A lot of folks have read Meet The Predators, about rapists who admit their conduct, and Predator Redux, about Dr. David Lisak’s more in-depth analysis of acquaintance rapists’ methods. Via YMY contributor Jill Filipovic at Feministe, we how have a guy explaining his method exactly.

[Update:Brorby has apologized, predictably claiming satire. Read it, believe what you want. No matter what one chooses to believe about Brorby, though, responding to this stuff is a major cultural fight. We're not fighting for the rapists' hearts and minds. We're fighting over their license to operate. Do they do into the stalk believing they can get away with it, or not? That, and what they do in response, are the stakes.]

Back in Meet The Predators, I said to men in het spaces:

Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it.

Now, Josh Brorby has something to tell us about what he calls The Brorby Method For One Night Standing, which he admits requires a disregard not just for self and victim, but for the law. I’m saying that I believe him. I take him at his word. I believe this is who he is, and this is what he does.

Brorby says:

First thing’s first: you need to be hella drunk for this to work (or at least the girl does), so you need to find a party… You should also avoid any festival, gala, or Saturnalia whereat strangers may reside, or even anyone you only peripherally know. I suggest a nice get-together with a small amount of close, personal friends…

Okay, so now you’ve got a party started. You need to scope out a hot little number to stand with for an entire night. I’d suggest finding someone you know really well, like a girl from your high school or someone you have class with every Tuesday and Thursday. Someone you talk to regularly. (This shouldn’t be a problem if you listened to my earlier advice – if you see a stranger in the room, get the girl you plan on having sex with out of there!) Get her something to drink – maybe a nice little Sex on the Beach, or some straight mouthwash. If you have the means you could just inject her with some Sodium Pentobarbitone (if this is the case, have a futon or mattress handy, she might drop to the floor).

She’s good and buzzed now, right? Maybe a little unconscious?
Whatever, bro, it’s a one-night stand. This is where you drop the line, something funny yet titillating to let her know your intentions. Try this one on for size: “Let’s have sex,” and if that doesn’t work, drop this bomb on her: “Hey I’m going to have sex with you now.” If you’re a real dare devil just pull down your pants and get to it.

Where have I seen that before?

Oh Yeah. I remember:

• [Rapists] are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
***
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.

(Emphasis mine.)

Like Jill, I expect his defenders to say this is some kind of a joke. I’ll stand on my prior remarks:

The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

Change the culture… [W]e need to change the environment that the rapist operates in. Choose not to be part of a rape-supportive environment. Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think. When you laugh along to get their approval, you give them yours. You tell them that the social license to operate is in force; that you’ll go along with the pact to turn your eyes away from the evidence; to make excuses for them; to assume it’s a mistake, of the first time, or a confusing situation. You’re telling them that they’re at low risk.

Brorby feels entirely comfortable publishing his method, which is rape. He recommends getting acquaintances too drunk to make decisions and sexually penetrating them. He admits this is both wrong and illegal. And he’s fine with naming this method after himself. He doesn’t say some other guys do this. He says it is his method.

And all the rapists who read it will see that this guy can just say this, and people laugh right along. Roman Polanski can drug and rape a thirteen year old girl and the whole Hollywood community comes to his defense; this guy can say he drugs and rapes women and his defenders will insist, in high dudgeon, that we all laugh and pretend he isn’t doing it.

Unless.*

Unless the reaction to Brorby is so swift and so strong that everyone with the ability to google knows he’s dangerous. Unless his next editorial is about how nobody will leave him alone in a room with a woman or a drop of alcohol because of what he said, and he isn’t invited to anyone’s home anymore. Unless the women he’s victimized (statistics say about six) come forward, with his own writing and each other to buttress their claims and he is held to account.

Theory, and practice. He told us who he is and what he does.

*Apologies to Dr. Suess.
[Update II: Swift's Modest Proposal worked because even the people Swift was satirizing would balk at actually eating the Irish. But even if one credits and satire explanation, one can't satirize a position merely by stating it. The men doing the vast majority of the raping agree with everying in that essay. It won't cause them or their defenders to pause and think about what they are doing. They'll just take it as support. Satire that the satirized take as support is ... part of the problem.]

What people should recognise is that this (via Jessica’s link roundup at feministing) is not “just” a case where slut-shaming a teen for sexting pushed her into suicide — which has happened before, as I’ve discussed in prior posts on sexting.

This is a case of a teen who was sexually assaulted, and then slut-shamed by the school and her parents, and repeatedly treated as though she had committed some sin or act of misconduct. In fact that’s not what happened.

Here’s what happened:

Hope would, however, be allowed to attend the annual [Future Farmers of America] convention in Orlando …
Hope was due to pick up at least two awards: a first-place team award for nursery and landscaping, plus her individual trophy for the highest test score in the state for her age group in that category.

No one knows how Hope met a group of boys staying across the hall. Rebecca Knowles, who is the FFA president, saw Hope talking to the boys by the hotel pool.

The boys were in their late teens and were not there for the FFA convention. They insisted she send a nude photo to them.
One of the boys was especially aggressive and called the room repeatedly on the conference’s last night, asking Hope for a photo of her breasts.

“They kept calling and they kept bugging her,” said Rebecca, 14, who said she was in the room but asleep. “I think she was just scared. One of our roommates was scared as well and said, ‘Oh, my God, just do it.’ They were scared and wanted to get it over.”
The boy calling didn’t have a cell phone. So Hope used Rebecca’s phone to take a picture of her breasts, then slipped it outside her door.

The phone, which Hope had left outside for the boy, was still in the hallway when an adult found it and saw the photo.

Hope had already sent a suggestive photo of herself to a boy she liked, who showed it to others. She was punished by the school and her parents, but she had moved on. Then, she was terrorized by older teen boys into taking a photo of her breasts. The story is very clear here: this was not consensual. They scared her into doing it.

So how did the responsible adults react to a girl who had been stalked and terrorized into showing an older boy her breasts? Her parents grounded her and sent her to a Christian counselor. The school barred her from a role as an FFA adviser, taking from her one of the most positive and productive things in her life. She even blamed herself:

“Making mistakes &/or stupid choices doesn’t necessarily make it impossible for you to give advice and lead people in the right direction,” she wrote in her journal. “Do you think people ever told Elvis Presley he couldn’t lead people to be singers & give them advice because he had made some bad choices with drugs & alcohol? … I don’t think so!”

Parents and educators need to know this: she did not make a mistake or a stupid choice. She was the victim of sexual assault. If a boy scares a girl into sexual conduct, whether it’s a photograph, a blowjob or intercourse, her conduct is not consensual and she needs to be treated as a victim, not a perpetrator.

