Sunday, June 24, 2018

Thoughts on “Droit du Seigneur”, “Rape Culture”, and Being Trained to Be a Victim


I recently read a story about a young girl of middle school age who punched a boy in the eye for taking an unwarranted liberty like patting her bottom or lifting her skirt.  I forget which.  Her school principal was more concerned with her behavior than the boy’s, and she launched into a tirade about how his attitude was part of the rape culture we have always had concerning relations between men and women, and the reason her mother had taught her to punch out men who made unwelcome advances.  Several woman teachers who witnessed the event applauded.  This story was related by a very proud mother.  

I often recall from my own childhood and adolescence how bullies in various school situations would torment some particular boy, defending themselves by claiming the victims had asked for it.  I always felt horrible for saying nothing, secretly glad that the V on my own forehead didn’t shine as brightly the Vs on those boys’ foreheads seemed to.  We have talked about bullying a lot in the past few years, and how sometimes victims of bullying choose extreme measures rather face more bullying.  While there is valid reason to discuss why some victims choose such measures and some don’t, my purpose is to question the notion that any victim “asks for it” or deserves it by tradition or custom.  

I’m not an anthropologist or sociologist.  I’m not much of anything except an observer, really.  But I think what we now call a rape culture is closely aligned to what was once called le droit du seigneur.  We hear that phrase in our own time mostly in discussions of Mozart’s sublime Le Nozze di Figaro, wherein it is often defined as the right of a titled gentleman to have his way with a young lady of lesser social rank on her wedding night. I rather think that definition is quite narrow.  

History shows us that possession of wealth and rank and a penis, or any combination thereof, or even just one, has led society to grant the possessor or one or more of these the right to subjugate, humiliate, violate a person who has fewer of these things. In the case of a titled man and an untitled woman, it is the right to make a plaything of the woman, but we have seen it in many other applications.  Think of stories of conquering warriors raping and pillaging.  Think of stories of sexual abuse by any sort of power holder, economic or otherwise.  Think of 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, that play by Mr. Tennessee Williams which Mr. Elia Kazan made into the movie Baby Doll.  (Seriously.  Look it up if you’re not familiar with it.)  Think of prison rape “jokes”.  

But it is much deeper, more subtle than such obvious violations.  Most of us are fortunate enough not to have been shaped by giant events like being raped or watching as our families are murdered. We are all harmed in countless much more subtle ways that occur daily.  There are thousands of ways in which we are taught to revere and show deference to our “superiors”.  My own parents were poor farmers and industry workers in the Great Depression. They taught me that you accept whatever shit is handed to you and you get on with it. No questioning whether you deserved shit or whether the shit-bestower had the right to bestow shit.  It became far more common to seek to evaluate how you deserved the shit than to feel and express outrage at having been shat upon.  This is how most first- and second-generation immigrant families in this countries learned to think, as well as centuries-old poor farmers like my family.  We are taught to be victims. Forgive the crude metaphor, but all of this is such a norm in our society that we are forced to create such crude expressions as “rape culture”.    

Bullies/titled landowners/owners of penises might not admit it, but they see the world in the grammatical context of subject or object.  Greater or lesser.  Peer or vassal.  “American” or damned foreigner.  Attractive and less attractive.  Yes, even white or non-white.  The world is not constructed this way.  The world is constructed of subjects, if we want to continue the grammatical metaphor.  If we live in a world where SUVs the size of small houses have rear-view cameras and we can talk openly about how the economy is utterly dependent on undocumented immigrants (don’t deny it!), we are no longer barbarians.  We no longer need to subjugate anyone by physical force or humiliation.  (It’s done for us by economics, but that’s a different essay.)  

Is there a solution?  It’s not in arguing.  It’s not in political posturing.  It’s certainly not in violence.   It is surely in seeing the humanity in the other person.  I could wax poetic about this concept, but I don’t have a lot of hope for many people accepting this solution.  Humans have a lot invested in seeing someone as the “other”.  All I can say is that I hope that when the bullies/stormtroopers/Republicans come to get me because I’m old/fat/gay/intelligent/sensitive/musical/“other”, they’ll kill me fast.