Abstract
This article attacks David Benatar’s claim made in his 2012 book, The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys, that when an individual is the victim of violence it does not matter whether his or her perpetrator is of the same or a different sex. By exploring two related yet distinct phenomena, well documented in the empirical psychological literature, that I call “shattering” and “fragmentation,” I argue that when a woman is raped, it does matter that her rapist is male, given that her situation as a woman under patriarchy is partly constitutive of the harm that she suffers.
In David Benatar’s 2012 book, The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys, he makes the following claim: When men (or women) are the victims of violence, it does not really matter whether the perpetrator is of the same sex or a different sex. What matters is that they have been attacked. (p. 123)
Benatar makes this claim in an attempt to argue that men are disproportionately and unjustifiably discriminated against when it comes to violent acts, and in an attempt to dispel the problem of sexual violence, which is perpetrated primarily against women, he must resort to the claim, above, that when one is attacked, it does not matter whether one’s perpetrator is male or female, but rather just that one has been attacked. This claim fails to recognize that cases of sexual violence differ in certain crucial respects from other cases of violence, and that given the nature of sexual violence as it occurs within patriarchal society, rape harms differently sexed individuals in different ways, where these harms are partly informed by the sex of one’s attacker. In particular, it fails to recognize that women qua women are especially vulnerable to rape, are in fact disproportionately the victims of rape, are typically raped by men, and are harmed in ways that are unique to their situation as women under patriarchy.
The main aim of this article, then, is to provide an account of two of the harms that can be caused by male-on-female rape in patriarchal societies, which shows that women, when they find themselves the victims of male-on-female rape, experience the harm of rape in certain ways that are related particularly to their situation as women under patriarchy. Although I focus on the harm of male-on-female rape in this article, it follows from my argument that the harms of male-on-female, male-on-male, female-on-male, and female-on-female rapes differ from one another in certain crucial respects in accordance with the sex of the perpetrator and the victim. In providing the following account, then, I hope to show that Benatar’s claim is, at worst, false, and, at best, highly controversial.
I will begin by describing the two ways in which I take rape to be experienced as harmful by survivors, which I call “shattering” and “fragmentation,” arguing that even if we accept that both men and women can be harmed by rape in these two ways, the lived experience of these harms is qualitatively different in each case given different associations with masculinity and femininity and different shared features in the lives of men and women under patriarchy. I will then describe in detail the ways in which the lived experience of shattering and fragmentation for women is unique to their situation as women under patriarchy. That is, I will explain how the situation of women under patriarchy is—and, in particular, how associations with femininity and shared features in the lives of women are—partly constitutive of women’s lived experience of shattering and fragmentation in the aftermath of rape.
Three distinct matters should be noted before we proceed. First, the account of women’s situation given here is underpinned by the philosophy of the existential phenomenologists. Phenomenology refers to the study of experience and, in particular, to the constitution of meaning in experience or what the phenomenologists term “lived experience.” The account I offer here, then, is based on a conceptual exploration of the phenomenological “lived experience” of the harm of rape for women who exist within material, historical, and socio-cultural settings—who are situated within patriarchy. The phenomenological framework that I adopt allows us to capture shared, fundamental features in the lives of women, such as the pervasive nature of sexual objectification in women’s lives, which not only creates an atmosphere of threat under which women live as especially vulnerable to rape but also often results in a woman’s coming to experience a degree of alienation from her body. These shared features in the lives of women as embodied underpin, I claim, the structural features of the lived experience and harm of male-on-female rape for women.