It is a nearly inescapable conclusion that the sexual assault and her revictimization worked in tandem with the slut-shaming from the prior incident to lead to the precipitating set of circumstances:

About a week after Hope’s suspension ended, she and Rebecca found three boys seated at the cafeteria table the girls had always claimed as their own.

The ringleader, Rebecca said, hectored Hope about the photo that had made its way through the school in June. Another boy joined in.

Hope left the table in tears. She spent the rest of the day in the office talking to counselors, her mother said.

***
Hope met that day with Jodi Orlando, the school’s social worker. Another staff member had noticed cuts on Hope’s leg and become concerned.

The social worker quizzed Hope, then had her sign a “no-harm” contract in which Hope agreed to talk to an adult if she felt an urge to hurt herself. Both Orlando and Hope signed the undated contract, which her parents found in Hope’s bedroom trash can after her death.

***
At 8:30 p.m., the phone rang. Hope sprang to answer it. When her parents asked who it was, she answered, “Theresa.”

The caller ID, which appeared on the television screen, said “Michael,” the name of a 15-year-old boy Hope liked.

Donna heard a boy’s voice on the extension. Because she had lied, Hope’s parents grounded her from the phone for a week.

***
Then she saw that a pink scarf was knotted around the canopy of her queen-sized bed. The other end was wrapped around Hope’s neck.

Downstairs, Charlie was about to let the dog out when he heard Donna’s voice.

“Call 911!”

An ambulance arrived and took Hope to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

If she were not dead I’d be harder on Hope Witsell’s parents. Treating a child who has been assaulted as though she did something wrong is such a bad mistake that … well, it’s a cliche to say that mistakes can ruin a child’s life, but it’s literally true of that one. Failure to tell a daughter who has been sexually assaulted that she did nothing wrong and shouldn’t blame herself is as serious a mistake as handing her the keys to a car with no brake fluid. But they must have realized this. They must be going over and over and over all the things they did wrong, and they will be in terrible pain over this forever, so that’s all I’m going to say about them.

The school is in turtle mode. They have liability exposure. They will get their asses handed to them for not telling the parents that she was self-injuring and at risk for suicide. They should get their asses handed to them for not taking meaningful steps to protect Hope from the coordinated, sexualized taunting … but then I never expect schools to actually try to prevent bullying of any kind. That’s a longer, more involved discussion.

The people who knew Hope Witsell will mourn her for a long time to come. For the rest of us, this is a reminder of the cost of revictimizing the victims.

When I heard the first rumbling of the Tiger Woods story I figured out right away that the bit about his wife Elin Nordegren smashing the back window out with a golf club to help him out of the vehicle didn’t scan, and she probably broke it in a domestic dispute. Even people with more money than they can ever spend have problems, and they can replace the window, or even the whole Escalade. So I didn’t think much about it right away. And the joking has started to filter in around the watercooler.

Last night as I drifted off to sleep, I remembered that they have two young children in that house.

I don’t know for sure if anyone hit anyone. We don’t have much in the way of facts, just some sketchily sourced reporting, some sensational allegations and a bunch of headlines. But thinking about the story last night, I remembered what broken stuff means, and looked at all the snapshots my mind can’t throw away. The upturned formica kitchen table. The wooden salad bowl lying near the kitchen window, which it hit but did not break. The half-eaten lobster tail on the floor. The things that did break; the dishes — all of them, in a pile of shards in the kitchen. The T-shaped hole in the wall, base on top and stem below, then the constellation of little marks where the thinner glass shattered on the sheetrock.

And it took me a while to get to sleep, because my body remembered the tight feeling from neck to knees, and the look the rabbit has in the second before it bolts.

I’ve been meaning to write about this since the story broke, and this post at Gender Across Borders got me motivated to do it. Lambert, who has since apologized, pulled an opposing player off her feet by her ponytail during a college soccer game. That was not her only incident in the game; she punched another player in the back and made a very nasty tackle in what was a very physical and mean game all around. Much of the discussion has focused on her individual play, whether it is acceptable and whether her treatment has been sexist. I want to take a step back and take a more macro approach: what does aggression mean in sports and how does Lambert fit into how we see women as competitors?

Direct aggression is not part of every sport, but in a lot of team sports it is. Players come into contact. How much and in what way this is expected and allowed is particular not just to the sport, but the level of competition, and culture of the league, and the sex category of the competitors.

I’m not just talking about the rules. There are rules against fighting in hockey, and there are penalties. But nobody thinks that fighting isn’t part of the game. There are rules, there are penalties, and the benefit of breaking the rules is weighed against the cost of getting caught. In American football, for example, offensive linemen hold routinely. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get called, and there’s a penalty. Both the violations and the penalties are part of the game.

There are the routine violations, and there are the shocking violations. For example, when Marty McSorley hit Donald Brashear in the head with his stick, it wasn’t part of the game and it wasn’t treated at if it was. What side of the line something falls on, though, may be a matter of debate.

The individualized debate isn’t one I want to get into. What I want to say is that individual fouling and individual gross misconduct are part of a spectrum that arises from teaching people to compete hard in a physical arena. There are people who can exhibit extraordinary self-control and magnanimity even while scrapping for every advantage — I’m thinking Dollar Bill here. Then there are people who are mean, surly and dirty as part of their style of play. Bill Laimbeer and the Chuck Daly Pistons, I’m looking at you. Sometimes it’s actually productive — the Broad Street Bullies and Daly’s Pistons earned national championships, in part, by being physically intimidating. It can also be counterproductive, and the cellar of any league usually has a team of thugs that tries and fails to transmogrify aggression into performance, and gives up needless penalties in the process.

I’m not interested in debating the big Elizabeth Lambert hair-pull. What I’m saying is that, if we raise a group of girls to play soccer and play hard, those girls will fall on a spectrum that includes their version of the Bradleys and the Laimbeers and the McSorleys. The occasional cork-popping hothead will manifest, but the process also produces another kind of competitors: physical, tough, surly, intimidating. Someone who is rough for the purpose of creating an advantage, who claims space on the floor or the field or the ice, and won’t be backed down.

And that’s the important part, isn’t it? If the real world is rough-and-tumble and we expect people to inject themselves, fight for advantages and claim space, don’t we use sports to teach that to our boys? And shouldn’t we teach that to our girls? Shouldn’t we teach our daughters, just like our sons, “nobody owns the paint: you have to take the paint”?

One of my favorite quotes about sports is one of the most frequently misquoted. Vince Lombardi did not originate the saying, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing“. (It probably dates from college coach Red Sanders before the 1956 Rose Bowl.) But he did say, “winning isn’t everything, trying to win is,” and at various other times, “the desire to win is” and “the will to win is.”

