Reporting on sexual violence ‘inside the closet’: Masculinity,homosexuality and #MeToo

Methodology: Critical Discourse Analysis

We conducted a CDA of Australian news media articles, guided by our theoretical framework(s) of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005) and intelligibility (Butler, 2004). The use of CDA allowed us to examine how this gendered social order is sustained through the use of gendered ideology in discourse. It also allowed us to analyse how discourse not only reflects particular gendered realities, but how news media further (re)produce particular realities and norms (Xie, 2018). This methodology allowed us to examine how news media are (re)producing what is intelligible as sexual violence and who is intelligible as victims and perpetrators.

Method: news media analysis

As we explored earlier, news media are a particularly influential source of discourse surrounding sexual violence, therefore news media analysis provided an appropriate method. There is a significant gap in research examining news media representations of sexual violence in queer contexts. A substantial power of the news media is that they can choose which events to respond to at what time (Xie, 2018), and considering that sexual violence involving queer people is rarely reported, the small number of queer cases reported as part of #MeToo provides an important opportunity to analyse how these were being constructed. Specifically, our analysis examines the intertextual and interdiscursive aspects of news reporting including which voices were privileged, which were absent, whose quotes were used and the commentary provided on the case by journalists/authors. This allowed us to analyse the implicit ideology and power relationships created through reporting (Xie, 2018).

Sample

A purposive sample of Australian newspaper articles covering the three selected cases of Aziz Ansari, Kevin Spacey and Tom Ballard were used for this analysis (see ‘Case Studies’ section for an overview of each). This purposive sample was selected as they represented some of the few non-heteronormative cases that arose from the #MeToo movement, allowing us to address this gap in the literature on media reporting of sexual violence. The sample was restricted to Australian newspapers, and while the #MeToo movement was a global phenomenon, a focus on Australia allowed us to undertake an in-depth analysis of a small number of rich case studies. We included both ‘factual’ reporting of the incidents (39% of articles), as well as opinion articles and editorials (61% of articles) as these all form part of the cultural scaffolding of sexual violence (Gavey, 2005). However, only one article for the heteronormative Aziz Ansari case was ‘factual’ news reporting, with 92% of articles in this case being opinion and editorials.

Digital editions of the newspaper articles were collected through the online Factiva and ProQuest databases using the time constraint of October 2017 to July 2018. They were located using the keywords of the alleged perpetrator’s names: ‘Kevin Spacey’, ‘Aziz Ansari’, ‘Tom Ballard’ and by selecting the ‘sex crimes’ theme/category. All Australian newspapers were searched resulting in 50 articles being located. The website news.com.au was also searched using the alleged perpetrator names, and 3 articles that did not appear in the databases were collected (see Table 1 for final sample of newspapers). This then yielded 53 articles in total. Twelve repeat or unrelated articles were cleaned from the sample, leaving the final sample of articles as:

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Table 1.

Final sample of newspapers and number of articles.

Newspaper	Number of articles
The Australian	8
The Sydney Morning Herald	6
The Guardian	5
Herald Sun	5
The Advertiser	4
The Age	2
Australian Associated Press	2
Mail Online	2
The Daily Examiner	1
Financial Review	1
The Daily Telegraph	1
ABC News	1
The Bulletin	1
9 News	1

Procedure

NVivo software was used to code the news media articles, which began with an initial reading of all the data, and then a second reading in which themes and observations began to be developed. Our initial analysis was guided by our larger themes of sexual consent, gender and sexuality. We then broke these larger themes down into sub-themes through identifying patterns in the data, with references to patterns found in previous research on sexual violence reporting (Bryman, 2012: 581–584). These sub-themes were also guided by our theoretical frameworks, identifying how the articles made sense of the cases. We considered what stereotypes or norms about sexual violence, gender and sexuality the articles drew on or situated the cases in relation to in order to make these cases culturally ‘intelligible’ and how these did or did not reinforce hegemonic masculinity. These norms and stereotypes were identified with references to previous studies (see literature review) that have identified social and cultural norms around sexual violence, masculinity and homosexuality. These sub-themes are reflected in the presentation of our results and discussion below, including how sexual violence was constructed, how consent was constructed, how victim/survivors were portrayed, and how sexuality played into perpetrator portrayal.

