Of monsters and men RE: Rapists are men

I got a lot of questions and feedback from last week’s blog, which is awesome. Rather than trying to respond to those comments in the comments section, I figured it would be more effective to reply in the form of another post. So, if you commented last week, listen up. Particularly the Anton Kleinschmidts out there …

The most important point I need to make is that understanding something is very different from condoning it. Attempting to explain why men rape, and understanding their motivations for raping, is fundamentally different to condoning the act, or trying to “explain it away”. Condoning rape would be to play it down, or even to endorse it. Seeking to understand rape on the other hand, is about investigating why it happens. Understanding is not the same as excusing rape or rapists.

Perhaps it’s because we find rape so abhorrent — so unthinkable — that many people find theorising rape problematic, as if by thinking through rape, we in some way make it a more acceptable act. But surely it’s through seeking an understanding of rape that we are better equipped to deal with the issue. Through understanding the conditions that make raping possible, we are able to act on the basis of that understanding, and better deal with perpetrators. Calling rapists monsters stops this process: they are labelled, judged, and (hopefully, but seldom) imprisoned. That one rapist may be removed from society, but the social mechanism and root cause of rape persists in society.

That’s why I argue we need to better understand rape and rapists — not to sympathise with them, provide an excuse for rape, or to soften their horrific acts — but so that we can get to what drives men to rape in the first case. Understanding rape is not to condone it, but to interrogate it in the hopes of ending it in a way that labelling rapists simply cannot.

Part of my argument was that we should come to see rape as a symptom of society. “Rapists as monsters” brackets them off from society; we see them as aberrations or anomalies, like malignant cells that cause cancer and should be removed. While I sympathise with the emotions behind calling them dogs, animals, monsters, I still think it’s vitally important we don’t dehumanise rapists. We need to understand how it is that fathers, brothers, husbands, and work colleagues come to rape — what drives members of our society to rape? Labelling rapists animals stops this question dead in its tracks because as “monsters” we no longer see rapists as products of our society, but aberrations from it.

I think by far the most challenging and insightful question was posed by Richard. Basically he asked about why seeing rapists as men was so important. If all this is about stopping rape, then seeing rapists as monsters — a sort of “rapistophobia” — is surely the most direct and effective way of getting men to stop raping. I thought about this quite a bit, and think that it comes down to a point I made about rapists using rape as a means of overcoming emasculation. Men who feel disempowered may resort to rape as a way of re-establishing the boundary between themselves as a powerful agent and the person they attack. It’s a very similar mechanism to the one operating when men go out “gay-bashing” — it’s about men making themselves feel more like a man.

So while discourses like “real men don’t rape” could possibly go some way in reducing the incidence of rape, they do nothing to remedy the underlying cause of rape. That cause is how we define “being a man” in South Africa, and the panic and shame that comes with not being able to live up to those expectations. So while “rapistophobia” could possibly reduce the incidence of rape, I think emasculated men would still be left with the need to prove how manly they really are, and could then resort to other forms of violence to achieve this; gender-based violence, aggressive behaviour, abuse, and rape all seem to be different sides of the same coin (granted, a coin with many sides!?).

Finally there were those who objected to my “rapists are men” argument because, they argued, all men are not rapists. Please, as if that even makes sense. On this point, Jennifer Thorpe has a brilliant analogy: men are most likely to be colour-blind — saying this doesn’t mean that all men are colour-blind; it simply means that of all the people who are colour-blind, most are men. The same applies to rape. “Rapists are men” doesn’t mean that all men rape, or that women can’t or don’t rape; it quite simply means that rapists are most likely to be men. Simple.