1700 words | 9 minute read
Content Notes: Discussions of sexual violence (including CSA) and rape culture
Image by Markus Spiske
I am a feminist before I am anything else. My feminism is intersectional, anti-capitalist, and anti-carceral. This is because, through my studies and lived experience, I have seen how a truly effective feminism that strives not just for equality, but for liberation, is feminism in its purest form.
I say all this because I believe it is essential to everything I do—this blog post included. It may seem strange to some that I am a feminist and a Hellenic Polytheist, seeing as how the Ancient Greek myths are dripping in rape and other forms of patriarchal violence. For many, myths are read literally: Hades did kidnap Persephone; Zeus did deceive women into having sex with him; Apollon did pursue Daphne to desperation. How, then, can I worship such terrible figures, if even the gods commit such atrocious acts of sexual violence?
I have written about this before. In this post, I explained why myths should be read critically, as we should read all media critically. Myths are not the words of the gods: they are tales written by primarily by men situated within a specific culture. It just so happens that Ancient Greek culture was ferociously patriarchal. Given this context, it is unsurprising that the gods are portrayed as the chief patriarchs, for if they are the divine figuration of masculinity, then of course they would be patriarchal, too.
These fundamentalist takes of myth—and yes, they are fundamentalist, considering that they are literal interpretations—are worrying to me as a feminist. They speak of our acceptance of rape culture to the point of suggesting even our gods are complicit in it. My question, then, is why would some worship a god that they truly believe to be a rapist?
What Is Rape Culture?
While many people are familiar with the term ‘rape culture’, it would be wrong of me to assume we all share the same thoughts on it. I should say that I am doing a PhD in this subject and how survivors actually go about, well, surviving, so while I am fairly knowledgeable on the subject, it doesn’t mean that I share the same understanding as you, dear reader. So, let’s explore what I mean when I talk about it.
Let’s start with some statistics, taken from Rape Crisis England and Wales (because this is where I live). 1 in 4 women have been sexually assaulted during adulthood, as have 1 in 18 men. A separate study found that 1 in 2 transgender and/or non-binary people experience sexual assault. Back to the Rape Crisis statistics, 1 in 6 children are sexually abused during their childhood. Additionally, 69,184 rapes were recorded by police in a one-year period. As we know, reporting to the police is quite low, and so this figure is likely to be just a drop in the ocean. If we do some math, with these police statistics it means that at least 8 rapes happen per hour in England and Wales alone. Of these records, charges were brought in only 2.7% of cases. However, false accusations are found to be very rare.
This is the context we are working within. When it comes to defining rape culture, then, we have to bear these shocking statistics in mind. Rape culture itself has many definitions that float around in the public sphere. There is the oft-quoted Susan Brownmiller phrase that rape “is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. This comes from page 15 of her book seminal book Against Our Will, originally published in 1975. This is the basis of many people’s understandings of rape culture.
However, there are problems with Brownmiller and this quote. Angela Y. Davis, in her book Women, Race, Class (which, incidentally, is amazing), explains how Brownmiller uses police statistics in her book—which are never a reliable indicator of the actual picture of rape due to the inherent problems of law enforcement—to paint a racist figure of the rapacious Black man. At this time in history, rapes by Black men—particularly against white women—were overrepresented in police statistics. Davis argues that we need an analysis of rape that takes into consideration the differences in race and class as well as gender. This is, then, a call for intersectionality. As Britannica words it, intersectionality:
“refers more broadly to an intellectual framework for understanding how various aspects of individual identity—including race, gender, social class, and sexuality—interact to create unique experiences of privilege or oppression.”
So, what does an intersectional approach to rape culture look like? In an essay by Alisa Kessel, a more expansive definition emerges in which rape culture is:
“a set of intersubjective and collectively reproduced myths, discourses, and practices that individuals use to assign interpretations of rape victimhood and perpetration, innocence and guilt, and power and powerlessness that, in turn, reproduce a culture that normalizes rape and other sexual violence as an effective (though outwardly condemned) way to reinforce relations of subordination”.