And I believe that. I believe in the will to compete and win, to drive one’s self, to train and sweat and bleed and keep training, in the discipline to get hit and get knocked down and get up. Sometimes that means being angry and surly and unfriendly. Sometimes that means, for some people, that to be aggressive means to act aggressive.

We live in a society that regularly accepts that in men: If I started listing them I’d have trouble stopping, so I’ll just name one. Bob Gibson. Surly, mean, and intimidating — and it’s not even a contact sport. But we look askance at women taking on that role — because it’s direct aggression. Folks are okay with artistry; Mia Hamm could always outmaneuver opponents, but do we accept the women who run over and through opponents, the women who play physical and hit hard? I think we’re coming to. Players like Michelle Akers ae legends within their sport, though women’s athletics is so overshadowed by the men that women’s team sports’ biggest stars are barely household names, overshadowed by gymnasts, swimmers, figure skaters, tennis players, and an entire pantheon of male athletes. But then, it wasn’t that long ago that it seemed like everyone hated Cathy Turner for being a physical, bumping, rough-and-tumble competitor in the physical, bumping, rough-and-tumble sport of short track skating.

As Melissa McEwen pointed out, in a post about Lambert, when men in soccer are rough and even unsportsmanlike, it gets attention but it does not occasion the same kind of shaming: Vinnie Jones gets movie roles on the strength of his career as an enforcer, and Wayne Rooney is one of the more celebrated figures in the game today, despite his lack of temper control. But in a country where women’s college soccer isn’t even on the radar screen, Lambert’s violence was an outsized story.

It’s an old patriarchal double-bind: men and even some women say that women lack the drive and the guts to be tough competitors, but to do that goes against all the socialization we throw at them, and they are often more severely criticized for the outright display of aggression. If Lambert is a sign, even a maladaptive one, that we’re raising a generation of girls to say (to paraphrase Rihanna), “Eff nice”, then I’m okay with that.

Meet The Predators, which featured a 2002 study co-authored by psychology professor David Lisak, has attracted a lot of attention and links in the last few weeks. To all those who have picked this up and discussed his findings, thank you. I think what he was able to show, and what McWhorter’s Navy study replicated, is very, very important stuff and the more exposure it gets the more difference it can make.

Lisak is not new to rape and interpersonal violence research, however. It is a major topic of his career-long body of work. Melissa McEwen at Shakesville (who linked Meet the Predators) has posted about Lisak’s work before, and I’ve been doing some more reading.

The last time I discussed Lisak’s work, I focused on the proportion of the population are the serial predators: a limited group within the population who are recidivist rapists, and who account for the overwhelming majority of rapes, and for a large portion of the child abuse and molestation and the intimate partner violence.

Cara (my fellow Yes Means Yes blog and book contributor), over at her regular blog The Curvature, noted important qualifications to Lisak’s 2002 results, which is that they only capture the undetected rapists who fall within the four questions of his survey. I agree with that, so this is an undercount and a limited set. There are methodological limitations that are going to fail to capture some rapists in any survey, and so the 2002 study should be read with its limitations in mind.

That said, Lisak has other important work out there. He has analyzed who these men are in some depth. Like the population figures, I suspect his analysis will come as confirmation rather than new information to many of our readers here.

[Trigger warning -- discussion of rape including modus operandi]
The analysis I want to focus on is this paper, Understanding The Predatory Nature Of Sexual Violence. It is on the web in several locations, though I have not seen a journal cite for it anywhere. A review of the references shows, however, that it is based on peer-reviewed literature, including Lisak’s own prior work.

Lisak says that the research on the psychological characteristics of incarcerated rapists also applies to the undetected:

Many of the motivational factors that were identified in incarcerated rapists have been shown to apply equally to undetected rapists. When compared to men who do not rape, these undetected rapists are measurably more angry at women, more motivated by the need to dominate and control women, more impulsive and disinhibited in their behavior, more hyper-masculine in their beliefs and attitudes, less empathic and more antisocial.

Guys with rigid views of gender roles and an axe to grind against women in general are overrepresented among rapists. That won’t come as a surprise to most readers here, I expect. But it is important confirmation. Guys who seem to hate women … do. If they sound like they don’t like or respect women and see women as impediments to be overcome … they’re telling the truth. That’s what they think, and they will abuse if they think they can get away with it.

Lisak doesn’t actually say this, but having read some of his work in depth now, I really think the major difference between the incarcerated and the non-incarcerated rapists are that the former cannot or do not confine themselves to tactics that are low-risk to them. The undetected rapists overwhelmingly use minimal or no force, rely mostly on alcohol and rape their acquaintances. They create situations where the culture will protect them by making excuses for them and questioning or denying their victims. Incarcerated rapists, I think, are just the ones who use the tactics that society is more willing to recognize as rape and less willing to make excuses for.

It is the modus operandi that keeps the undetected rapist undetected: they correctly identify a methodology that will put them under the protection of the rape culture. They are unlikely to be convicted because the story doesn’t fit the script. In fact, they are unlikely to be arrested because the story doesn’t lead to easy convictions. In fact, they are unlikely to be reported because rape survivors know that the tactics these men use leave them with little real recourse. In fact, these rapists may put the victim in a position where she is so intoxicated or terrified or just isolated and defeated that she never even says “no,” and because the culture overwhelmingly refuses to call these tactics what they are, even the victims themselves may be unable to call it rape for a very long time afterward, if ever.

Lisak describes the characteristics of their methodology:

In the course of 20 years of interviewing these undetected rapists, in both research and forensic settings, it has been possible for me to distill some of the common characteristics of the modus operandi of these sex offenders. These undetected rapists:
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse
control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.

[Emphasis mine.]

This isn’t quite a user’s guide to finding the rapists at a party, but it is an identifiable set of characteristics that have some implications and allow some educated guesses.

As Lisak says:

This picture conflicts sharply with the widely-held view that rapes committed on university campuses are typically the result of a basically “decent” young man who, were it not for too much alcohol and too little communication, would never do such a thing. While some campus rapes do fit this more benign view, the evidence points to a far less benign reality, in which the vast majority of rapes are committed by serial, violent predators.

[Emphasis mine.]

My first takeaway from this is that it may help some survivors to know this. I’ve seen and heard so many women beat themselves up about what they could or should have done — usually with no end of “help” in the self-flagellation. It might help some survivors of these kinds of rapes to know that they were not stupid and they didn’t make a mistake; that they were in overwhelming probability targeted and harmed deliberately by someone who has planned and maybe practiced a routine of testing, intoxication and isolation. Survivors shouldn’t feel like suckers.