Second, although the argument I present here does not necessarily rely on my particular understanding of patriarchy, I take patriarchy to be, first, a system in which male and female, masculine and feminine, and men and women are held in binary and hierarchical opposition with one another—where women are positioned as “other” and inferior to men—and, second, based on the rule of hegemonic patriarchal ideology. The latter claim is particular to the account of patriarchy that I have defended elsewhere (see, for instance, Kelland, 2011), but is not uncontroversial, despite its being taken up in certain ways by post-structuralist and critical theories. On my account of patriarchy as hegemonic, socially constructed gender norms, values, and roles come, to a certain extent, to be internalized as natural and inevitable rather than socially constructed and changeable, and inform the ways in which both men and women experience the world and understand their experiences. However, understanding patriarchal ideology as hegemonic is not, I think, required for me to argue in this article that the lived experiences of male and female rape survivors differ in certain crucial qualitative respects, and so, for this reason, I will not go into further detail about hegemony in this article.
Finally, I am aware of recent feminist critiques of “victim-feminism.” A number of concerns have been raised in recent feminist work that in various ways target accounts that focus on the harm of, or trauma induced by, rape. Nicola Gavey (2009), for example, has argued that such accounts tend to either explicitly or implicitly emphasize the vulnerability and passivity of the female victim, which, she argues, reifies the very structures and gendered identities that give rise to rape. In other work, Gavey (1999) argues that understanding sexual violence as victimization problematizes our ability to make sense of sexually violent acts that do not result in an experience of victimization or trauma. She is not here denying the importance of work that aims to understand the harms of rape when they are experienced, but rather signals the political importance of acknowledging that not all rape “victims” are traumatized, which might make room, she argues, for narratives of resistance. Sharon Lamb (1999) argues further that our current conceptualization of victimhood implies a “long-standing suffering” or pathology that “[robs] victims of agency” (p. 109). She claims that understanding this “pathology” as arising out of external circumstances comes close to understanding raped women as “damaged goods.” Like Gavey, Lamb emphasizes the importance of acknowledging alternative experiences of sexual violence and claims that “when resilience is ignored, a traditional view of women as the weaker sex, in need of protection and special services, is reinforced” (p. 116). In response to these critiques, I wish to emphasize that I am neither claiming that all rape victims experience the harms I describe below nor claiming that an experience of sexual violence necessarily leaves one victimized or traumatized. Furthermore, to focus, as I do, on understanding the lived experience of the harm of rape does not entail that women are essentially passive or weak, but, rather, emphasizes the fact that the associations with femininity are the socially constructed result of patriarchy that partly constitutes the harm of rape when rape is experienced as harmful or victimizing. That is, my argument in what follows stresses both the importance of understanding how rape can be experienced as harmful by women living in patriarchal societies and how this harm differs qualitatively based on the sex of the perpetrator and the “victim.”
Lived Experiences of the Harm of Rape
In the next two sections, I explore two phenomena that I call shattering and fragmentation—which both impinge on personhood and agency by cleaving apart subjectivity and embodiment. 1 Typically, the phenomenon that I call “shattering” refers to a challenging or destruction of certain fundamental beliefs that a survivor has about the world and her safety in it, and “fragmentation” refers to a particular kind of change to an individual’s self-identity: A fragmented individual’s self-identity fails to reflect a fundamental part of what makes her who she is. Both phenomena, I argue, should be understood phenomenologically as lived experiences. In this section, I describe these phenomena in their barest forms, briefly elucidating what each term means and providing some examples from the literature to support my description of each. In the section that follows, I look in particular at the lived experiences of shattering and fragmentation for women living in patriarchal societies and explore women’s lived experience of these phenomena in terms of certain shared fundamental features in the lives of women under patriarchy. Again, I am not arguing that only women experience shattering and fragmentation. It seems clear to me that both men and women, when raped, can come to experience these harms. However, I am claiming that the lived experience of these harms will differ for men and women in certain crucial qualitative respects given different shared fundamental features in the lives of men and women, which themselves depend on the different associations made with masculinity and femininity and subsequent power relations in patriarchal ideology. I am also not claiming that either phenomenon is more applicable to men or women. This claim is not only beyond the scope of this article, but, moreover, is not essential to combating Benatar’s claim, which requires only that I show that the sex of perpetrator and victim is relevant to the harms experienced in the aftermath of rape. 2
Shattering
