I was raised by good, liberal parents (on the subject of race relations, at least), who intentionally raised me in a diverse neighborhood. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Coleman, was passionate on the subject of black history: it wasn't just a month in her class, and Martin Luther King Day (Doctor Martin Luther King, she would emphasize) was a high point of the year, prepared for in the way that, in other years, we would prepare for Christmas pageants. But I came out of it (understandably) with a first-grader's comprehension of what had happened: black people used to have to sit in different seats on the bus and so on, but then a bunch of great black people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman came along (I didn't have a firm grasp on the chronology) and showed everybody that they were wrong and black people could sit anywhere they wanted. The End.
And that was where things were for me, for a long time. Sure, in an intellectual sense, I realized that (for example) separate water fountains were mainly a symbol of a problem rather than the problem itself. But it's only in the last few years, (in which Obama was elected, and I moved to Oakland, among other things), that I've started to move deeper on a gut level, and come to get some sense of the true, dystopian horror that was the American South between Reconstruction and Civil Rights. (N.B. Obviously, things were worse prior to The Civil War, things are still a long way from perfect, and race relations in the North had and have their own special brand of poison to them. But that is another story, and shall be told another time.) But I think it was reading this article that first truly opened my eyes to the insight that for 100 years, in a large portion of this country: any white person had the right to sentence any black man to death. At any moment, any white person could accuse any black man of, basically, looking at a white woman, and said accusation would comprise sufficient evidence to empower his neighbors to lay hands on that man and kill him, without argument or appeal. And while lynching was (to the best of my extremely limited knowledge) largely confined to the old Confederacy, the national government was quite happy to aid and abet the practice (fun fact! Albert Einstein was branded a "Communist sympathizer" by J. Edgar Hoover for signing onto an anti-lynching organization).
Now, as a white man (a good, liberal white man, he thinks to himself), that can be tough to get your head around. But the funny thing is, in a way, this dystopia that so many Americans lived through, for so many generations, is the precise phantom that motivated the Reagan-led "tough on crime" era that overshadows our domestic politics to this day. The fear that led to the disparity in crack cocaine sentences, "three strikes" laws, "Stand Your Ground" doctrines, and all the rest, the fear that I imbibed with everyone else of my generation (though again, I thank my family for shielding me from the worst of it), was simply the fear that any white person, ever, could find themselves in the same position that all black men were in for 200 years of our history, including 100 after we had promised them equality. An urban nightmare where young black men wander freely, killing white men at will and with impunity, for no other crime than being "in the wrong part of town." A fear that a white person, minding his own business, could suddenly be interrogated, judged, and executed regarding a crime he knew nothing of, with no lawyer and indeed no law. A fear, quite simply, of being Chad's Dad in Mad Real World.
WGN America is trying to get in on the scripted series game. Their first outing is called Salem, and whether you've heard of it or not (I've never seen any of it and don't particularly intend to), I assume you already know what it's about: witches. Which at first glance seems obvious, but on further reflection, starts to seem insane. Because here is by far the most important fact about the Salem witch trials: none of them were witches. Which seems like a banal point, but I hope that the context in which I'm describing this has made you think twice about it. I'm sure that nobody involved in the creation of this series did think twice about it, and were merely interested in telling a supernatural scripted drama that would attract various demographics, which is of course their job. But when it comes down to it, what's the difference between telling a story about Salem centered around witchcraft, and telling a story about 1950's Mississippi centered around a gang of black rapists? That would be offensive, right? Wouldn't it?
A question that you'll see tossed around now and then is: what is the slavery of today? Meaning: you look at America circa 1800, and see that slavery was pretty much a second-order issue to most people. It was hardly universally supported, but it was broadly understood to be just one of those things people argue about, and not the monstrosity that we see it as today. And so it seems reasonable to assume that, in 2200, people will see something in our society as monstrous to them as slavery seems to us. So what might that be? (The conservative answer, and the one I was raised with, is abortion, but that is another story, and shall be told another time.) I remember seeing a liberal blogger, whom I basically respect, bring up that question, and suggest that the answer might be: driving cars. That is, in a future where all cars drive themselves, and there are essentially zero auto accidents, people will wonder how we could have allowed virtually anyone to pilot gigantic chunks of steel at high speeds, causing so many deaths that they became a routine element of the daily news. And yes, I imagine that will blow people's minds in the future, just as the separate water fountains blew my mind as a first-grader. But, gosh, that sure seems like a cop-out answer. It would be nice if the great moral wrong of our time was really just a technological shortcoming. But I'm pretty sure that's not it.