My second takeaway is the implications for prevention. In a culture where women bear all the responsibility for preventing rape, it is difficult to even talk about rape prevention. I like this approach, which puts the responsibility where it should be — on the rapist. It’s clever. But as Lisak says (see below), rapists are not doing it by accident, and educating them is not going to make them stop. Telling women to walk to their cars with keys in their hands and all the other stranger rape advice deals with just the one kind of rape that is a small sliver of the total, and that has the greatest probablility of being reported and successfully prosecuted — so even if those tips were all very useful in that context, it ignores the much more common context: the serial predators that go after women they know, and use alcohol as their main tool.

Finally, while it’s easy for me as a teetotaler to say that we all shouldn’t drink, telling women not to use the social drug that this society overwhelmingly incorporates into its rituals is basically returning to a Victorian separate-spheres notion. That’s second-class citizenship, and using the threat of violence to enforce second-class citizenship is terrorism. We cannot negotiate with terrorists.

But simply saying, “there’s nothing women can do” is defeatist. I’ve said many times in response to the usual “I’m not blaming her but she …” trolling that women are already doing everything they know how to keep from getting raped, short of giving up living their lives. And that’s true. However, Lisak’s research may provide more know-how in identifying and escaping rapists.

Avoiding a rapist does more than just cause him to pick another target. If rapists can’t rape at minimal risk, they have a choice between either raping fewer victims, or using tactics that put them at more risk of being reported and punished. Either is a move in the right direction.

Lisak’s work also provides messages not just for women to identify when these tactics are directed at them, but also for bystanders, as he himself says:

Prevention efforts geared toward persuading men not to rape are very unlikely to be effective. Lessons can be drawn from many decades of experience in sex offender treatment, which have demonstrated that it is extremely difficult to change the behavior of a serial predator even when you incarcerate him and subject him to an intensive, multi-year program. Rather than focusing prevention efforts on the rapists, it would seem far more effective to focus those efforts on the far more numerous bystanders – men and women who are part of the social and cultural milieu in which rapes are spawned and who can be mobilized to identify perpetrators and intervene in high-risk situations.

[Emphasis mine.]

In other words, look for the tactics and interrupt the routine. Spot the rapist deliberately getting the woman drunk or angling to get the drunk woman alone in an unfamiliar place, and intervene. A guy offering a drunk woman a ride home may just be offering a ride, but if he is insistent when someone else offers a ride, this ought to raise a flag.

In the last post on Lisak’s work I said that men need to listen, and to change the culture to take away the rapists’ social license to operate. I wrote there about the language of supportive attitudes that tell the rapist he will be coddled and trusted and his victim will be rejected, interrogated and disbelieved. But there’s more, and more concrete, work to be done. Bystanders can look for the pattern and interfere with the pattern. If a guy is antagonistic towards women and places a lot of emphasis on sex as scoring or conquest, and he’s violating a woman’s boundaries and trying to end up with her drunk and alone, we don’t have to be sure what he’s doing to be concerned, and to start trying to give her exit ramps from his predatory slide.

Get in the middle, get in the way, and block the stalk. It’s concrete and it’s doable. It doesn’t take a hero. It takes a human.

As usual on this blog, rape-supportive commenters will last about as long as a snowball in hell.

Sex work is not an invitation to rape.

[Trigger warning -- news story contains description]
There is a range of feminist opinion on what role sex work ought to have. But there can’t be a range of opinion on sex workers: they are people. No means no. Stop means stop. Whatever services they sell — cam shows, penetration, BDSM or whatever — do not and cannot be seen to invalidate their humanity. And ignoring a person’s right to say, “stop penetrating my body” is the most basic denial of humanity.

The problem with a jury system is the same as the problem with judges (recall this awful shit): they reflect first and foremost the biases of the society they operate in. Here, there wasn’t a real question about what happened:

A New South Wales District Court jury cleared Petty Officer Timothy Davis, 25, of a charge of sexual intercourse without consent, with the aggravating factor of causing the woman actual bodily harm. … The woman told the court she had protected, consensual sex with Davis at the brothel where she worked, but said he became aggressive when she told him his time was up and forced her to have unprotected sex. The jury was shown police photographs of scratches on the woman.
Davis denied forcing the woman to have sex, but admitted in court that he used a “lock down maneuver” to pin her to the bed when she said she wanted to stop. He told the court he backed off when she kicked him, though he said he muffled her mouth with his hand when she began to scream after he demanded his money back.

Laws regarding prostitution vary between states in Australia. Brothels are legal in New South Wales.

This is not a legal problem. This is not a problem statutory reform can solve. Her work was legal where she was doing it. She was a service provider engaged in a lawful business enterprise, not meaningfully legally different from a masseuse or a personal trainer or a manicurist, for these purposes. Her work puts her in close contact with customers to whom she provides services. Nothing about that implies that she waives her basic human rights to do her job.

And this is not an enforcement problem. The police made an arrest and the prosecutors brought the case. The judge didn’t throw it out. The case went all the way to a jury.

This is a cultural problem. He admitted he pinned her down, he admitted he covered her mouth, he admitted that he put his penis inside her with no condom … and a jury of ordinary citizens acquitted him anyway. I can’t see any way that happens unless they simply decided that they are so biased against sex workers that they think sex workers deserve to be raped when doing their job.

Shouldn’t it be so obvious as to be unnecessary to say this? Sex workers do not deserve to be raped — while doing their jobs, or at any other time, ever. It’s a basic syllogism, really. Major premise: No human deserves to be raped. Minor premise: Sex workers are human. Conclusion: No sex worker deserves to be raped. The operation of the syllogism is Logic 101. The truth of the premises is Humanity 101. Disagree with one of those premises? Fail the course, repeat Humanity 101.

So much of policy around sex work is driven by a phobic and hateful reaction. There are basic things about sex work that everyone who identifies as sex positive or feminist or both ought to find common ground on: e.g. that sex workers ought to be protected from rape, including while working; that providing sexual services, even if illegal, ought not to be punished more harshly or more frequently than being a customer of the same services; that underage sex workers ought not to be prosecuted at all because someone who lacks the agency to have zir consent to noncommercial sex recognized ought not to bear criminal responsibility for the same acts if money changes hands. Shouldn’t those simple propositions get universal agreement from everyone?

And let’s not forget the person who caused this shitshow of basic human rights violation. Congratulations PO Tim Davis. You’re a piece of shit. You abused a sex worker, and you got away with it because the jury hates sex workers. You fail Humanity 101. Repeat the course. You know what? Don’t. I want you off my fucking planet, now. Eat your service sidearm. Your next victims will thank you. Because we both know it’s highly likely you’ve done this before, and I’m goddamned sure you’ll do it again.