The phenomenon that I call shattering is based on the insights of Susan Brison, bell hooks, and Louise du Toit who, in varying ways, argue that the trauma of rape challenges or destroys certain fundamental beliefs held by the survivor relating to herself, others, and the world in which she lives. For Brison (2002), When [a] trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted . . . it not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it . . . it also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity . . . one can no longer be oneself even to oneself, since the self exists fundamentally in relation to others. (p. 40)
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For hooks (2000), The world one has most intimately known, in which one felt relatively safe and secure, has collapsed. Another world has come into being, one filled with terrors, where it is difficult to distinguish between a safe situation and a dangerous one. A gesture of love and a violent, uncaring gesture. There is a feeling of vulnerability, exposure, that never goes away, that lurks beneath the surface. (p. 209)
And, finally, for du Toit (2009), The victim of rape . . . has her home destroyed in the attack where home stands for both a safe place and for feeling at home in one’s body, as well as for the ability to project oneself in the world (to be a subject in the full sense of the word) because one has a secure place to stand from where one can project oneself outwards. (p. 99)
All three emphasize the destruction of certain fundamental assumptions about oneself, others, and the world that result from rape. Both Brison (2002) and hooks (2000) argue that survivors of rape experience a fundamentally altered relationship with the world and the people in it—rape “shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it” (p. 40) and transforms the world into a place “filled with terrors” (p. 209). Du Toit goes further to argue that rape also alters one’s relationship to one’s sense of the self, and in particular to one’s sense of oneself as an effective agent acting in the world. For Du Toit (2009), rape is “a form of domination [that] is world destructive (and, concomitantly, destructive of one’s sense of self and one’s relations with others)” (pp. 76-77, emphasis added). Rape destroys, or aims to destroy, she argues, one’s sense of the self in relation to the world, which she calls “spirit injury,” one’s sense of the self in relation to one’s others, which she calls “victim complicity,” one’s sense of one’s relations with others in relation to one’s world and in relation to one’s self, which she calls “loss of voice” and “loss of moral rage,” respectively, and one’s sense of the world in relation to oneself and in relation to one’s others, which she calls “dereliction” or “homelessness” (p. 79).
Empirical support for these claims can be found in the work of, for example, psychologists Mary Koss and Mary Harvey (1991) who discuss what they call five schemas that have been found to be challenged by rape—namely, safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy.
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They argue that an individual untouched by victimization may believe that she is capable of protecting herself, that her perceptions and judgments can be trusted, that she can solve problems and meet new challenges, that she has worth or value, and is able to care for herself. However, trauma in the form of victimization has, they argue, been found to lead to negative alterations to these schemas—leading the same individual to believe that she is unable to care for or protect herself—both in general and in particular, from future harm—that she is unable to make important life decisions and is weak, helpless, bad, evil, or destructive. The findings from Koss and Harvey’s work are consistent with the claims put forward by Brison, hooks, and du Toit that rape can challenge, if not destroy, certain of a survivor’s fundamental assumptions and beliefs about herself, others, and the world in which she lives. Further support can be found in the social psychological research of Nicola Gavey (2007) who reports, from an interview with a rape victim, that the rape brought about a more existential psychological crisis whereby she lost confidence in her whole system of religious values and beliefs and her sense of who she was in that system of meaning . . . Not only was [her] identity completely disrupted by the rape, but the future course of her life took shape in that moment, sending her along a path in which her choices and opportunities were curtailed and in which she had to struggle not to lose her whole sense of self. (p. 241)
Fragmentation
“Fragmentation” refers to a particular kind of change to an individual’s self-identity: A fragmented individual’s self-identity fails to reflect a fundamental part of what makes an individual who she is. My description of this phenomenon should not be taken to be a discovery on my part of an experience typically suffered by rape survivors—which would require far more evidence than I present here—rather, I am interested in exploring a phenomenon briefly described by psychologists Keith Bletzer and Mary Koss in their study of individuals’ experiences after rape. Bletzer and Koss (2006) report that [the] language that women use to describe what [they] call after-rape generally acknowledges an inalterable shift in the survivor’s self-identity that pervades the life of a woman who has been raped. (p. 9, emphasis added) It is precisely this change or “inalterable shift in the survivor’s self-identity” that I am interested in here. Not all changes to self-identity classify as fragmentation. To say that an individual’s self-identity has become fragmented is not just to say that her self-identity has changed; rather, it is to point to a particular kind of change—the change that results from an individual’s failing to reflect a fundamental part of herself in her self-identity.