Constructing sexual violence: ‘bad sex’ vs ‘sexual assault’

In the Aziz Ansari case, Ansari’s actions were framed by the majority of reporting as sitting outside the boundaries of ‘real’ sexual violence. Dominant media narratives instead constructed this case as ‘bad sex’ at worst, where Ansari perhaps ‘misread the mood’. However, the case was predominantly framed as a normative and acceptable heterosexual encounter. In The Daily Telegraph (source 7 - see Appendix 1 for list of all newspaper sources), the author states that this should not be considered sexual violence as ‘he didn’t handcuff her to the bed. He didn’t assault her’, employing the stereotype and myth that ‘real’ sexual violence must involve force. The author then states that Ansari is ‘not a criminal. He’s a man’, further reinforcing men as naturally sexually aggressive with pressure and coercion normal (heterosexual) male behaviour. This effectively constructs sexual violence in heteronormative contexts as bounded and binary (something either is or is not sexual violence), while presenting heteronormative sex as inherently (and acceptably) ‘messy’ and ambiguous (see Hindes and Fileborn, 2019 for a more in-depth discussion of Australian media reporting of the Ansari case).

This sits in stark contrast to the Spacey and Ballard cases (both alleged perpetrators being homosexual men) which, despite arguably also being messy and ambiguous (though to varying degrees, particularly in the Spacey case), were consistently constructed as constituting ‘real’ sexual violence. In the case of Spacey, this is likely also because the victim-survivor was a child at the time of the incident, meaning that the question of sexual consent (and the potential to frame the situation as simply ‘bad sex’ or a ‘date gone horribly wrong’) was not available as a narrative device for making this case ‘intelligible’. Notably, in the Ballard and Spacey cases, news media reporting tended to draw on legal language reaffirming the survivor’s experience as non-consensual and legitimate, even if they did not meet the threshold for a criminal standard of conduct (as was the case with Ballard). This is reflected through descriptors of the incident as ‘sexual assault’, ‘sexual misconduct’ and ‘indecent assault’. In a smaller number of instances, more colloquial descriptions of the (alleged) perpetrator’s actions were used, such as ‘kissed and fondled’ or ‘groped and lay him on a bed’.

Importantly, in comparison to reporting on the Ansari case, these narratives virtually never contained discourse that worked to undermine, dismiss, or downplay the seriousness of the sexual violence or the victim-survivor’s interpretations of what happened. Indeed, in Spacey’s case, the emphasis was often on his actions as a predator who (in the words of the author) ‘prey[s] on vulnerable people’ (Herald Sun, source 18). This works to place responsibility on the perpetrator rather than survivor (again in contrast to the Ansari case). For Spacey, we also begin to see the discursive linking of homosexuality with paedophilia through the author’s use of the phrase ‘fiddled about with children’ (The Australian, source 21), a framing which is deeply problematic (as we return to below) but also reaffirms the intelligibility of this case as ‘real’ violence through situating it in relation to the ‘monstrous’ figure of the paedophile. The collective effect of these dominant constructions is to position the male victims’ experiences as ‘real’ and intelligible violence, while Grace’s experience is made intelligible through relating the experience to that of ‘normal’ heterosex, thus not constituting ‘real’ violence. This demonstrates the difficulty in being able to conceptualise sexual violence as a continuum and to legitimate a broad spectrum of victim/survivors’ experiences (Kelly, 1988) when there is a discursive hierarchy of what ‘counts’. This hierarchy is not solely based on the acts themselves, but also based on the gender, sexuality and age of the victims and perpetrators.

Questioning consent: romantic persuasion vs aggressive homosexual pursuit

While some nuanced discourse was apparent in the reporting of Ansari around consent and gender, the majority of the articles perpetuate harmful stereotypes about sexual interactions between men and women, with the majority not recognising the case as non-consensual (see Hindes and Fileborn, 2019). For example, dominant narratives tended to present sexual ‘miscommunication’, token resistance (saying ‘no’ when you really mean ‘yes’), and the use of some coercion as normal (if not desirable) features of heterosex. The Sydney Morning Herald (source 8) author claimed this was a story of ‘males merely pressuring women into sex’, while the author of The Daily Telegraph (source 7) article claimed that this pressure is in fact desirable:

Here’s a woman’s truth about the reality of sex. There’s some persuasion involved, a lot of the time. And actually, a little persuasion is kinda nice.

In the majority of articles Ansari is never positioned as responsible for ensuring Grace was consenting. Instead, common victim blaming tropes were employed by authors of the articles, positioning Grace as responsible for the ‘unwanted’ sex:

The problem for Grace is she didn’t leave his apartment . . .

Grace could have spent more time getting to know Ansari before getting naked.