Some people will consider this an outrageous understatement, and others heresy: the BDSM community (such as it is, or communities, such as they are) is far from perfect. Because kinksters tend to have discussions about limits in overt ways and make communication a norm, lots of people sort of talk about BDSMers like we have it together on the sex and communication front. And for my part I think there’s some truth to that. There are a lot of positives. I certainly know feminist women who say they have found that they are more respected and listened to within BDSM communities than anywhere else, though individual experiences and particular communities vary. And in general my view is that there’s a sense of respect to self-definition that can be very useful, and a broader sense of body positivity — specifically sexual body positivity, than one sees most other places.

The things that folks who are not BDSMers most often note as positives about BDSM are the communication aspects. Having the tools to communicate about what people like to do and how they ought to do it so that it’s reasonably safe and everyone enjoys it is a big step, practically, from how a lot of sexual interaction goes in the general population.

However, as I hope a lot of people learned from the trainwreck of fail that was Open Source Boob Project (thanks, er, I think, to the terrific YMY contributor Latoya Peterson for reminding me), merely making the process of communication explicit, when the underlying dynamics are still coercion, commodification and cis- and heterosexism, is not progress. Explicit communication is a tool. It can enable progress, but it isn’t by itself progress, and it does not even always lead to progress. So BDSMers have some good tools to work with and some stuff that could help the general population move forward. But they are not some infallible chosen people (and I don’t believe there is any perfect community anywhere).

Some of the issues are really just outgrowths of the same or related dynamics flowing into kinky communities. For example, unless the space is specifically a queer space, the assumptions (not just in my experience, but in the experience of a lot of my kinky friends as well) are: that everyone is cissexual, that every man is het unless otherwise indicated, that every woman is bi or bi-curious unless otherwise indicated, and that women are switches or bottoms unless otherwise indicated (summary of research on actual role split here). Not that the general population has a better set of default assumptions, but that we assume at all is a problem.

Other problems are specific to the highly sexualized nature of the BDSM community. Folks can debate endlessly when and to what extent BDSM is sexual, but kinky spaces — even no-play burgermunches — are often highly sexualized spaces, and there can be a lot of pressure to be sexual and be available. Holly at Pervocracy says things about her local kinky folks that make me laugh out loud, and sometimes that make me cringe with sad familiarity. Recently, she said:

I don’t think being ugly or even weird is cause to treat a person badly. But refusing to play with or fuck someone isn’t an abuse. I’m not an equal opportunity employer, and I don’t think I have any ethical obligation to be. I think there’s also an implication that since play isn’t sex, it shouldn’t matter if you’re attracted to someone–but c’mon now, this isn’t doubles tennis, it’s a fetish and even if I leave my panties on I’d still like them to get a bit wet. And tragically, physical appearance and presentation are important fuel for my panty-wetting mechanisms.

Kink communities that are so devoted to “acceptance” that no one stands up to creeps have been a pet peeve of mine for a while. But when you start telling me that I should be “accepting” with my body… fuck that.

This is one area where the BDSM community can be even worse than the general population. The entire broader culture operates with an ongoing whore/madonna complex, and once women are sexual in any way, they wear a sort of tag that says, “up for it.” (Seriously, if you have not already, read the linked post by Stacey May Fowles, my favorite post ever on this blog, about her experiences as a highly sexual and openly kinky woman.) In the BDSM community, everyone is sort of assigned a highly sexual identity just by showing up.

In some circumstances, that gives rise to really ugly dynamics. Denelian said in a comment on this post:

[E]very single time i went to *ANY* BDSM gathering of ANY sort, at least 3 or 4 different “dominant men” [i sarcasta-quote because i dislike the specific men i am speaking of] would try to do things to me, or convince me to be involved with, THINGS I DO NOT LIKE.and my “no” was never, ever accepted. i would be smacked by men i had JUST TOLD i would not let spank me, grabbed and held by men i had just told i would not let tie my up, touched by men who i had told *specifically* that they did NOT have permission to touch me.

and almost every time it happened, two things happened. i was told that it happened because “everyone knows that all women have a little sub and want to be dominated”; and i was villified for being angry at people who refused to respect my boundries.
every woman i know whose has left the scene has left for the same reason – that underlying assumption that, if a woman “admits” she has kink, she is saying she is completely available to every single person who wants her in any way she wants her.
MOST people in the BDSM scene are NOT like this. a few bad apples, etc.

One might think that this would not be a problem. BDSM requires trust; trust requires respecting boundaries; BDSMers discuss boundaries, in explicit detail, quite regularly. And yet …

I wish what Denelian says was unfamiliar to me. I wish that it had always been my experience that women in BDSM were listened to and respected. But it’s not the first time I’ve heard it or seen it. I’ve heard it since the earth was cooling and women complained about this stuff on alt.sex.bondage on USENET. And it’s not limited to public invasions.

If any community ought to be aware of abuse issues, it’s BDSMers. And we do talk a good game about it. And when the abuser is not well connected, it’s easy to call out the abuse. For example, Glenn Marcus isn’t getting support that I can see except from his personal friends. But when the abuser is an insider; when the abuser is likable and charming and a good speaker …

I have permission to write about this. A friend of mine, a close friend who has held a leather contest title and who has been a part of various communities on both coasts for well over a decade, was nonconsensually beaten by a man with whom she was in a contractual 24/7 dominant-submissive relationship. He was tall, handsome and charming, and though relatively new to BDSM and the community, he was and is a sought-after speaker on BDSM and spirituality. Their relationship was having difficulty, and he exploded in an incident of intimate partner violence. Afterwards, other women came forward with stories of his less dramatic boundary violations. (That’s the tip-off. Small boundary violations are an indicator of large boundary violations.)

She went to court for a restraining order. The domestic violence court appointed a mediator — who the charming abuser seduced. But when he tried to convince the judge that it was all just a misunderstanding, the judge eventually told him to shut it. The judge understood what was going on. That judge sees charming abusers over and over again. She got relief from the courts — from the non-kinky power structure that BDSMers often fear will misunderstand mischaracterize and stigmatize what we do.

Not from the BDSM community. She and another woman who complained of his conduct were marginalized and feel excluded from some of the public spaces; the abuser is still welcome. He’s still invited to events. He’s still welcome in the organizations and the public spaces and many of the parties, because he’s well-connected and well liked and hot; and because people chose personal loyalty over what’s right. They just do: no way around that sad truth of human society.