In particular, I am interested in a claim made by Brison (2002) in the aftermath of her own experience of rape, which captures precisely the phenomenon that interests me in terms of fragmentation—the separating out of the individual’s embodiment from her self-identity. This type of fragmentation is especially significant in light of phenomenological claims about the importance of the body, as representing sexual difference, to both the subjectivity and situation of women.
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She claims that “survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before they were traumatized” (p. 38). Describing her own experience, Brison writes, I was no longer the same person I had been before the assault, and one of the ways in which I seemed changed was that I had a different relationship with my body. My body was now perceived as an enemy . . . and as a site of increased vulnerability. (p. 44, emphasis added)
The phenomenon described here by Brison is one in which the bodily self has come to be entirely separated off from self-identity—the body has come to be seen as an enemy and as distinct from the “real” self. This is the phenomenon, then, that I am interested in here—the experience of the body as an enemy, which Brison describes, as an instance of the phenomenon described by Bletzer and Koss (2006) above—namely, as one particular incarnation of what Bletzer and Koss describe as an inalterable shift in the survivor’s self-identity that pervades the life of a rape survivor.
Shattering and Fragmentation for Women
Remember that although shattering and fragmentation in their bare forms described above can be experienced by both male and female rape survivors, what I will discuss in this section is the particular instantiation of these harms as lived by female rape survivors in patriarchal societies. The account that I develop in this section depends crucially on the particular situation of women living in patriarchal societies, because this situation, I argue, is partly constitutive of the lived experience of the harm of male-on-female rape insofar as certain shared fundamental features in the lives of women under patriarchy can result in certain assumptions and beliefs that underpin women’s lived experience of shattering and fragmentation. To describe the particular lived experiences of shattering and fragmentation for women, I must first, then, briefly elaborate on what I take these shared fundamental features to be.
The Situation and Shared Fundamental Features in the Lives of Women
The situation of women under patriarchy has very real and dire consequences for the lives of women 6 ; among these, as I have argued elsewhere, (Kelland, 2011) are the pervasive sexual objectification of women’s bodies, the resulting alienation that women typically come to experience in relation to their bodies, and an atmosphere of threat under which women live as especially vulnerable to rape and sexual violence at the hands of men.
To elucidate, the sexual objectification of women by men plays a fundamental role in women’s situation under patriarchy; if the ideal to be achieved by women is femininity, and femininity is aligned with passivity—the nature of objects or inert things—then to be a woman under patriarchy, prima facie, involves being seen and treated as an object by men.
Martha Nussbaum proposes that there are at least seven notions involved in the idea of treating as an object. These include treating a person as a tool for one’s own purposes (instrumentality), as lacking in agency (inertness), fungible, violable, and perhaps as owned by another, and denying that person’s autonomy or self-determination and subjectivity. Of this list, the sexual objectification of women by men prima facie satisfies the instrumentality, fungibility, and denial of subjectivity features of objectification. Moreover, while the sexual objectification of women by men prima facie satisfies these features, it also threatens to satisfy, at some further time, other features from this list, namely, the violation of autonomy, inertness, violability, and, under certain circumstances, ownership features of objectification. This is due to the fact that to be sexually objectified—to be treated as nothing other than a generic, sexual object whose experience and feelings need not be taken into account—threatens further degradation, such as rape, where the victim is treated as instrumental, fungible, and, sometimes, owned, and experiences her autonomy and boundary integrity as violated.
