Tim Chambers on rape and sex

NO, YOU CAN’T STEAL A KISS

Timothy Chambers

Here, Timothy Chambers argues that rape is not a sex act. In a piece further down, I suggest that it is.

I guess my first feminist role-model was Marilyn Sokol. She played ‘Stella,’ the boisterous best friend to Goldie Hawn’s ‘Gloria,’ in the 1978 blockbuster, Foul Play.
I first saw it when I was eight or nine years old.

There’s a scene where Gloria reveals that she gave a ride to a hitchhiker.

Stella is incredulous. ‘Really, Gloria! Do you know the percentages of rapes from hitchhikers?!…And look at you, with no protection.’ (By ‘protection,’ Stella means mace or brass knuckles, both of which she owns.)

‘Well,’ Gloria considers, the hitchhiker ‘didn’t seem to be after sex.’

‘Rape is not an act of sex,’ Stella booms. ‘Rape is an act of violence! Remember that.’

I can’t speak for Gloria, but I surely remembered it. I’m reminded of it every so often. In her tantalizing attempt to define sex (entitled, ‘Are We Having Sex Now Or What?’),

Greta Christina declares what should be a deal-breaker for any candidate definition. ‘Even the conventional standby—sex equals intercourse—has a serious flaw,’ she writes. ‘[I]t includes rape, which is something I emphatically refuse to accept. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s no consent, it ain’t sex.’

And yet, I’m unsure whether this truth has percolated into society at large. I’m reminded of this every so often, too. Sometimes it’s a careless phrasing, which I spotted in the New York Daily News in 2005 (‘…who lost her virginity at gunpoint in 1991 when a gang of thugs…’). Or else it’s a potentially misleading headline, compliments of a 2007 article in the London Daily Mail (‘Doctor rejects evidence of patient who says that he hypnotized her and took her virginity’). And then there was the Aug. 17, 1999 story in the New York Times, citing a rising demand for ‘virginity tests’ in South Africa. The article never notes the obvious: if a woman had been assaulted, then the ‘test’ would yield a false negative. The list goes on and on.

All of these cases, which describe rape survivors as having had their virginity ‘taken,’ get matters dead wrong. To me, it’s axiomatic: a survivor who was raped didn’t thereby ‘have sex’; a person is not a virgin only if they have ‘had sex’; ergo, it’s conceptually impossible for a rapist to ‘take’ or ‘rob’ his target’s virginity.

Now, I’m an academic philosopher by training and temperament. This means I can only tolerate cognitive dissonance and mixed messages for just so long. At last, I find myself needing to sit somewhere comfy, put some jottings on paper, and sort out the truth once and for all.

II

Why does Stella find it obvious that rape is not an act of sex? And why has society been so slow on the uptake of this obvious truth?

It helped me to notice how many amorous activities require reciprocity before we credit the act as happening. Take holding hands. It’s not enough that my hand comes into contact with another’s hand—otherwise, I’ve held hands with everyone whose hands I’ve shaken.

Hand-holding also seems to preclude coercion, however subtle. Suppose I spot my friend, Grace, on a date at an uptown bistro. The next day, I remark to her, ‘It looks like your date went swimmingly.’

Grace scowls. ‘As if.’

‘But you were holding hands,’ I protest.

‘We weren’t ‘holding hands,’’ Grace corrects. ‘He took my hand—practically grabbed it. The feeling wasn’t mutual. I didn’t pull away because I already sensed the guy was a jerk, and I didn’t want him making a scene in my favorite restaurant.’

Dancing provides another activity with links to reciprocity. I once witnessed a friend of mine, Cerrisa, at a dance-party. Some young guy, dripping with desperation, approached her. She declined, politely.

Then the man starts to dance in front of her.

My friend was unmoved. ‘I’m not dancing with you,’ she said, and stalked off.

Did Cerrisa and her wannabe suitor dance? Obviously not. He danced for her. But since she didn’t join his motions, it would be false to say they danced. (Just curious: would it be possible for two people to dance for one another, simultaneously, without thereby dancing with each other? With mirrors, maybe?)

