinley, Jr. is more concerned about the 18 men than one girl.

The casual way in which we deal with rape may begin and end with television and movies where we are inundated with images of sexual and domestic violence. Can you think of a dramatic television series that has not incorporated some kind of rape story line? There was a time when these story lines had a certain educational element to them, à la “A Very Special Episode.” I remember, for example, the episode of
Beverly Hills 90210
where Kelly Taylor, surrounded tearfully by her closest friends, discussed being date-raped at a slumber party. For many young women, that episode created a space where they could have a conversation about rape as something that did not happen only with strangers. Later in the series, when the show was on its last legs, Kelly would be raped again, this time by a stranger. We watched the familiar trajectory of violation, trauma, disillusion, and finally vindication, seemingly forgetting that we had sort of seen this story before.

Half the movies aired on Lifetime or Lifetime Movie Network feature some kind of violence against women. The violence is graphic and gratuitous while still being strangely antiseptic: the actual act is more implied than shown. We consume these representations of violence eagerly. There is comfort, I suppose, in consuming violence in 90-minute segments, muted by commercials for household goods and communicated to us by former television stars with feathered bangs.

While rape as entertainment fodder may have included an element of the didactic at one time, such is no longer the case. Rape, these days, is good for ratings.
Private Practice
, a medical drama on ABC, recently aired a story arc where Dr. Charlotte King, iron-willed, independent, and sexually adventurous, was brutally raped. This happened, of course, just as February sweeps were beginning. The depiction of the assault was as graphic as you might expect from prime-time network television. For several episodes we saw the attack and its aftermath, how the once vibrant Charlotte became a shell of herself, how she became sexually frigid, how her body bore witness to the physical damage of rape. Another character on the show, Dr. Violet Turner, bravely confessed that she too had been raped. The show was widely applauded for its sensitive treatment of a difficult subject.

The soap opera
General Hospital
is currently airing a rape story line whose story arc peaked, yes, during sweeps. Like most soap operas,
General Hospital
incorporates a rape story line every five years or so when they need an uptick in viewers. Before the current rape, Emily Quartermaine was raped, and before Emily, Elizabeth Webber was raped, and long before Elizabeth Webber, Laura of Luke and Laura was raped by Luke but that rape was okay because Laura ended up marrying Luke so her rape doesn’t really count. Every woman,
General Hospital
wants us to believe, loves her rapist. The current rape story line has a twist. This time the victim is a man, Michael Corinthos, Jr., son of Port Charles mob boss Sonny Corinthos, himself no stranger to violence against women. While it is commendable to see the show’s producers trying to address the issue of male rape and prison rape, the subject matter is still handled carelessly, is still a source of titillation, and is still packaged neatly between commercials for cleaning products and baby diapers.

Of course, if we are going to talk about rape and how we are inundated by representations of rape and how, perhaps, we’ve become numb to rape, we have to discuss
Law & Order: SVU
, which deals, primarily, in sexual assault—all manner of sexual assault, against women, children, and once in a great while, men. Each week the violation is more elaborate, more lurid, more unspeakable. When the show first aired, Rosie O’Donnell objected quite vocally when one of the stars appeared on her show. O’Donnell said she didn’t understand why such a show was needed. People dismissed her objections and the incident was quickly forgotten. The series is in its 12th season and shows no signs of ending anytime soon. When O’Donnell objected to
SVU
’s premise, when she dared to suggest that perhaps a show dealing so explicitly with sexual assault was unnecessary, was too much, people treated her as if she was the crazy one, the prude censor. I watch
SVU
religiously, have actually seen every single episode. I am not sure what that says about me.

It is rather ironic that only a couple weeks ago the
Times
ran an editorial about the War on Women. This topic is, obviously, one that matters to me. I recently wrote an essay about how, as a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that to write is a political act—whether I intend it to be or not, because we live in a culture where McKinley’s article is permissible and publishable. I am troubled by how we have allowed intellectual distance between violence and the representation of violence. We talk about rape but we don’t talk about rape, not carefully.

We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the “newspaper of record” can write an article that comes off as sympathetic to 18 rapists while encouraging victim blaming. Have we forgotten what an 11-year-old is? An 11-year-old is very, very young, and that amplifies the atrocity, at least for me. I also think that people perhaps do not understand the trauma of gang rape. While there’s no benefit to creating a hierarchy of rape where one kind of rape is worse than another, because all rape is despicable, there is something particularly insidious about gang rape, about a pack of men feeding on each other’s frenzy, individually and collectively acting on a belief that it is their right to violate a woman’s body in such an unspeakable manner.

Gang rape is a difficult experience to survive physically and emotionally. There is the exposure to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, vaginal and anal tearing, fistulas and vaginal scar tissue. The reproductive system is often irreparably damaged. Victims of gang rape, in particular, have a higher chance of miscarrying a pregnancy. Psychologically, there are any number of effects including PTSD, anxiety, fear, coping with the social stigma, coping with shame, and on and on. The actual rape ends but the aftermath can reach very far and be even more devastating than the rape itself. We rarely discuss these things, though. Instead, we are careless. We allow ourselves to believe that rape can be washed away as neatly as it is on TV and in the movies, where the trajectory of victimhood is neatly defined.

What I know about gang rape is that the experience is wholly consuming and a never-ending nightmare. There is little point in pretending otherwise. Perhaps James McKinley, Jr. is, like so many people today, anesthetized or somehow willfully distanced from such brutal realities. Perhaps despite this inundation of rape imagery, our immersion in a rape culture, not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. Perhaps the right stories are not being told or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape. Perhaps we are writing too many stories about rape.

I approach this topic somewhat selfishly. I write about sexual violence a great deal in my fiction. I don’t believe the why of this writerly obsession matters, but still, people often want to know what drives me to write these dark stories over and over. The why seems plainly obvious. I am trying to rewrite my own, difficult history as much as I try to write my way toward understanding how these things can happen, why they happen, why nothing changes. Perhaps it is simply that writing is cheaper than therapy or drugs. When I read articles such as McKinley’s, I start to wonder about my responsibility as a writer. I’m just finishing my novel, the story of a brutal kidnapping in Haiti, part of which involves a gang rape. Having to write that kind of story requires going to a dark place. At times, I have made myself nauseous with what I’m writing and what I am capable of writing and imagining, my ability to go there.

As I write stories about sexual violence, I wonder if I am being gratuitous. I want to get it right. How do you get this sort of thing right? How do you write violence authentically without making it exploitative? There are times when I worry I am contributing to the kind of cultural numbness that would allow an article like the one in the
Times
to be written and published, that allows rape to be such rich fodder for popular culture and entertainment. No matter how hard we try, we cannot separate violence in fiction from violence in the world. As Laura Tanner notes in her book
Intimate Violence
, “The act of reading a representation of violence is defined by the reader’s suspension between the semiotic and the real, between a representation and the material dynamics of violence which it evokes, reflects, or transforms.” She continues, “The distance and detachment of a reader who must leave his or her body behind in order to enter imaginatively into the scene of violence make it possible for representations of violence to obscure the material dynamics of bodily violation, erasing not only the victim’s body but his or her pain.” The way we currently represent rape, in books, in newspapers, on television, on the silver screen, often allows us to ignore the material realities of rape, the impact of rape, the meaning of rape.

While I have these concerns, I also feel committed to telling the truth, to saying these violences happen even if bearing such witness contributes to a spectacle of sexual violence. When we’re talking about race or religion or politics, it is often said we need to speak carefully. With these difficult topics we need to be vigilant not only in what we say but how we express ourselves. That same care, I would suggest, has to be extended to how we write about violence, and sexual violence in particular.