In this view, rape and rape culture is used to prop up systems of subordination. This is an intersectional framework in that it allows us to see how rape culture affects us not just in terms of gender, but also as a tool within other systems of oppression, such as white supremacy, cis-allo-hetenormativity, and ableism. By viewing rape culture as just one building block of our multiply oppressive world, and by paying attention to how its discourses and mythos prop up certain taken-for-granted understanding of different identity categories (such as ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, as stated), we can see the ways in which it operates both overtly and covertly as a system of domination.
How Do Literal Readings of Myth Support Rape Culture?
As I wrote in a previous blog post, ‘Stop Taking Things So Damn Literally: Why We Need Media Analysis Skills for Myth’:
“To say anything else, to take the myths literally, is not only fundamentalist, it serves only to naturalise sexual violence. It makes out that it will always exist because it is a simple fact that even the gods, as glorious as they are, commit these violent deeds. It is deeply patriarchal and cynical to not only believe this but promote it online, and it undermines the work that feminists are doing to end sexual violence.”
Rape is not a natural phenomenon. To call it so is a kind of doomerism, essentially implying that we will never eradicate it because it is bred into us. Instead, as feminists have pointed out and as I have tried to show, rape is cultural: we live in a world that uses rape as a tool of domination, but another world is possible.
The gods are forces of nature. Even if you’re not particularly an animist, there is still the fact that many of the gods are considered to be personifications of natural and cultural phenomena: Gaia is the primordial goddess who is the earth; Hypnos is the personification of sleep; Eusebia is piety (a cultural concept). There are plenty more examples of this. However, even for the gods who are anthropomorphised in such a way as to claim they rule over domains rather than actually being them, they are still deeply tied to nature and its cycles. This can be seen in someone such as Apollon, who is in charge of both healing and the plague: two sides of the same coin; life and death.
The gods, then, are part of the natural world, so it follows that calling them rapists is to naturalise rape even further. While I would never claim that the gods are perfect—perfection, in my opinion, is an impossibility even for them, even if they do approach it much more than any human could ever—I would not attribute distinctly human evils to them. Not only does this dishonour them, it props up a rape culture that tells us that rape is simply a part of life, regretable but not something we can actually do much about.
The very worshipping of gods who you consider to be rapists also aides and abets rape culture. By saying that a rapist is worthy of worship, you are saying that rape is only incidental to a person’s actions or personality and not something so abhorrent as to warrant any action. It’s akin to staying friends with someone who has committed abuse because “they’re not like that with me” or “they’re actually a good person apart from that”.
This is all, simply, rape apologism.
Forgive me if I sound overly aggressive in this post, but as a survivor and feminist, my aggression and rage towards rape, rape culture, and rape apologism are very warranted. They are stains on our collective identity and culture. They are horrors beyond reckoning. They must be abolished if we ever wish to be free.
I said in my previous post already quoted that “I do not find it a stretch to say those who take myth literally are fundamentalists, and we should all be aware of the risks this poses”. Fundamentalism lends itself to conservatism, given the depictions of events we have in myth. It naturalises all sorts of human evils written into the mythos of gods by man. Rape is just one of these. To naturalise it, as I hope I have shown, is a deeply reactionary view that serves to only re-entrench rape culture.
Instead, we need to analyse myth more deeply in terms of its cultural context. We need to consider who wrote these myths and why. What are they actually trying to tell us? Is it how a god became associated with something? Is it an explanation of why certain rituals were carried out in cult practice? Is it an allegory for a part of life within a specific historical and sociocultural context? Indeed, asking these questions allows us to better understand the context of our reconstructed/revived faith.
So, think more deeply. Ask more questions. And never, ever give in to the idea that human evils are baked into our core. Only pain exists when we travel down that road.
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