- The Australian (source 1)

Comparatively, 90% of articles reporting on the Ballard case accepted and legitimised the case as non-consensual, with only one author from The Bulletin (source 34) questioning the lack of verbal communication stating, ‘not once during the encounter did he actually say no’. None of the 19 articles covering the Kevin Spacey case questioned the issue of consent, with all of the articles reporting the details of the case as non-consensual. Again, this is likely due to the fact that the victim-survivor was a minor at the time of the offence, and legally, whether or not they consented is irrelevant. We do not suggest that the male survivor’s lack of verbal communication should be questioned, but rather raise this to highlight the difference in how the absence of clear verbal refusal is constructed across these cases. In the case of Ansari where the victim/survivor is a woman, there is a clear difference in how consent is constructed compared to the cases of Ballard and Spacey where the victim-survivors are male. When the victim/survivor is a woman there was more ambiguity in how consent is constructed, a greater focus on how her own actions contributed to the assault, more questions around her interpretation of events, and more sympathy for the perpetrator’s (in)ability to interpret consent.

The Ansari case is made intelligible as consensual through placing the case in relation to what would otherwise stereotypically be considered ‘normal’ heterosex. Queer sexual interactions, however, are less intelligible within these heteronormative frameworks, as there are fewer norms about queer sex that the Ballard and Spacey cases can be placed in relation to. Our analysis suggests that the news media overwhelmingly accepted the Ballard and Spacey cases as non-consensual and did not employ victim blaming tropes as was the case for the bulk of reporting on the Ansari case (see Hindes and Fileborn, 2019). Rather, we suggest that these cases were instead made ‘intelligible’ through placing them in relation to harmful stereotypes about homosexuality and masculinity as we explore below.

Constructing the victim-survivor: women as ‘angry’ and ‘dumb’ vs men as ‘traumatised’ and ‘scarred’

In this section, we move to consider how victim-survivors were constructed across each of the case studies. There were notable gendered differences at play: male survivors were systematically constructed as ‘legitimate’ victims, with the harms of their experiences taken seriously. In contrast, Grace’s victim status was routinely called into question, with her experience explicitly and implicitly undermined. Yet, despite this discrediting of women victim-survivors, sexual violence was simultaneously constructed as being a ‘heterosexual issue’. For example, women were more broadly positioned as victim-survivors by the authors in four of the articles covering the Spacey case, despite the victim-survivor being male:

I have never understood how forcing a woman into sex (either physically or by coercion) can in any way be considered fun.

Women are our mothers, our sisters, the little ones are our daughters. Show respect.

- Herald Sun (source 13)

We are moving towards a chaperone culture, in which women, delicate lambs that we are, must be protected at all times.

- The Australian (source 1)

This broader positioning of women as victims in articles that are ostensibly reporting on a queer and male victim of sexual violence erases the experiences of victims other than heterosexual women. It ignores that homosexual, bisexual and other men who have sex with men also experience pressure and coercion (Braun et al., 2009). As well as erasing queer experiences, it also reinforces the notion of women as potential ‘victims in waiting’, treating sexual assault as a non-negotiable reality that defines and controls women, and disregards individual agency (Naffine, 2014: 176). It may also be the case that references to women victim-survivors are used here to make these cases ‘intelligible’ in the absence of dominant discourses to draw on for queer male survivors. In other words, the issue of sexual violence comes to be understood or ‘knowable’ through the dominant narrative of ‘woman as victim’, working to resediment and stabilise this discursive construction in the face of experiences that unsettle it.

While articles covering Spacey positioned women as victims, and in need of protection, in contrast those on the Ansari case were hyper-critical of the woman victim-survivor, overtly discrediting and questioning the assault. Throughout the media coverage, the female victim/survivor is described as ‘angry’, ‘dumb’, ‘whining’, ‘clawing’, ‘cruel’, ‘vicious’, ‘unforgivable’ (see Hindes and Fileborn, 2019). In contrast, the claims of the male victim-survivor in the Spacey case were taken at face-value. There was little commentary regarding the victim-survivor; however, the small amount that did arise was sympathetic labelling him as ‘traumatised’ and ‘scarred’, with one article legitimising the victim’s freeze response. Again, this likely is due at least in part to the fact that the victim/survivor was underage at the time of the encounter. However, in the case of Tom Ballard 80% of articles similarly position the male victim-survivor as ‘traumatised’ and there is a strong focus on quotes from the victim-survivor detailing the specific harm the encounter caused to his mental health including ‘suicidal thoughts’ and ‘substance abuse issues’. While two articles do subtly question the victim-survivor, with The Australian (source 40) author calling what happened ‘unsubstantiated accusations’, and The Bulletin (source 34) author saying ‘not once during the encounter did he actually say no’, the remainder of the articles position the victim-survivor as heroic for coming forward through the use of direct quotes from him:

‘It’s a risk speaking out about sexual assault. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done. . . . It’s important to tell people if you’ve been sexually assaulted because you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of’, he said. (The Advertiser (source 35))

‘Mr Roberts encourages survivors of sexual assault to not be ashamed. “If you tell the truth, all the right people will be on your side”’, he said. (9 News (source 37))

Thus, in the Ballard case the survivor’s actions are made ‘intelligible’ through norms of hegemonic masculinity, which work to reposition the survivor as brave and heroic for speaking out about his experience. When read alongside the media reporting of Grace, the comments of Ballard’s survivor work to (though unintentionally) further discredit the voices of women survivors whose experiences are typically treated with considerably more suspicion. By implication, women survivors do not have ‘all the right people on their side’, and by extension of this logic are not ‘telling the truth’. In all, this media reporting works to construct male victim-survivors as credible, believable, and as having experienced legitimate and understandable harms, while simultaneously being erased as victims at times. Women victim-survivors, on the other hand, are always already positioned as victims, yet are not credible or trustworthy. The credibility of the male survivor in the Ballard case must also be situated within the context of the case involving a homosexual perpetrator and heterosexual survivor. As we explore in further detail below, this survivor’s experience may be made to be intelligible as violence because it violates norms of the hegemonic, masculine body as bounded, impenetrable, and sexually agentic – reminiscent of the ‘gay panic defense’ discussed earlier.

Focusing on sexuality in queer cases: constructing the deviant homosexual

In the Ballard and Spacey cases – which were outside of a heteronormative context – instead of an explicit focus on gender like in the Ansari case, media reporting emphasised the sexuality of those involved. However, while this focus on sexuality was not explicitly gendered, the discourse used to talk about sexuality clearly constructs ideologies around male sexuality, men’s bodies, and men as victim/survivors of sexual assault.

Throughout the reporting on Kevin Spacey 12/19 articles draw focus to his homosexuality. Two articles conflate homosexuality with sexual deviance, and one conflates homosexuality with paedophilia. In the same paragraph that the author of The Advertiser (source 22) claims ‘very few have been convinced’ [of him being heterosexual], the author also states (without any source) that Spacey is friends with a ‘convicted paedophile financier’. Pairing this unrelated fact with discussion about his homosexuality constructs there somehow being a link between Spacey’s sexuality and his friendship with a paedophile. The same article also quotes fives stories from ‘anonymous online sources’ of Spacey flirting with and propositioning men. While none of these stories are claiming to be sexually violent, the author frames them in such a way that Spacey’s homosexuality appears to be sexually deviant by using language such as ‘another alleged incident’. It is worth noting here, however, that some scholars (Eguchi, 2018: 100) have critiqued Spacey himself for playing in to constructs of queer ‘deviancy’ as a ‘deflection of sexual misconduct allegations against him’, while simultaneously reproducing the logics of rape culture (Enck, 2018). As Eguchi (2018) argues, by disclosing his sexuality ‘in conjunction with his apologia for Rapp’ Spacey ‘rhetorically reaffirms associations of homosexuality with sexual sin, along with paedophilia and unwanted sex’ (p. 100). As such, it may not be possible to disentangle the reproduction of these discourses in media reporting from Spacey’s own reliance on them in his apology (and, other queer perpetrators named through #MeToo similarly drew on discourses of ‘queer deviancy’ in their ‘defense’ – see Ison, 2019). Nonetheless, these findings reflect those of previous studies which have also identified a tendency for news media to rhetorically link and conflate homosexuality with pedophilia and sexual deviance (Alwood, 1996; Russell and Kelly, 2003).

One author in The Australian (Source 21) used the word ‘gay’ 13 times in their coverage of the Spacey case, and in a variety of contexts which position homosexuality negatively, implicitly suggesting that homosexuality is somehow connected to the perpetration of sexual violence. For example,

‘The moral of the tale is you can’t sexually assault young men and teenagers, particularly from inside the closet and get away with it’.

The author also suggests that other actors who are ‘in the closet’ may be sexual predators, and antagonistically says ‘come out, come out, wherever you are . . . or someone is coming to get you’. This reinforces the harmful stereotype that homosexual men are sexual predators, possessing an ‘uncontrollable and voracious appetite for sex, particularly with young “straight” men’ (Sewell, 2001: 58). Sewell further argues that homosexuality is often depicted as an extravagant and sensationalised caricature (much like The Australian and The Advertiser depict above), constructing homosexuality as a force that must be contained, and a threat to heterosexuality. This positioning of homosexuality as deviant and dangerous continues to relegate it to a lower hierarchical status between the masculinities (Connell, 2005), something that becomes particularly apparent when juxtaposed against cases such as Ansari’s where heterosexual masculinity is overwhelmingly protected (Hindes and Fileborn, 2019).

