Rape, Responsibility and Point of View

Toward the end of last August Chrissie Hynde launched a memoir called Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. In the book and in interviews about the book Hynde placed blame for being raped at the age of 21 squarely on herself:

“This was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” she said. “You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naïve.”

Hynde then added comments which generalized about personal conduct and rape:

“If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk … Who else’s fault can it be? You know, if you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him.

“If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. But if I’m being very (flashy) and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged … that’s just common sense.”

Predictably, social networks exploded in response to Hynde’s comments, mostly because that’s what social networks do, but also because of legitimate concern that Hynde was engaging in victim-blaming, which has a very long and ugly history in the U.S. and around the world. In writing this post I hope to reconcile those valid concerns with Hynde’s comments, because I think rape needs to be understood not only in the context of justice, but in terms of real-world implications which are often difficult to discuss when sloganeering or political correctness rule the rhetorical day. And because I can already see you bristling at the very notion that the question of rape and responsibility is anything but black and white, we will address the black-and-white part first.  

Only Yes Means Yes
After a protracted and shameful delay reaching back to the dawn of time, we have, at least in the United States, finally made a cultural determination about rape which is unambiguous. Rather than blaming victims in any way for being raped, or trying to determine relative fault as if rape were somehow the equivalent of a motor-vehicle accident, we have adopted a simple standard. It no longer matters what a rape victim was wearing, what they were doing, where they were, or whether they were intoxicated or not. It also does not matter if a victim resisted, because resistance can actually increase the possibility of additional injury or death. It’s not even important whether a victim said no to advances or tried to remove themselves from a situation in which rape occurred, because many rapists drug or incapacitate their victims precisely to make the possibility of avoidance or resistance impossible.

All that matters now, at least at the cutting edge of American cultural, is whether affirmative consent is given. Any indication at any time that sex is not wanted means sex is not wanted. If you are absolutely sure you want to have sex with someone, and you encourage their advances, but you change your mind at the last minute, then no means no. If you slam fifteen shots and are barely coherent, no still means no. Even if you are in the middle of sex and suddenly want to stop, no means no. No always means no, incapacity means no by default, and there are no exceptions.

Only yes means yes. That simple rule also makes it abundantly clear who is and is not a rapist. If you refuse to stop or to eschew sex after someone says no, then you are a rapist. It doesn’t matter if you’re a trusted lover or you break into houses and force yourself on strangers — if you compel someone to have sex with you or to continue having sex with you against their will then you are a rapist. There are no excuses, there are no exceptions, there are no extenuating circumstances.

No matter what scenario we propose, then, as a culture we have finally gotten to the point where rape is always the fault of the rapist. Which means Chrissie Hynde is wrong when she stated that walking around drunk in her underwear would make a subsequent rape her fault. No, it would not be her fault, it would be the fault of the rapist, and anyone who objected to her statements on that basis is justified in doing so.

Reality and Circumstance
When I was in my early twenties I taught a state-mandated motorcycle safety course, mostly to riders who were required to take the course because they were under eighteen. If you know anything about young men and motorcycles, you know that mandate was a good idea. While the majority of the coursework was laid out by a national foundation, ensuring consistency across instructors, I was still able to pass along personal lessons drawn from my own experience as a rider.

The first thing I told each class on the first day was that while they did have the exact same rights as any other motor vehicle on the road, they would not take much solace in having had the right of way if they ended up in the hospital for six months. So the first goal for every rider in my class was adopting a point of view — commonly called defensive driving — which minimized negative outcomes even if the other driver was legally in the wrong. Because almost every vehicle on the road outweighs the average motorcycle and rider by a ton and more likely two, to say nothing of being fully enclosed in a metal structure designed to absorb impacts, I then introduced the most effective variant of that point of view. Instead of assuming that every other driver was distracted or unaware of their presence, I told the students to assume that everyone else on the road was actively trying to kill them.