(This isn’t entirely specific to BDSM as distinct from other sexual communities. As a blind item for those who know the story: “bitches weren’t complaining then.” And that wasn’t specifically BDSM-related, though the speaker is a BDSMer.)

So we are not the chosen people. We do some things right, but we also do some things wrong. And if we can’t listen to people — to women — when they say what their boundaries are, we have an urgent and pressing need to improve our own communities, rather than bask in the glow of having delivered to the world the ideas of negotiation, safewords and aftercare.

NB: Comments to the effect that all BDSM is abuse will be deleted and those making them banned. There are plenty of spaces to sling that shit; this is not one of them.

Some time ago, I wrote about virginity (which is a meaningless concept with no value) and about the premium placed on it, something I discussed in Towards A Performance Model of Sex, in Yes Means Yes. Jessica Valenti also discusses it in detail in Purity Myth. However, neither of us spent much time with the reverse dynamic: how the culture treats women as abnormal if they don’t fall in line with the compulsory sexuality as expected. Some folks have raised that issue in response to things I’ve written in the past, though I can’t find the references now, and then recently Salome wrote eloquently about it in comments here.

It ought to be a non-debatable maxim that anyone can refuse to be sexual with anyone, in any way, at any time, for any reason — with any particular person, or with anyone. Some folks are asexual. They’re not interested in partnered sex. It is wrong to assume that this is some sort of pathology; not everyone who lacks the desire for partnered sex has been traumatized. Some are asexual. That has to be okay.

Folks who do want partnered sex have plenty of reasons they can’t find it. Just to pick an example, gay and lesbian folks in conservative and very homophobic environments may (or may not) have trouble finding partners. It can’t be easy finding same-sex partners in, say, Provo, Utah, but then I’ve heard enough stories about guys behind the bleachers at Christian rock concerts to know that repression never works as completely as the repressors would like. Likewise folks whose gender expression doesn’t fit the binary, or doesn’t fit their assigned sex — which is not to say that trans – or genderqueer folks don’t have active sex lives; plenty find partners. Folks whose bodies fall outside the expected norms may (or may not) have trouble finding partners. (For all that the mainstream media tells us that fat bodies, for example, or unlovable and unfuckable, I’ve spent decades in and around communities where fat people have found love and fucking; and the media hardly acknowledges disabled bodies at all, but that neither means that disabled folks don’t want partnered sex, nor that they can’t get it.)*

But difficulty finding a partner — not just any partner, but the right partner — is not unique to people who fall significantly outside some real or imagined norm. A few weeks ago, Tina Fey was on Letterman, and disclosed that she was a “virgin” (she didn’t unpack that; mainstream media never does) until she was 24. Video here. She jokes that she was “homely,” and I suspect that this is a true statement of her insecurities. I’ll admit that I find Fey very attractive; though her Liz Lemon character, whose personality is dominated by her insecurities, not so much.

We expect men to be made to feel ashamed of virginity (whatever that is) or lack of sexual experience. That’s not good, but that’s not a surprise. Yet, with all the pressure that abstinence entrepreneurs and professional scolds put on women to not have partnered sex, one would expect that there would be some perceptible support or reward for women who decide that’s what they want to do.

But that’s not what I keep hearing. What I keep hearing is that support for abstinence is mostly illusory; that women who actually make the choice not to have partnered sex have about ten minutes between “good girl” and “you’re not getting any younger.” That, in practice, abstinence is pathologized. But so is any expression of sexuality other than monogamous, committed relationship with an opposite sex partner fitting within a narrow set of acceptable demographic constraints.

So, as it always is with patriachy, almost everything is a no-win situation. Abstinence puritanism lives right next door to compulsory heterosexuality, working to completely eliminate alternatives and choices for women to express an authentic personal sexuality, and instead penalizing any choice but the stifling “correct” one: to wait, but only as long as appropriate, and then be sexual on command with an approved partner.

There are permutations, of course. Salome talks in comments about the pressure on her to just find a more or less random partner, though she knows that’s not what she wants:

I have to deal with this stigma all the time, as a 19-year-old college student who hasn’t had sex, but is an agnostic and thus clearly isn’t one of the “purity pledge people.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told I should stop waiting to get into a relationship with a guy I care about, and “just get laid.” I’m a gender & sexuality minor, so sex is no mystery to me and in some ways I’m more educated about it than my sexually-active friends. However, there’s this assumption that because I haven’t had sex yet, and I’m not particularly eager to have it simply for the sake of “getting laid,” I’m somehow repressed about sex. And that unsatisfying sex with someone I’m not interested in is somehow going to change this.

* * * *

By “sex for the sake of getting laid,” I mean the sort of sex some of my friends encourage I have, where I sleep with someone I’m only marginally interested in just so I can say “I did it!” Which to me, doesn’t sound very fulfilling.

It seems to me that most women who want partnered sex and have not had it fall somewhere on the spectrum of Salome’s stance and Fey’s joke: that they have some ability to find a partner, but the opportunities they have are ones they think will make them less happy instead of more. Certainly, there are folks who just can’t find a partner, cis- het- women included. But I don’t believe that, for example, Fey literally “couldn’t give it away.” I believe she didn’t want just any partner, just for the sake of metaphorically checking a box, and was made to feel insecure about thinking that she shouldn’t settle for less.

I’m certainly not going to dictate to others what kind of sex they should like, or have. But whatever it is people think they want, they are probably right. If a young woman thinks she would rather wait for the right person or the right situation than just get it over with, she’s in a better position to gauge that than anyone else; so, her view being the best information available, she probably ought to trust it.

And giving her a bunch of crap about that is just as wrong as slut-shaming. In precisely the same way and for precisely the same reason: because compulsion to say “no” and compulsion to say “yes” are equally antithetical to a Yes Means Yes ethic.

*Whether fat or disabled or trans folks, there are lots of people whose bodies are stigmatized and who find lots of available and even eager partners … who fetishize them. I’m using the term in the specific sense — not merely finding something particularly attractive that most people don’t, but rather being attracted to a characteristic almost or completely to the exclusion of the person. Fat fetishists, disability fetishists, etc. often treat the people with these characteristics as inconvenient interference between them and the characteristic that has erotic power for them. For the object of the fetish, this can be a tremendously lonely and alienating kind of interaction. Some folks will say that the fetishists are partners when there are not a lot of other options, and others will say that no partner is better than a partner that makes them feel depersonalized — and that has to be an individual choice. But the fetishists — again, using the term in the specialized sense and not as loose terminology for kinkster — ought to recognize that that fat person, disabled person or any other person is still a person.

Today is Transgender Day Of Remembrance. Whether by nature or culture, people tend to feel sympathy and empathy with individuals and personal stories. The one symbolizes the many, however incompletely, because the many do not stick with us in the same way.