The sexual objectification of women’s bodies and the perpetual gaze fixed upon these bodies can come to be internalized by women themselves, which then results in a sense of alienation from the body. 7 For if the sexual objectification of women by men has the content ascribed to it and women, to some degree or another, internalize this (male) gaze, then women are susceptible to viewing their own bodies as vulnerable and violable. However, a body that has come to be seen as vulnerable and potentially violable is estranged from the self. 8 The sexual objectification of women, then, not only results in alienation from the body but also, I argue, creates an atmosphere of threat under which women are especially vulnerable to rape.
The threat of rape is particularly significant—it is a threat that is grounded in what it means to be a woman according to patriarchal ideology. To be threatened with rape is not only to have one’s personhood threatened—as may be the case in other non-rape cases of violence—but also to have one’s personhood threatened in virtue of one’s sex. This, then, is the content of the threat of rape; that women qua women are the kinds of creatures that it is permissible to treat as instrumental, fungible, inert, and violable.
The claim that women live with the threat of rape is not itself an original claim. Tim Beneke (1982) claims that “rape and the threat of rape pervades the lives of women” (p. 325), and Ann Cahill (2001) claims that “women’s bodily experiences . . . tend to incorporate at a basic level an assumption of the threat of rape, to the extent that it forms a kind of backdrop for daily, even trivial decisions” (p. 121). However, although the claim itself is not original, to spell it out, as I have, in terms of its relationship with the sexual objectification of women under patriarchy, is new and allows us to ascribe content to the threat.
Shattering
When describing the phenomenon of shattering above, I referred to accounts that claim that the experience of rape challenges or destroys certain fundamental beliefs and assumptions about oneself, others, and the world in which one lives. However, although shattering as destruction captures part of the harm of the experience of rape, I argue that an essential part of the phenomenon of shattering for women is played by a confirmation of certain ideological beliefs—of beliefs that women (consciously or unconsciously) hold as a result of their situation as women under patriarchy. Shattering, then, is constituted both by the challenging (or destruction) of certain beliefs and the confirmation of certain ideological beliefs. On the account of shattering that I propose in this section, rape is also shattering because it confirms certain ideological assumptions and beliefs that female rape survivors (consciously or unconsciously) hold as a result of their situation as women under patriarchy.
To elucidate, if the threat of rape is a shared feature in the lives of women, then the fulfillment of this threat could plausibly be seen to play a central role in explaining how rape comes to be experienced as shattering by women—precisely because the fulfillment of the threat of rape not only confirms women’s apparent vulnerability and violability, by confirming the content of the sexually objectifying gaze, but also confirms the status of women qua women as second-class citizens under patriarchy, citizens who are especially vulnerable to rape.
