My partner likes watching baseball; I like making fun of baseball. I especially enjoy ridiculing the game’s fascination with arcane facts and statistics. “This is only the 13th time that a nine-fingered infielder has caught a pop fly after the third foul when the humidity has been over 69%, Jim!!” “That’s right Steve!! The closest was in the Bullfrogs-Skeeters season opener in ’49. Whatta game!!” Such achievements are inevitably followed by a round of high-fiving, chest thumping, and ass slapping-not that there’s anything homoerotic in baseball. Or homophobic. No, not at all. It’s just ‘boys’ having fun with their bats and their balls. But I teach in Women and Gender Studies; my partner’s a baseball-loving computer geek. Our differing perspectives are understandable. He gets Cardinals memorabilia every Christmas; I subsequently ‘store’ it in the basement. I sit on my end of the couch reading feminist theory; he sits on his end reading the box scores of a pasttime I consider, at best, a waste of public resources and, at worst, ritualized masculine violence. For nearly 14 years now that’s how it is.
But I’m less amused by a similar obsession with arcana when it comes to rape and sexual assault. For years I’ve taught classes that include the topic and there never fails to be a student who plays what I call the ‘rape hypothesis game.’ Dennis Sweeney played the game in his op-ed “Rape is Ambiguous” (4/25/07). “If she had three drinks but I had only two, is it rape? If we were both drunk/wasted/can’t remember the night before is it rape? If she ‘regrets’ having sex in the morning is it fair that I’m accused of rape?” And so on. (Would that such creative questioning propelled my students’ research papers!)
Do we ask similar questions about larceny? Robbery? Murder? “If I only shot the bank guard twice with a borrowed but registered German handgun, is it still murder? What if I only shot the guard once?”
The law makes fine distinctions between various degrees of murder and manslaughter but no one seems to want to know how close they can come to killing without ‘really’ committing murder!
What is it about rape that compels us to ask how close we can get to it with actually breaking the law? I suppose it’s good that my students want to better understand rape and sexual assault, but I find disturbing the questions seemingly designed to mark the (supposedly) fine line separating regrettable lovemaking and felony rape.
What the ‘rape hypothesis game’ indicates is that its players fail to comprehend the serious consequences of rape and sexual assault for the survivors, which can include depression, anxiety, phobia disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, physical injury, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, etc. Statistically, one in four college women will be the victim of rape or sexual assault. They’re all somebody’s daughter, sister, girlfriend, future wife and mother. Think about that for a minute.
For the guys who have read this far, ask yourself, “Do I want my sister, mother, aunt, daughter, girlfriend or future wife to experience the violation of rape and its consequences? Exactly how close do I want them to come to it?”
Rape and sexual assault are not a game to be scored or a grammatical structure to be parsed. They are criminal violations of another person’s right to bodily integrity and personal control.
Why would you want to get any closer to it than you absolutely have to?
Michael is a lecturer in the Women and Gender Studies Program. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].