So many trans folks have been killed. The one that stares out at me, the person whose photos stare back at me, is Gwen Araujo, murdered in Newark, California on October 3, 2002. She was just 17.

Gwen Araujo was a lot of things to a lot of people. She was a No Doubt fan and a daughter and a Californian. But she wasn’t killed for being any of those things. She was killed because of her history. And in death, she has been largely been reduced to that one fact.

In life, she was not one thing or one identity. None of us are. We live in the world as whole people, individuals from the way we brush our teeth in the morning to the way we lay our heads on our pillows at night. Our medical history and our gender presentation and our orientation are part of us, but so are our ethnicities, our communities, our achievements, intellects, abilities and relationships. In life, she was a whole teen girl, but that all gets lost. In death, she is a collection of snapshots and a dry biography of a woman who left the world at age 17, because a group of men couldn’t coexits with one small fact about one small facet about a woman that they knew, and were attracted to.

Anyway, there’s more to her than “trans and dead” and there’s more to TDoR than “Gwen and many like her,” but while we can think about the many we tend to feel about the one, and Gwen Araujo is the one on my mind today.

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. It has been clear for a long time, at least since Robin Warshaw’s groundbreaking “I Never Called It Rape,” which used Mary Koss’s reseach, that the stranger rape script did not describe rape as most women experienced it. It’s easy to picture the stranger rapist: a violent criminal, not much different from the violent criminals who commit other violent crimes. This guy was in prison before, and he’ll be back there again, though not for rape because reporting and conviction rates are so low. (See, generally, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.)

But who commits the vast majority of rapes, the nonstranger rapes? The acquaintance rapes? Anecdotally, we all know the answer — or an answer, or some answers. The tall guy, the short guy, the skinny guy, the fat guy, the frat guy, the nerdy guy, the jock, the geek, the date, the friend-of-a-friend, the drinking buddy, and the guy from accounting. Lots of different guys in lots of different circumstances.

When women note that the rapists don’t come with convenient notes on their foreheads and that therefore women have to entertain the possibility that every guy (even ones they know a bit) are rapists, folks get all sorts of upset. But the less women know about who these guys are, the less they know who to worry about.

It is notoriously tough to figure out who the rapists are. Reporting and conviction rates for acquaintance rapes are so low as to be useless as a diagnostic tool. And how else can we know? The rapists won’t just tell us that they are rapists, right?

That’s what I would have though. Turns out I thought wrong. If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with somone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

I have taken a look at two large-sample surverys of undetected rapists. One is Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists by David Lesak and Paul M. Miller, published in Violence and Victims, Vol 17, No. 1, 2002 (Lisak & Miller 2002). The other is Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel by Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., published in Violence and Victims, Vol, 24, No. 2, 2009 (McWhorter 2009). (I can’t link to either study because neither is available in full for free.)

These look to me to be the best available data on who the rapists are who have not been caught and incarcerated — which is the vast, vast majority. They are, however, limited, so that in talking about them it constrains the discussion of rape into a narrow range around a modal form of men raping women.*

Lisak & Miller

Lisak & Miller set out to answer two questions:

First, do a substantial number of undetected rapists rape more than once (i.e. repeat rapists)? Second, do undetected rapists (repeat or otherwise), like their incarcerated counterparts, commit other types of interpersonal violence …?

Lisak & Miller at p. 74.

Their sample was 1882 college students, ranging in age from 18 to 71 with a median age of 26.5 — so somewhat older than a traditional college population. The group was also ethnically diverse. They asked this group four questions about rape and attempted rape. I’ll paraphrase:
1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?
2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?
3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?
4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

[Edited to add: I paraphrased the questions to make them shorter, but now the questions are being quoted, so I thought it was only fair to the authors to key in the full text of the questions they used:

(1) Have you ever been in a situation where you tried, but for various reasons did not succeed, in having sexual intercourse with an adult by using or threatening to use physical force (twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.) if they did not cooperate?
(2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
(3) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?
(4) Have you ever had oral sex with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used or threatened to use physical force (twisting their arm; holding them down, etc.) if they didn’t cooperate?
Lisak & Miller at 77-78.]

So without quibbling over the precise statutory definition, this equates to rape or attempted rape. 120 men admitted to raping to attempting to rape. This is actually a relatively slim proportion of the survey population — just over 6% — and might be an underreport, though for part of the sample, the survey team did interviews to confirm the self-reports, which tends to show if there is an undercount in the self-reports, and found the responses consistent. But the more interesting part of the findings were how those rapists and their offenses broke down.

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.

The breakdown between the modus operandi of the rapists also tells us a lot about how wrong the script is. Of all 120 admitted rapists, only about 30% reported using force or threats, while the remainder raped intoxicated victims. This proportion was roughly the same between the 44 rapists who reported one assault and the 76 who reported multiple assaults. (What the authors call “overt-force rapists” committed more sexual assaults, on average, than the “intoxication rapists” by about 6 to 3, but the parts of the sample are so small that this result did not reach statistical significance and could be sampling error rather than a real phenomenon. I’d really like an answer to that, though.)

Lisak & Miller also answered their other question: are rapists responsible for more violence generally? Yes. The surveys covered other violent acts, such as slapping or choking an intimate partner, physically or sexually abusing a child, and sexual assaults other than attempted or completed rapes. In the realm of being partner- and child-beating monsters, the repeat rapists really stood out. These 76 men, just 4% of the sample, were responsible for 28% of the reported violence. The whole sample of almost 1900 men reported just under 4000 violent acts, but this 4% of recidivist rapists results in over 1000 of those violent acts.

If we could eliminate the men who rape again and again and again, a quarter of the violence against women and children would disappear. That’s the public policy implication.

McWhorter

Stephanie McWhorter and her colleagues completed a study just this year that in my view replicate the important results of Lisak & Miller, working with a very different population of young-ish men. She studied 1146 newly enlisted men in the U.S. Navy, asking them about their behavior since age 14. McWhorter’s participants were younger than Lisak & Miller’s sample, averaging just under 20 and topping out at 34, as one would expect from a sample of military recruits. The study was longitudinal, following up at intervals during the participants’ Navy hitch.

McWhorter used a Sexual Experiences Survey tool that has been in use for more than 20 years. Of her 1146 participants, 144, or 13%, admitted an attempted or completed rape — substantially higher than Lisak & Miller. But in another respect, her work very much matched theirs: 71% of the men who admitted an attempted or completed rape admitted more than one, very close to Lisak & Miller’s 63%. The 96 men who admitted multiple attempted of completed rapes in McWhorter’s survey averaged 6.36 assaults each. This is not far from Lisak & Miller’s average of 5.8 assaults per recidivist. Looked at another way, of the 865 total attempted or completed rapes these men admitted to, a staggering 95% were committed by 96 men, or just 8.4% of the sample.

