Rape and Resistance by Alcoff Linda Martín

Author:Alcoff, Linda Martín.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Desires and Pleasures

The formal, contractual connotations of consent make it an odd choice as a central feature of intimate relationships involving physical needs and yearnings that at times can overtake us with surprise. Consent implies a rational volition, an agency, operating prior to and apart from the passions. Consent thus loads the deck to portray sex as transactional even when the lived experience of the act can feel more like a falling, a magnetic pull. One sometimes finds oneself in a sexual situation without planning or calculation. Rape and sex thus sometimes share a phenomenological feature: meta-level thoughts about “What is happening here?” seem to emerge in the midst, in the middle, some time after whatever it is is well under way.

I realize, fully, how dangerous it is to analogize wanted and unwanted sex. And yet this commonality is precisely why outsiders wonder about whether our claims of violation are true to the event, or whether the event was assigned a set of negative and accusatory words and terms only after the fact. Police, prosecutors, friends, assholes, ask: did you want it? Did you enjoy it? Or they may never voice these words but wonder all the same.

One of the most popular movies of the 1960s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had a memorable scene making clear why such questions are asked. This was one of a thousand similar scenes in the history of cinema in which a woman's vulnerability to a dangerous figure is played for sexual titillation. In the beginning of the scene, we see a pretty young schoolteacher walking through early nightfall to her small house, entering the door, relaxed in her familiar surroundings, preparing to change her clothes, when a man with a gun startles her. He directs her to keep going: that is, to keep removing her clothes. Slowly now she continues, with a guarded look, while the camera lingers over her body, until he approaches her and she embraces him with the words, “I thought you'd never get here.” This was merely, in today's parlance, a role play. Even if the scene had not been prepared by these players in advance, the woman goes along with it, for a while. The actions we observe are portrayed initially as a prelude to rape; we then find them to be a lover's game. But the acts themselves are identical. So the way in which we eventually decide how to understand the events we are watching hangs on the questions: what was her desire, meaning, her state of mind? Was this pleasurable for her?

On some theories of desire, what we want to know in assessing a given act can be discerned not by the actions themselves, but by the subjective experience of the actors.2 Even in a pre-arranged role play, a rape can occur. We need to know the participants’ state of mind, and in particular, in a scene like the one just described, the state of mind of the party who is being asked to perform or to follow direction, as victims generally are.

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