“Rape Culture”: Ways Of Deconstruction And Ideological Entrapment

By Hugo Platero: What is rape culture? We know it is a concept widely used by feminists and pro-feminists as a way to blame men and masculinity for allegedly creating an environment of beliefs and moral standards that encourage rape. It is, clearly, a mechanism to cast all men as culprits for rape perpetrated (criminally and sometimes also pathologically) by some.
Questioning “rape culture” from the statistical perspective is very simple. This task has been performed quite efficiently by RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), the largest network tackling sexual violence in the USA. However, what I intend to question goes beyond statistics, which can be interpreted and reinterpreted according to the taste of the analyst and his or her theoretical-methodological preferences and references.
In this text I intend to start a reflection on why “rape culture” is a credible concept in the first place? What makes this concept accepted by politicians, intellectuals, national newspapers, men, etc.? What makes this concept popular without major criticisms of it? Obviously there is a practical dimension of its popularity: the militant feminist movement. Nevertheless, we know that there must be something in the concept of “rape culture,” something that makes it believable, since the feminist movement, no matter how much activism and people involved, is not always successful in putting forward their agendas to the public. See, for instance, the case of abortion; despite all the activism, they can’t create a credible concept endorsed by the majority of people [in Brazil] and the issue does not emerge in social networks without being massively attacked.

The idea of “rape culture” assumes that man and his behavior are fundamentally sexual and unrestrained, i.e., the man who is an agent of rape culture is not human. That man is converted into a machine of sexual potency, unable to be contained by reason or strength.
When we approach the man of the “rape culture,” we come across, in actuality, a normative discourse about being a man, faced with the gender role of “being a man,” that is, the understanding of man as only potency and virility, strength and conquest, sex and achievement, sometimes invasion. When the subject is born as a male, he carries the weight of social and normative expectations, to be as close as possible of the normative ideal of masculinity. The young man, the boy, the adult man, is constantly forced to affirm himself as a man designed under those norms and discourses. However, is being a man only that?
Is the ideal of “male,” rooted in the Victorian Era and subsequently crystallized, just the protector, the potent, manly, and above all, the one who needs to affirm himself sexually in all areas of his life? Most certainly, no.
However, the feminist movement’s explanation of rape culture is based on the image of that very ideal of a man. That stereotype of masculinity is one feminists reinforce all the time in two ways: at times, through the construction of women as victims of men and “patriarchy”; and at times, presenting men as aggressors, dominating and enslaving women.
But that is not the only way the feminist movement reinforces that idea. It also does it as well when it criticizes that ideal man. The feminist critique of masculinity, as it is ideologically conceived, gathers, to non-feminist male ears, characteristics of the feminized man. Thus, feminist criticism, aiming the deconstruction of the Victorian fiction of men, instead urges men to constantly affirm that kind of masculinity. This process culminates in a cycle of denial-affirmation, a kind of superficial discourse about masculinity, and this cycle of denial-affirmation grants credible support to the notion of a rape culture.
The discourses about men and masculinity, as presented here, are discourses of perversion and cancellation of man’s humanity that legitimize not only the credibility of “rape culture,” but actually make it acceptable. For example, the relationship between adult women and boys (as in cases such as the recent Brazilian “13 year old boy, son of Friboi’s owner dates a 30 year-old woman” hoax). However, these construction discourses of man-as-machine-and-potency become naturalized through the years. This is part of what Foucault calls “Historical plot”: the man, as a masculine subject, is naturalized as “potency and machine,” and moves towards the denial of his own humanity: the desirable man is the one of potency, the “true man”, affirming his virility; male sexual initiation is earlier than women’s and not as romanticized; the possibilities of man’s expression of emotion and sensitivity are inhibited, constrained to avoid coming anywhere near what’s  “naturally” feminine; men can never “feminize” themselves, facing the risk of being “sissy”, “faggot”, or, the risk of not being ontologically “a man.”