Male-on-female rape, then, can be seen as a direct enactment of how women are seen under patriarchy; it is a confirmation not only of the meanings attached to women’s bodies by patriarchal society but also of the content of the threat created by the sexual objectification of women under patriarchy, and as a confirmation of these meanings, rape can shatter the necessary trust that a woman must place in others, and particularly in men, her assumption that the world is a relatively safe and secure place and, importantly, her assumption that she is able to protect herself, make good decisions, and act effectively in the world according to her own will. Brison (2002) writes of her own experience of rape, Although I experienced and remembered my assault under a wide variety of descriptions, it was, perhaps because of the cultural context, easiest for me to categorize the assault as a gender-motivated bias crime. Not only did the assault resonate with my postmemory of rape, confirming that, yes, women are all vulnerable to sexual violence, but the immediate aftermath heightened my sense of helplessness as a woman . . . I felt like a pawn—a helpless, passive victim—caught up in a ghastly game in which some men ran around trying to kill women and others went around trying to save them. (pp. 89-90 [emphasis added])
On my account, to be raped is not only or even primarily to be treated as an object—one cannot humiliate or degrade an object—it is crucially to be treated as a woman, that is, treated as if one is passive, submissive, inert, instrumental, fungible, and violable—the content of both women’s alienation from their bodies and the threat of rape itself. Cahill (2011) is sympathetic to this claim. In her recent book (2011), Overcoming Objectification, she writes, One cannot rape an inanimate object; nor does rape turn a victim into an inanimate object. She remains, painfully, an embodied being, vulnerable to harm, yes, but a subject nevertheless . . . Yes, her subjectivity is (temporarily) eclipsed, but in some ways that is the point: she must have a subjectivity that can be eclipsed, she must occupy the role of “person” or “subject” in order for her assailant to feel the thrill of violence. (pp. 136-139; see also Cahill, 2009)
To be raped is to be treated as a woman because the very meanings associated with being a woman in patriarchal ideology, and which partly constitute the content of both women’s typical alienation from their bodies and the threat of rape itself, are given expression in the act of rape. 9 Rape fulfills the threat created by sexual objectification and in so doing confirms the second-class status of women as a social collective in relation to men as a group under patriarchy. If this is the case, then it seems plausible that living through rape could bring the victim to become aware of her low status as a woman under patriarchy.
This account shows us how the fulfillment of the threat of rape undermines the victim’s trust—beliefs in herself, others, and the world—most notably her beliefs in her ability, as a woman, to protect herself, trust others, and feel safe in the world—and is also reflective of the confirmation or reinforcement of certain of women’s ideological beliefs, beliefs that result from living under patriarchy. 10
My account of shattering as both challenging and confirming should not be seen as counterintuitive. Imagine, for example, that one has a psychological fear of being abandoned. This fear, even if it pervades one’s subjective life, if confirmed, would be no less destructive. The individual, in this case, has in mind what the worst is, but when the worst presents itself, when it actually happens, when this individual is in fact abandoned, the worst is made real—the individual’s pervasive psychological fear of being abandoned is confirmed, and any slight amount of trust placed in others is shattered. Similarly, although women live with the threat of rape, the fulfillment of this threat (and in particular, the enactment and confirmation of the content of both women’s typical alienation from their bodies and the threat of rape, as well as the status of women qua women) confirms the worst—that women are, under patriarchy, second-class citizens who are especially violable and vulnerable to rape.
Fragmentation
In the “Fragmentation” subsection under the “Lived Experiences of the Harm of Rape” section, I described fragmentation as an individual’s failure to reflect a fundamental part of herself in her self-identity. Fragmentation, I claimed, could be seen as a particularly significant subset of shattering—namely, shattering as it pertains to self-identity. Shattering, as we have seen, partly involves the confirmation of certain ideologically created assumptions and beliefs, and fragmentation involves the confirmation of ideologically created assumptions and beliefs about the body in particular, resulting in the shattering of the individual’s self-identity with respect to the importance placed on embodiment. Recall that I am particularly interested in Brison’s claim that in the aftermath of her rape, she came to experience her body as an enemy and as that which made her vulnerable to the kind of treatment she endured.
Properly understanding this claim, I believe, relies on an appreciation of the typical woman’s alienation from her body. What occurs in alienation—the othering of the body—is, I claim, but one step away from the sort of fragmentation I am particularly interested in here—namely, the failure to reflect one’s embodiment in one’s self-identity. While an alienated woman is estranged from her body, a fragmented woman, in the particular case that I am interested in, has come to view her body as her enemy, and so as fundamentally alien to herself. This particular kind of fragmentation can be explained, I argue, by combining women’s typical alienation from their bodies with our understanding of the experience of shattering as partly involving the confirmation of the content of both women’s typical alienation from their bodies and the threat of rape as well as of women’s status as second-class citizens under patriarchy—all of which depend, in important ways, on the view of the female body endorsed by patriarchal ideology. In the confirmation of these assumptions and beliefs, the alienation that women typically experience from their bodies is compounded; the confirmation that her body does indeed make her vulnerable to rape, is violable, and positions her as a second-class citizen under patriarchy results in the experience of her body as an enemy—results, that is, in her coming to reject her body as fundamental to her self-identity. The female victim of rape can come to view her body as fundamentally alien to herself in an effort to protect herself-as-subjectivity from the confirmed meanings associated with her body-as-female. As a result, what she takes to be her “real” self fails to reflect her embodiment precisely because it is her body that imbues her existence with immanence and vulnerability and conflicts with her conception of herself as a transcendent subject.