While Spacey’s sexuality is constructed as a causal factor for his sexually violent behaviours, The Australian (source 21) author also stated that:

Gay men that I knew in their late 20s and early 30s felt flattered when he [Spacey] touched their bottom in the Groucho Club. They’d been touched by an Oscar winner, a Tony winner, a Hollywood star. They felt elevated. This is how yesterday’s flattery is today’s disgust.

The use of ‘yesterday’s flattery is today’s disgust’ normalises this type of non-consensual behaviour within the gay community. So, while the article conflates sexual violence with homosexuality, it also normalises non-consensual behaviour when it is between two homosexual men. This reflects research that suggests pressure and coercion is normalised between men who have sex with men (Braun et al., 2009; McKie, 2015). However, Braun et al. (2009) argue this is not because gay cultures or gay sexualities endorse or promote coercive behaviours, but rather it reflects broader hegemonic masculinities that construct male sexuality as ‘always wanting’ (p. 120). This phrase also implies that claims of sexual violence may be the result of ‘consensual’ encounters that have been retrospectively re-interpreted as violence, playing into the trope that victim-survivors make allegations on the basis of consensual but regretted sex.

In the reporting of Ballard, we do not see the construction of male sexuality as ‘always wanting’ or the normalisation of non-consensual sex when it is a heterosexual man receiving a sexual advance by a homosexual man. Thirty percent of the articles covering the Ballard case use the quote from the victim-survivor ‘it was a traumatising experience for many reasons, one of those being I’m a heterosexual’. This constructs the harm of sexual violence as arising from the sexuality of those involved, and the apparent violation of gendered norms as they relate to sexuality. In other words, sexual violence is harmful in this case because it violates the hegemonically masculine body’s status as bounded and impenetrable. Such reporting works to re-constitute hegemonic masculinity in a way that amplifies the apparent harms of sexual violence vis-a-vis the transgression of hegemonic masculinity. The survivor, in this case, suffers an additional ontological harm that negates his status as suitably masculine, reducing him to the subordinate status typically associated with women and gay men.

Further, in the case of Ballard, the victim-survivor is only criticised by one author for not saying ‘no’ verbally, and there is significantly less (in most cases zero) expectation placed on him by the media to have responded ‘appropriately’. Despite 78% of articles reporting on the Ballard case quoting the police response that it was ‘outside the confines of the law’, none of these articles overtly used this to question his victim status. In fact, 44% of the articles used quotes from the victim/survivor retelling how harmful the experience was, working to provide legitimacy to the claim, despite the police response. In addition, 22% of the articles quote the police response alongside quoting Ballard denying the claims, however no overt judgement is made about the legitimacy of the victim/survivor. While the Ansari case had arguably similar circumstances (but no confirmation from the police that his actions were not criminal), the same victim blaming myths are not applied to the Ballard victim-survivor. That a heterosexual man would not be desiring of sexual advances from a gay man is an unquestioned (and unquestionable) assumption here – the survivors’ actions in the Ballard case do not warrant interrogation as they are already rendered intelligible through the norms of hegemonic masculinity. Again, this is not to suggest that his actions should be questioned, but rather to illustrate the differential ways in which gender is operationalised across the Ballard and Ansari cases.

Rather than questioning the victim-survivor’s behaviours, there is a focus on the victim-survivor in the Ballard case being a heterosexual man who received an unwanted sexual advance from a homosexual man, with his heterosexuality increasing the trauma of the situation. This is reflective of studies of blame attribution in which homophobic attitudes can determine how much blame is attributed to the victim or offender (for an overview see: Tomei and Cramer, 2016). Just as negative and stereotypical views of women increase their perceived culpability in their own victimisation, negative views towards homosexuality have been found to increase the culpability of a victim or perpetrator who is homosexual (Tomei and Cramer, 2016: 225). In the Ballard reporting, we see a focus on the harm caused to the victim, rather than questioning victim-survivor’s behaviour as we see in the Ansari reporting. This is reflective of homophobic attitudes that diminish the heterosexual man’s responsibility to have acted ‘appropriately’ in such a situation, instead putting the focus on the ‘predatory and lascivious’ homosexual predator (Golder, 2004: 35).