Following the ITV Daybreak Twitter row over rape and as the One Billion Rising campaign to end domestic violence gathers pace, Katy Brand puts campaign director Eve Ensler in the spotlight for her weekly Paper Tiger.
15 Feb. 2013: Let me start with a trio of quotes from three famous feminists on the subject of rape. They are not easy quotes, and these women were all roundly attacked, mainly by other women, but still, in the spirit of freedom of thought and expression they remain interesting and controversial years, even decades later.
First, Camille Paglia: ‘Rape is an outrage…but the hysteria around rape is equally outrageous. The whole system is now designed to make you (i.e. the victim) feel you are maimed and mutilated forever.’ And now to Fay Weldon, author, who said in 1998 that ‘rape is not the worst thing that can ever happen to a woman, if you are safe, alive and unmarked afterwards.’ And finally Germaine Greer, ‘it is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous but men. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualized as devastating.’
Obviously none of these women were seeking to trivialise rape with their comments, they were mainly arguing against this apparent belief in society that following a rape, a woman will never, ever truly recover - that her life will be over, that she may never feel joy again nor be able to have a functioning sexual relationship for the rest of her days.
And that is quite a thing to tell someone after they have been the victim of a crime. If you tell women this over and over again, we will start to believe it, and then we will start to live as if it is true. In a time where the lack of justice for rape victims is a disgusting scandal, is it helpful to also force them to feel that a lifetime of emotional torment is also inevitable?
Greer’s point is startling: that in a male dominated society, it tends to be the case that rape is considered something that you cannot properly recover from, as if the penis is by definition the most powerful weapon of all. You may not agree, but it is an interesting point to consider. And is that fair to the victims? Could there be another way?
That rape is horrifying, shocking, miserable and disturbing is not in question, but there could also be a message that you WILL get better, and perhaps, god willing, more quickly than you thought. You WILL enjoy sex again with a good man (or even a bad one). To be the victim of rape is not necessarily a life sentence – how awful to make a woman feel that it is.
It is with this in mind that I believe Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising project to end violence against women is very interesting. Ensler is most famous for her play ‘The Vagina Monologues’, and her other related campaign V-Day, which was set up to eradicate violence against women 15 years ago. She has said that she was not expecting to still be doing it now, but the latest statistics suggest that one in three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, giving the figure one billion, and so her work is as necessary as ever.
This prompted her to move the V-Day campaign up a gear and this, inevitably, involves celebrities. The concept behind One Billion Rising is pretty simple: get people dancing in the street. Men, women, children and yes, Thandie Newton. Through flash mobs co-ordinated by the campaign yesterday, there were events all over the world, from Austin, Texas to Kabul, Afghanistan.
To use dance as a weapon against rape and violence is a genius idea. Dance is used to express joy, life, vitality – everything a rape victim is robbed of following the crime.
I am sure there were many victims of rape and violence out on the streets dancing yesterday, showing that there is life after sexual crime: that no rapist is going to stop a woman from enjoying a good dance about in the street if and when she feels like it. It’s defiant and powerful, both to the accepted wisdom about how rape victims might behave after what they have suffered, and also a good two fingers up at anyone who wishes to crush a woman’s life force using violence and enforced sex.
There are those who disagree with Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising campaign, such as Natalie Gyte writing in the Huffington Post. They seem to find it frivolous, flippant, even neo-colonialist of all things, as if campaigning against sexual violence should be regional – is that the plan? To separate women as much as possible? And not let us talk to each other, woman to woman, whatever country we may be from?
Some have even said they don’t like the involvement of men in the campaign, which is pretty much the most regressive thing I’ve heard in a long time: the ‘all men are potential rapists’ brigade are ludicrously out of date. There are billions of good men in the world, and if they want to join in the dancing, they should be welcomed – that’s pretty much the point of dancing.
No, I like Eve Ensler’s way. Dance in the face of your oppressors – if rape is a non-verbal method of communicating hatred, surely dancing is the perfect protest.