Family of Queen Victoria, oil on canvas by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

It is important to consider that in this article I’m not talking about biologically- or socially-constructed gender. That does not matter in this case. I am referring to the perception, of the organization of symbols and gender roles, i.e., the symbolic, vocal, aesthetic and emotional-performative elements that allow us to be perceived as belonging to this or that genre of “man.” I am addressing the perception others have of men, and the needs of self-insertion in public space, from the places discursively designed, primarily, for those subjects perceived as being this or that gender.
What does it mean to say that these discourses are of men’s perversion, and nullification of their humanity? When “being a man” relates to the normalizing discourses of masculinity (which have the characteristics exhaustively listed in this text), then being male is distant from intrinsically human possibilities (values currently denied to the ideal of masculinity), such as emotion, empathy, sensitivity.
It is important that we pay attention to the “gender” devices as being socially necessary in the moments in time when they existed. That is, the Victorian man (potency and machine) has today his humanity denied, because that is a model of manhood extracted from a past age, and idealized in a normalizing way in our time. In the Victorian Era, prior to the 20^th century, masculinity was permeated by values equivalent to those currently denied: honor, chivalry, dignity, religiosity. If we understand that when the construction of masculinity as it was expected of them according to these historic discourses that I have mentioned, then we would realize that, at that time, a belief in a “rape culture” would not have been possible. It actualizes itself and makes itself possibly only relating to the discourses on masculinity in two movements: the historical erosion of values associated with this ideal of man; and the affirmation-denial of this now emptied ideal of man (as described above).
When feminists point to the Victorian ideal of man, they do so in order to say that this is the nature of “being a man” (a fallacy that is contradictory inside feminist theory itself), and then propose a deconstruction of masculinity. What they don’t realize is that what they want is to deconstruct a discourse of masculinity from a past era, and once it is dislocated by feminists themselves, emptied, into our Era, and reinforced by the affirmation of its antithesis; reinforced by the affirmation of women-as-victims, in ways similar to what Derrida calls “supplementation.”
Now, such a proposition is astonishing for most men, since no studies exist about the “being male” in contemporary times or in post-modernity, in discursive terms, besides that from Victorian times.
Fearing the annulment of their manhood, many men, as a way to cope with feminism, will eventually affirm themselves as that Victorian emptied man, and concede to “rape culture” the status of a credible concept. And they do it through sayings such as “no man can resist a chick,” or “obviously you have to catch them all.” The fear of not having references about their gender role corroborates the gender role assigned to them by the feminist movement.
Some may say, “But a man has hunter, sexual conquest instincts.” Well they might have. However, the very notion of civilization is rooted in the transition towards taming, through reason, what is instinctive. And the sublimation of instincts into emotions, so that they have existence in the realm of reason. Therefore, I’m talking about men in civilization, not the man-male-beast in nature, where the concept of rape in itself would not exist, and consequently, nor there would be any rape culture.
It is not the statistical attack on the concept of “rape culture” that will destroy it — rather, it is the flexibility of the discourses related to being a man which will do so. And this flexibility does not consist in a “feminization” of men, but in deepening the range of possibilities in emotional education and acknowledgement of men in their humanity, much more then relating men to an ancient, emptied, ideal masculinity.
The feminist discourse must be deconstructed, and that is the only that way “rape culture” can be deconstructed. It must be attacked in the points that make it emotionally credible, not in data showing that the theory is a fallacious. “Rape culture” is not a concept of reason, rather it is a concept similar to the concepts of faith, legitimizing themselves via the belief in them, and not in demonstrations of data or absence of data in the empirical world.

References:

1. Butlher, J. (1999). El Género en disputa: El feminismo y la subversión de la identidad. Barcelona: Paidos.
2. Derrida, J. (1978). De la Gramatología. Barcelona: Del Siglo Veintiuno.
3. Foucault, M. (1988). A História da Sexualidade I. São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra.
4. 4. Preciado, B. (2008). Testo Yonqui. Barcelona: Espasa.
5. http://rainn.org/images/03-2014/WH-Task-Force-RAINN-Recommendations.pdf

Translated by Aldir Gracindo.

About Hugo Platero

Hugo Platero has been dedicated to Gender Theory Studies for many years. He is a dissident of the feminist movement, transfeminist, and LGBT. He is a man, gay, and feminine cisgender. He believes in the possibility to think of masculinity in multiplicity. He's Foucaultian, Butlerian, deconstructivist and post-modernist. He loves French music, the Spanish language, and "la nueva canción" of Latin America. He also loves Madonna, Eric Clapton, and Fiona Apple. Of himself, he says "This is how I am, I'm Hugo Platero and I hope to contribute with the studies and reflections in this colective."

Editorial note: this piece is a translation of an article originally published on AVfM-Brazil. –DE

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