My answer to the question is, as you might have guessed by now: rape culture. Now, that term doesn't have as much traction as I feel like it should. It seems to come across as jargony, as fabricated, as trivial. That's partly, I think, just due to the simple linguistic coincidence that associates "rape culture" with "pop culture" in people's minds. Pop culture is big these days, and discussion around it is generally jargony, and pop culture itself is definitionally at least somewhat fabricated and trivial. That's the whole reason people love to discuss it, because one can disagree over pop culture without passing moral judgement.
And the relationship between pop and rape culture goes beyond the linguistic. Because pop culture discussion is the dominant forum of the present time, those who wish to discuss rape culture almost have no choice but to discuss it in the sphere of pop culture (Game Of Thrones being a recent example). And they should; rape culture permeates television like lynching culture permeated cinema, and witch-burning culture permeated sermons. But introducing the concept of rape culture into a discussion of pop culture invokes divergent reactions: it is trivialized by its association with pop culture, while simultaneously demonized for its intrusion into pop culture. Exploration of rape culture implies the very moral judgment that exploration of pop culture exists to avoid. So the many people who have resorted to pop culture discussion to avoid confronting the moral conundrums that are part of the human experience will always be wary of those who discuss pop culture precisely to shed light on those conundrums. Rape culture is particularly dangerous to them, as it threatens to expose the privilege they want to use without ever acknowledging. Bringing up rape culture in a Breaking Bad discussion board is like bringing up gravity to Wile E. Coyote as he stands in midair over a canyon.
But the main thing I want to say about rape culture is that it isn't really about rape, in the same way that the Civil Rights movement wasn't really about lynching. The harm done to black people in this country wasn't primarily the lynchings themselves (after all, only a very small percentage of them were actually lynched). The problem is the environment they created. The problem was the death warrant that every white person carried with them at all times, whether or not they ever used it, and the daily, hourly fear that must have inspired in all black men, regardless of whether they themselves ever encountered any violence. And the fact is, for most of human existence, every man has carried that same death warrant in their pockets for any woman (at least of their own race). You'll note that my discussion of lynching specified black men. But black women weren't generally targeted by lynching, because it was rightly assumed that black men would voluntarily enforce, with violence, black women's adherence to societal expectations (a practice which was celebrated in Jimi Hendrix's first single, Hey Joe, to name one example).
And the fact is, right now, today, every man is born with a rape card in his pocket. 97% of rapists never spend a day in jail. And whether or not you knew that statistic, you can feel its truth. You know at least one person, probably several, who have been on one side or the other of a rape that was never reported, and for that matter may never have been referred to as "rape" by anyone involved. But everyone knows what it was, and we therefore also know that if a man wants to rape someone, he just needs to pick the right victim, time, and place, and he's no more likely to get convicted than a redneck accusing a black man of whistling at his daughter in 1920s Florida.
And as difficult a thing as that might be for me to know as a man, it's important that I remember how much worse it would be to know that as a woman. Men all do know it, of course. For one thing, it is an inextricable part of our national psychodrama surrounding prison. Our refusal to address (indeed our virtual celebration of) the problem of rape in prison is almost certainly a sublimated expression of our collective guilt over rape culture, a way we promise at least some of us the poetic justice we fear all of us deserve. That at least some white men (as a punishment) must spend a part of their lives with the same fear we subject all our women to, the fear that our very bodies may be taken from ourselves without warning, and used for others' desires.
So it's not about rape, is my point. Every woman that has ever felt unable to go to a party by herself is a victim of rape culture. (And of course, every culture in history has regarded "going to a party by yourself" as unacceptable behavior for a woman.) Every woman who has pretended not to be offended by a man's unwanted comments about her body, or clothes, or her attitude, is a victim of rape culture. Every girl who has been told by her mom that her interest in boys is wrong, and dangerous, and shameful, is a victim of rape culture. In short, every woman you know, your mothers and friends and nieces and coworkers, your heroes and crushes and ex-girlfriends, all of them have been, and continue to be, harmed and limited and lessened by rape culture. So recognize, when somebody reacts to your enjoyment of the next Marvel movie by pointing out its failure to meet the Bechdel Test, or refuses to appreciate the genius of your favorite edgy comedian, or expresses their belief that Silicon Valley tech companies may not actually be a pure meritocracy: they aren't the ones being petty and trivial. You are.
