There Are Too Many Stories Like This: Rape Culture on the Ballot
It was too perfect a re-entry experience as I flew from Japan to the USA, from a place where I never worried about my safety to one where it has always been the background noise of my life. As I was watching the serene Silent Friend on my screen, the TV show chosen by the man sitting next to me caught my eye because it was set in Yosemite. It began as so many of them do, with the violent death of an attractive young woman, followed by many close-up scenes of her badly injured mostly nude corpse. I went and looked up the show and found a Guardian review declaring, " The female characters are mostly troublesome, and there to be saved; if you find long, lingering shots of women’s bodies on mortuary slabs gratuitous, this is not the show for you."
In 1990, I refused to watch David Lynch's Twin Peaks, because it too centered on a dead high-school girl whose sexuality and murder would be salacious plot devices throughout the series. In 2017, just a few months before he got exposed as a serial rapist by three remarkable journalists, I got a letter from Harvey Weinstein, or purportedly from him, and definitely from his corporation urging me to watch a DVD I never watched. It described the enclosed DVD as: “the gripping story about a young girl’s murder on a Native reservation… I think you’ll find it intensely chilling. I’d love to hear your thoughts after you’ve had a chance to screen. All my best, Harvey.” On the flight out I'd watched the compelling investigative journalism drama She Said, about how the New York Times's Megan Twohey and Jodie Kantor earned the trust of enough of Weinstein's victims to expose his crimes. It's hard to get away from this stuff, and it sometimes seems like my job to point out again and again that it's everywhere.
The Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee dropped a bombshell report this week. The 53-page document begins, "A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it." Mainstream media would rather you not hear the explosions either, but alternative media is on it. Among its statements is this: "Beatrice Keul, whose account is comprehensively set forth for the first time in this report, credibly alleges that Trump violently raped her at a November 1993 pageant at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and that Epstein, Trump, and others used this pageant as a 'hunting ground' to prey on vulnerable young women and girls." Elsewhere, it declares "In total, more than 25 different women—some connected to Epstein and many not—have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Some have questioned the timing of this report so soon before an election. I wonder if it's a working paper for a Democratic majority to start leading investigations, handing out subpoenas, and so forth, should they win back the House.
Of course the sex crimes of Donald Trump are old news, and his party has not just made its peace with that. It's become the pro-rape mega-misogyny party, though at least some of that seems to be backfiring, notably Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's attempt to smear his rival, Amy Acton, as a liar about her horrific childhood. He did so by finding her mother, an indigent train wreck who hasn't seen her daughter since that daughter, at age twelve, testified that her stepfather had been raping her for years. Her mother chose the stepfather, who fled justice. Ramaswamy chose to run an ad featuring that mother attacking her daughter as a liar. Which means that the mother, by choice never met teenage or adult Acton, never saw her child for forty-eight years, never knew her, didn't know what the hell she was talking about when she chose to smear the woman running for governor in the state she fled with the rapist she stayed married to until he died decades later.
Which in turn means that the despicable Ramaswamy was willing to weaponize child rape against a survivor for political advantage. But everything says Acton is telling the truth. A Cleveland, Ohio, TV station headlined a story about the situation with "Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother calls her liar in ad; court documents say otherwise." Even the right-wing National Review headlined their story, "Amy Acton’s Mom Claims Candidate Lied About Childhood in Attack Ad — Despite Extensive Record of Abuse." That abuse and deprivation is well-documented and backed up in the present by Acton's brother; it's why Acton's mother lost custody of her two children. Happily even some Republicans found the whole thing repulsive, and the Cook Report shifted the race from "toss-up" to "leans Democrat."
On Greg Sargent's Daily Blast show, Nicole Hemmer noted, after a clip of Trump verbally abusing a woman reporter who asked him about Ramaswamy's commercial, “I think there's actually some continuity here between his vicious abuse of female reporters in general on the one side and the politics around this vile ad itself. It's kind of all a bet that misogyny is somehow a winner in the closing stretch of this election. It's all a bet that this type of politics can get out a certain type of voter that they don't think they can get out any other way at this point, especially without Trump on the ballot. ... “they think that misogyny is the tool for bringing them out and not just for bringing out white men, but that has been the key for drawing black men and Latino men into their coalition. That's been something that they have pressed on again and again because it's their way to a rainbow coalition on the right.” A term I came across recently, vice signaling, the opposite of virtue signaling, describes the conservative invitation to be liberated from the obligations of compassion and honesty, to wallow in racism, misogyny, and lies.
Attacking, discrediting, and revictimizing rape victims is certainly a right-wing thing. Democrat Bernadette Greene-Placentia, who is running for Congress in a suburban Arizona district northwest of Phoenix, said early this month that she had been violently assaulted and raped while out repairing campaign signs (there's a climate angle in that she chose late-night hours to avoid the heat). Right-wing influencers have mocked her and claimed she's lying. Meanwhile, high-profile troll Michael Tracey, formerly of the dumpster fire news/opinon show The Young Turks, led the chase to name the Jane Doe who reported sexual assault by the fraternity members at Cornell University. Tracey has also attacked Epstein victims and sought to downplay the seriousness of Epstein's crimes. The doxing of Jane Doe has led to a tsunami of threats against her and her family, as Ruby Cramer reports in the New Yorker. Trump himself took the side of the frat boys in this case and, along with JD Vance, heartily endorsed the attacks on Acton. n
But it's not just Republicans. Tuesday, my first full day home, the Guardian reported: "Three Florida brothers who exploited the wealth and influence of their family’s luxury real estate business to drug and rape dozens of women were each sentenced to 30 years in prison in New York on Tuesday for sex trafficking." In another Guardian story about a UK case, "A woman’s world was 'tilted on its axis' when she discovered that for years her former husband had been drugging her and inviting men into their family home to sexually assault her while she was restrained and blindfolded, a court has been told." Yet another identifies a new victim of 1970s serial killer Ted Bundy I didn't have the heart to read.