The situation grows more nuanced with kissing, though. I’m reminded of the 1988 film, Dangerous Liaisons. There’s a scene where the villain, Valmont, calls upon a young woman, Cecile, very late at night. She asks him to leave.

Valmont promises to go on one condition: ‘I just want you to give me a kiss.’

Afterward, the villain still refuses to leave. ‘I promised to go when you gave me a kiss,’ he explains. ‘You didn’t give me a kiss. I gave you a kiss. Not the same thing at all.’

Valmont’s dastardly designs aside, his semantics ring true. If I kiss you on the lips, but you don’t ‘kiss me back’ (as we say), then we didn’t kiss.

At the same time, we do have phrases like ‘stole a kiss,’ as in ‘Valmont stole a kiss from Cecile when she was distracted.’ This sends a different message: the coercive or deceptive kisser got a kiss from the victim. After all, I can’t very well ‘steal’ something unless I somehow take possession of it.

This is most unfortunate. One wants to protest that speaking of ‘stolen kisses’ sins against the very institution. Kisses are meant to be tokens of shared affection—between parents and children, buzzes between friends, linkings of lovers. The very idea that someone could ‘steal a kiss’ seems a contradiction in terms. Yes, a man can extort certain bodily movements from a woman. But this cuts completely against the freedom of choice implied in saying, ‘We kissed.’

In other words, you can speak of coercing (or deceiving) a woman into kissing, but only if you turn a blind eye to the woman’s autonomy and consciousness. ‘Stolen kisses’ can only make sense if you view the woman’s participation as purely passive—as if ‘she acquiesced and allowed him to kiss her’ still means ‘they kissed.’ But the image this suggests is eerily asymmetric. Eerie, too, is how the myth of the ‘stolen kiss’ commodifies a woman’s gestures of intimacy, parsing them as if they were property which could be ‘stolen.’

III

All of this helped me illuminate the two questions which puzzled me at the outset.

Why isn’t rape an act of sex? Because, as Stella knew well, having sex (like holding hands or dancing together) presumes reciprocity. A rapist coerces a person into certain bodily motions. But to term these forced motions as ‘having sex’ adds insult to the initial assault. It only makes sense if, as we saw with ‘stolen kisses,’ our image of sex is seriously stunted: an image which renders irrelevant a woman’s state of mind and whether she exercised her autonomy. But that’s just obscene.

Why hasn’t society grasped this fact yet? I’m not sure. Call it the Inertia of Unchallenged Falsehoods. The very idea that a rape-survivor thereby had sex, or that virginity can be ‘stolen,’ seems to stem from a deeply-entrenched myth which casts women as ‘passive recipients’ in intimate transactions. In her insightful essay, ‘Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis’, Lois Pineau points to ‘a number of mutually supportive mythologies which see sexual assault as masterful seduction, and silent submission as sexual enjoyment,’ including ‘belief [in] the natural aggression of men and natural reluctance of women’ in intimate encounters.

How might we correct this marred image? For starters, we’ll need to call out the false picture when it makes media-appearances (which, as Lexis-Nexus assures me, is quite often). We would also do well to replace the image of sex which deserves discarding with an image of sex we can cherish. Towards this goal, Pineau makes excellent strides: ‘In honest sexual encounters,’ she writes, ‘this much is required. Assuming that each person enters the encounter in order to seek sexual satisfaction, each person…has an obligation to help the other seek his or her ends….But the requirement of mutuality means that we must take a communicative approach to discovering the ends of the other, and this entails that we respect the dialectics of desire.’

Sex, in this sense of the word, is a dialogue. It doesn’t happen when I only care about raising the points I want raised. It doesn’t happen when I ignore the points you want treated. It happens when we invite one another to perceive our most personal perspectives, with the hope that it will enhance the empathy we share.

Timothy Chambers teaches philosophy at the University of Hartford.