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that although rape may harm differently sexed individuals in similar ways, we must recognize that the lived experience of these harms is qualitatively different for each sex. The bulk of the article was devoted to two distinct but related phenomena commonly experienced by rape victims—shattering and fragmentation. 11 I have proposed that both be seen as lived experiences of the harm of rape and have provided accounts of shattering and fragmentation, both generally and particularly concerning the lived experience of female survivors of male-on-female rape.
This account of women’s lived experience of shattering and fragmentation relies on shared features in the lives of women, which are particular to the situation of women qua women under patriarchy. The lived experience of the harm of male-on-female rape is partly constituted by the situation of women as a collective under patriarchy. That is, the alienation that women typically come to experience from their bodies as well as the threat of rape are constituted in part by the meanings associated with the female body that are given expression in the place, meaning, and pervasiveness of sexual objectification in the lives of women. That these are able to contribute to the experience of shattering along with the confirmation of the content of both alienation and the threat of rape, as well as of women’s status qua women under patriarchy, means that the particular explanations I have offered of both shattering and fragmentation are only applicable in cases of female rape survivors.
Moreover, if we accept that the harm of male-on-female rape is partly constituted by the situation of women, it seems plausible to think that the harm of male-on-male or female-on-male rape would be partly constituted by the situation of men under patriarchy—that the lived experience of these harms would differ qualitatively given, for example, different associations between masculinity and femininity and varying power dynamics in these cases. 12 However, if this is the case, then Benatar’s claim that “it does not really matter whether [one’s] perpetrator is of the same sex or a different sex” is, at worst, false, and at best, highly controversial.
A concern could be raised that on my account, it is difficult to keep separate the possible effects of rape from the effects of ideology. However, I do not take this to be a problem for my account. On the account I am offering of the lived experience of the harm of male-on-female rape in patriarchal societies, ideology plays a central role. 13 Indeed, the ideological beliefs of a female rape victim underpin the lived experience of this harm—they are present in alienation, shattering, and fragmentation. Alienation results from the internalization of the sexually objectifying gaze of the (male) other—a gaze that reflects the very meanings associated with the female body under patriarchy and takes these to “justify” the practice of sexual objectification itself. It is because the female body is taken to be object-like that the treatment of this body as instrumental, for instance, seems natural and inevitable. Shattering-as-confirmation reinforces these ideological beliefs and the combination of alienation and shattering-as-confirmation—both underpinned by ideological beliefs—results in fragmentation. Ideology, then, plays a crucial role in the way that rape can affect a female survivor. The potential effects of rape on a female rape survivor are, on my account, intimately connected with the effects on most women of patriarchal ideology.
My account does leave room open for Benatar’s claim to be right in non-patriarchal societies, because given the role that patriarchal ideology and practice plays in my account of the harm of male-on-female rape, the absence of patriarchy could entail that the sex of one’s attacker would cease to matter. However, unfortunately, this is almost universally not the case. Most women today live in societies that remain for the most part patriarchal; and while this remains the case, the sex of one’s rapist will continue to play a role in the harms caused by rape and sexual violence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the enormously helpful comments of two anonymous referees for Journal of Interpersonal Violence as well as feedback on work used in this article from Rosalyn Diprose, Ann Cahill, Louise du Toit, Ward E. Jones, and Thomas Martin.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: Financial support for this research was provided by the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.