McWhorter’s findings on modus operandi also confirm the basic finding of Lisak & Miller’s earlier study: 61% of the reported attacks were intoxication-based, 23% were overt force alone, and 16% were both. (77% of the pre-enlistment and 75% of the post-enlistment rapes or attempted rapes were, in whole or in part, intoxication attacks. But 34% of pre-enlistment and 45% of post-enlistment assaults involved overt force, a change in pattern that ought to be explained by further research.)

McWhorter’s research also indicates that rapists start young. Of the men who did not report an assault pre-enlistment, only 2% reported assaults while in the Navy, but 16% of those who admitted that they raped or attempted to rape between age 14 and enlistment also said they did it again while enlisted. 60% of rapists, however, said their first assault was after they turned 18. This implies that there is a window when rapists start raping, in their late teens.

Finally, in an entirely unsurprising finding, rapists who admitted assaulting strangers – ever – were less than a quarter of the rapist population. More than 90% targeted acquaintances some of the time, and about 75% said they only targeted acquaintances. Only 7% of all the self-reported rapists reported targeting only strangers. And, in fact, there was zero overlap between the men who said they targeted starangers, and those who used only force.

I’m going to repeat that, because I think it is important. As McWhorter wrote:

Of the men who used only force against their victims, none reported raping a stranger; all the men knew their victims… [T]he stereotypical rape incident characterized by a man violently attacking a stranger was not reported by any of the respondents. Instead, respondents who used only force against their victims reported raping only women they knew. men who trageted strangers exclusively reported they used substances only in the rape incident.

These findings may help explain why most self-reported [attempted or completed rape] incidents go undetected.

McWhorter, p. 212-13.

Conclusions

Lots of smart people will take a lot of different things away from this research on undetected rapists, and on more research that will hopefully follow. Here are my impressions:

First, the stranger-force rape is a small proportion of rapes, and is all but absent from the samples of self-reporters. Other research** shows that lack of prior acquaintance and use of the weapon are the only significant factors that increase the likelihood that a victim will report the offense. Attacking strangers with force or weapons is the only pattern of victimization at all likely to lead to incarceration of the rapist, let’s face it — so those who commit rape in the way that follows the script may be already in jail, not in college or the Navy filling out surveys. The rapists who are out there are mostly using intoxication, and mostly attacking victims they know.

Second, the sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. (See Amanda Hess’s excellent takedown here.) The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again. That just doesn’t square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data. Most of the raping is done by guys who like to rape, and to abuse, assault and violate. If we could get the one-in-twelve or one-in-25 repeat rapists out of the population (that is a lot of men — perhaps six or twelve million men in the U.S. alone) or find a way to stop them from hurting others, most sexual assault, and a lot of intimate partner violence and child abuse, would go away. Really.

Recommendation

I’m directing this to men who inhabit het-identified social spaces, and I’m not really limiting it more than that. Women are already doing what they can to prevent rape; brokering a peace with the fear is part of their lives that we can never fully understand. We’re the ones who are not doing our jobs.

Here’s what we need to do. We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.

Listen. The women you know will tell you when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know you won’t stonewall, deny, blame or judge. Let them tell you that they got drunk, and woke up with your buddy on top of them. Listen. Don’t defend that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.

Change the culture. To rape again and again, these men need silence. They need to know that the right combination of factors — alcohol and sex shame, mostly — will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims. The women in your life need to be able to talk frankly about sexual assault. They need to be able to tell you, and they need to know that they can tell you, and not be stonewalled, denied, blamed or judged.

Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

Change the culture. We are not going to pull six or ten or twelve million men out of the U.S. population over any short period, so if we are going to put a dent in the prevalence of rape, we need to change the environment that the rapist operates in. Choose not to be part of a rape-supportive environment. Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think. When you laugh along to get their approval, you give them yours. You tell them that the social license to operate is in force; that you’ll go along with the pact to turn your eyes away from the evidence; to make excuses for them; to assume it’s a mistake, of the first time, or a confusing situation. You’re telling them that they’re at low risk.

I saw economist James Galbraith not long ago — an economist beloved of progressives everywhere. Galbraith said, among other things, “First rule of economics: incentives work.” He was speaking in another context, but this applies to rape. The overwhelming prevalence of acquaintance over stranger rapes and of intoxication over overt force, and the relative rarity of weapon use and physical injuries, is easily explained. Rapists know what works. They like to rape, they want to keep doing it, they want not to be caught. It is in their interest to be very sensitive to which accounts of rape are believed and which are attacked and to know which targets and methods are lowest-risk for them.

What they do is what works. They rape their drunk acquaintances because it works. They rape their drunk acquaintances because we let them.

We need to revoke the rapists’ social license to operate. We need to stop asking, “why do we think he didn’t know she wasn’t consenting,” which is the first question now, really. First as a cultural matter — leaving the legal matter aside — we need to adopt the stance that sexual interaction ought to always be had in a state of affirmative consent by all participants; that anything else is aberrant. If someone says, “I was sexually assaulted,” the first question should be, “why was a person continuing with sexual activity when zir partner did not want to?”

This is what it is: real rape happens when the attacker is drunk and the target is drunker and alone and isolated. That’s rape-rape. If he gets away with it, it will be, on average, rape-rape-rape-rape-rape-rape. If we refuse to listen, he can continue to pretend that the rapist is some guy in the parking lot late at night, when it’s actually him, in our friends’ bedrooms half an hour after last call. If we let that happen, we’re part of the problem.

The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

*Big caveat here: The research in this area is still in an almost embryonic state, though. Since both studies only look at male attackers and don’t discuss the sex, orientation or gender identity of victims at all, I’m kind of stuck with discussing rapes committed by men and presuming that their adult victims are women, though I’m almost certain there are exceptions that are not broken out in this data, and that are probably too few in number to allow conclusions about anyway. I’m going to address rape within the constaints of the data, which is about male rapists, and speak as if the modal assault, which is against a woman, is all assaults. That ignores a lot in terms of topics and dynamics, if not raw numbers, and I’m aware of how much it ignores, but just having any data from a non-incarcerated sample of rapists is a huge improvement over having none.

**Lisak & Miller cite Frazier, P.A. & Haney, B. (1996). Sexual assault cases in the legal system: Police, prosecutor and victim perspectives. Law and Human Behavior, 20, 607-628. I have not read it.