Kate Harding: Asking for It

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Kate Harding has been writing for feminist and current affairs blogs and websites, magazines and newspapers, for some time now, and has turned her public voice to an analysis of what is more and more often being recognised as “rape culture.” Her book, Asking for It - The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It, looks at the elements that make up rape culture in North America, and discusses ways to initiate change.

It’s written in an easy, almost conversational style, and is highly accessible in terms of explaining, and demonstrating, exactly what is meant by the term ‘rape culture.’ It’s also startlingly real. I found myself flooded with a sense of recognition, the feeling that the author had distilled my own experiences, into just about every paragraph. This is a book that will have most women who have done any thinking about the dynamics of sexual assault saying ‘yes, yes, that’s it, exactly’ all the way through.

Harding begins with a brief summation of rape culture from the perspective of by far the most typical victims, women:

“In the preamble to their 1993 anthology Transforming a Rape Culture, feminist scholars Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth write, ‘In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.’ “

Continuing her discussion of rape culture, Harding presents and explodes a number of myths about rape, building again on earlier feminist thought:

“Like ‘rape culture,’ the concept of an identifiable set of ‘rape myths’first arose among feminists in the seventies, and has been refined and studied by social scientists ever since. In a 2012 paper published in Aggression and Violent Behavior, researchers Amy Grubb and Emily Turner explain, ‘Rape myths vary among societies and cultures. However, they consistently follow a pattern whereby, they blame the victim for their rape, express a disbelief in claims of rape, exonerate the perpetrator, and allude that only certain types of women are raped.’ “

First venturing into the supposedly “murky” area of consent, she points to research indicating that the common excuse that women fail to express lack of consent clearly enough is, essentially, a steaming pile of bullshit. In any other area of human interaction, men (like all other human beings) are perfectly capable of decoding polite demurrals as ‘noes’ - it’s only in the area of sexual advances that even plain statements become somehow insufficient. She also challenges the frequently expressed idea that having the obtain clear consent for each intensification of sexual activity “spoils the mood.”

Harding reminds the reader of all the things we know about rape - that it is about power, not sex; that it is a violation of a person’s autonomy and not a trivial act that means little to a sexually experience woman; that it is intentional, not accidental; that it is not something any one secretly wants; that men who rape do so because they like it and know they can get away with it; that all the advice about dressing and acting appropriately does nothing to forestall it. She talks about the ubiquity of victim-blaming and the perverse focus on how being charged and convicted of rape will affect the lives of rapists while dismissing the trauma experienced by those who are raped. She takes aim at the cultural assumption that when looking at strategies for rape prevention, it is somehow the responsibility of women to avoid rape, rather than the responsibility of men not to rape.

Harding also takes a close look at how the police and the legal and justice systems function - or far too often, don’t function - in a rape culture. She explores the myth, all too frequently held by police, that women often make false accusations of rape, and looks at how the refusal to accept and investigate sexual assault allegations as legitimate complaints allows rapists to continue committing crimes, endangering more women. As Harding notes, “The greatest challenge, though, is changing the culture. Both a law enforcement culture in which one former Philadelphia detective—­echoing Milledgeville’s Sergeant Blash—reportedly called Special Victims the “Lying Bitches Unit” and the larger society we all live in.”

She also explores the role of media - from popular music to film and television to video games - in creating snd perpetuating rape culture through the way women, sex and violence are portrayed. Including online social media in her discussion, she looks at the issue of online sexual harassment and the meanings of rape in gamer and ‘manosphere’ culture.

In her closing chapter, Harding talks about beginning to see changes in the general acceptance of rape culture, in the way more women were beginning to come forward, and the increase in conversations around the concept of enthusiastic consent, the idea that only yes means yes. The book was published in 2015, before the seachange that is #MeToo and #Time’sUp swept through the media. Each year, perhaps we put a few more cracks in the rape culture.