Maybe there's something new to say about this old pathology, which seems to be about how to have access to a female body without really having to be with another person, a person who has rights, a voice, opinions, can grant or withdraw consent. Because there are so many stories when drugs or violence are used to turn sex into rape, because there is so much violence, so much apparent desire to have quasi-necrophiliac sex with a body whose mind is absent. In the Guardian story about a British couple, so like the Pelicot case that rocked France a couple of years ago, a husband wanted to see other men violate his unconscious wife. Cornell's Jane Doe, already intoxicated, was plied with the disassociative drug ketamine and assaulted while unable to give consent and in some moments of her ordeal while she was actively trying to avoid her assailants.
Perhaps it's fury at having to treat women as people in so many arenas of life; maybe these are revenge missions to insist that we are not people, we are not endowed with certain inalienable rights, to take away our right to bodily self-determination directly (as well as indirectly, through attacks on reproductive rights). I wrote of the Pelicot case in 2024, "The criminal justice system cannot change culture and consciousness; that happens elsewhere.Feminism has done astonishing work in changing the status of women these past 60 years, but it is not women’s work to change or fix men. And while many men are feminists, far too many men are immersed in the kind of rape culture on display in this trial. "
It's not just about sex; far-right pundits are increasingly arguing against women having the right to vote, as Amanda Marcotte documents in a recent article. All this is on the ballot in the current election; while Republicans are running some women – for example reproductive rights saboteur Susan Collins in Maine – in many times the candidates offer a choice between commitment to universal human rights around race, gender, religion, immigration status, sexual orientation and a pledge to return us to the radical inequality of the past. Discrediting rape victims is part of this, an attempt to portray women as unreliable, unbelievable, unable to bear witness to our own lives, and therefore inherently unequal and undeserving of rights.
All the stuff itemized above is grim, but in the big picture I believe it is also regressive, a furious attempt to return to the bad old days when under the law and in the culture women genuinely lacked rights, equality, a voice, and a vote. There is a direct correlation between authoritarianism and misogyny, since the former has a foundational commitment to inequality. The opposite is – well, in a remarkable video Acton addresses her childhood directly, speaks about how some looked the other way while she and her brother suffered, how while she found a way out, she's haunted by the kids who were left behind, and asserts, "That's why I'm promising to Ohioans no one in my state will ever be invisible to me." “I will never stop fighting for Ohio’s most vulnerable — especially the children and families who deserve the safety, dignity, opportunity, and hope that every Ohioan should have. No one in Ohio will ever be invisible to me.”
Globally societies continue to move forward, as shown by the exhilarating election results in both Brazil, which rejected the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro to reelect the left-leaning, rainforest-protecting Lula, and Serbia, where a long-ruling authoritarian was defeated by gorgeous student organizing. At the United Nations, Lula declared, “We’re building a Brazil...free of femicide, where no woman, inside or outside the home, lives under the threat of violence. This is a cause that the entire world needs to embrace.” In 2022 far-right candidate Yoon Suk-yeol won South Korea's presidential election on a platform pandering to the surge of young men's misogyny in that country where violence against women and stalkerware is rampant; like Bolsonaro senior, he attempted a coup and is as a result serving a prison sentence (as coup-attempter Trump should be).
The ballots across the USA is a referendum on equality and human rights; the outcome looks promising, but polls don't win elections, voters do.
p.s. The news just arrived after I hit send on this, that Dolores Huerta has died at age 96. Earlier this year she confirmed that she had been raped and impregnated by Cesar Chavez, twice, in the early 1960s. Although the children she put up for adoption in the community had two parents, only one of whom chose to cause the pregnancy, it seems that only she was criticized for this; many too (mostly men in what I saw, including some prominent Latino writers) chose to criticize her or cast doubt on her for not coming forward at the time. That is, they chose to be ignorant of her refusal to create a firestorm inside the movement she gave her life to and the ways that women were blamed as sluts and temptresses and adulteresses, shamed, and disbelieved when they came forward in that era.
But she should be remembered for so much more, including all her decades of steady advocacy for the rights of farmworkers, immigrants, the poor, the vulnerable, women – and while I would have liked to see the broad avenue in San Francisco called Cesar Chavez renamed Dolores Huerta, it seems likely it will instead be called Las Campesinas (which, baked-in sexism, spellcheck wants to change to Campesinos), and I suspect that she would have preferred that honoring of the collective over the individual.
I wrote a long piece about the manosphere as the manipulation of male values and agendas by profiteers that's the current cover story at the Nation.
And a shorter piece about the Cornell case for the Guardian:
Rebecca Solnit