That was how I rode myself but it was not how I started out. Naively, I initially assumed that I really did have the same rights on the road, and that other motorists would recognize those rights. What I learned in short order was that not only did some motorists not care about my rights, many motorists failed to recognize that I was there — even if I was right in front of them, or about to pass in front of them. There were even times when it seemed as if other drivers really were trying to kill me — baiting me into a false sense of security before pulling out in front of me, or turning across my path with no turn signal. In fact, on some of those occasions — a very few, but more than one — I think the drivers really wanted to run me off the road, yet even such paranoid distinctions were meaningless when it came to the potential risk to my well-being.

It took a while, but at some point I realized that the goal on a motorcycle was not to be right, it was to be safe. When a motorcycle tangles with even a small car, the rider and bike always lose, and the bigger the other vehicle, the worse the loss. Yes, I might be legally vindicated at my own funeral, while the person who killed me could conceivably end up in jail, but my goal was not justice, it was a long life well-lived.

The critical point, which I emphasized throughout the course, was that when you got on a motorcycle you had to assume responsibility for your own safety because nobody else was going to do it for you. If you couldn’t adopt that point of view then you shouldn’t be on the road, because without that perspective your odds of getting into a wreck rose exponentially. Only by riding defensively — even hyper-defensively — could you hope to ride for any length of time without being injured or possibly killed.

Rape and Circumstance
Rape is always the fault of the rapist. There are no circumstances in which a rape victim contributes to or is partially responsible for their own rape. That used to be the way some people thought about rape — often for self-serving if not hostile cultural reasons — but that’s over, and we’re not rolling back the clock. If a rape is committed, that rape is one hundred percent the fault of the person who did not stop when the other person said no, or did not secure affirmative consent.

Unfortunately, even if we all agree that rape is always the fault of the rapist, that says nothing useful about how we might go about minimizing the number of rapes, or decreasing the likelihood that any one individual might be raped. In an ideal world, of course, rape would simply never happen, just as motorcycle riders would never be cut off or run over, but even if you’re a utopian optimist you probably know that’s not realistic. We may get close someday, but we’re not there yet, and there is no ETA.

With motorcycle accidents, one advantage is that most such collisions are exactly that — accidents. Nobody, or almost nobody, gets in their car or truck and heads off to wreck or kill a motorcycle rider. Crashes happen, and road rage happens, and people get hurt and die, and people on motorcycles are disproportionately injured and killed because they are physically more exposed and vulnerable, but by and large motorcycles and their riders are not prey, meaning some general assumptions can be made with regard to useful defensive tactics and strategies.

With regard to rape, there are no accidental rapes. There may be rapes that rapists regret afterwards, perhaps even mortifyingly so, but by definition rape is not and cannot be an accident, and victims cannot contribute to their own rape. Rape is a conscious act — a choice, a decision — made by one human being in contravention of the law and the rights of another person. Because we know that rapes do happen despite being against the law, however, it still makes sense to ask how we might reduce the overall incidence of rape, if not decrease the chance that any particular individual might be raped in any instance.

The problem with talking about the circumstances in which rape takes place, and particularly how those circumstances might be minimized, is that the subject itself seems to transfer some culpability to the victim if they did not take all or even any of the precautions that might have minimized the possibility of a rape occurring. So we will once against stop and specifically reiterate what we have said all along: rape is never even remotely the fault of the victim. There cannot be any rape in which the victim is even partly at fault, there is no contributory negligence possible in rape, and there are no mitigating factors in rape.

What we also know, however, is that there really are rapists in the world, and by and large rapists don’t care about the law or the feelings of the people they rape. Rapists are not confused or taking a contrarian philosophical position or in need of a good counseling, they are people who have decided that they like raping other people. That’s what a rapist is, and like any other threat in the world it makes sense to consider the factors which might decrease or increase the likelihood of being victimized by a rapist. Whether you change your behavior based on those factors or not, that doesn’t let the rapist off the hook, or imply that you’re complicit in your own rape if you are raped, but it might very well keep you from being raped.

Rape and Opportunity
Having settled the question of who is responsible for rape, we have now moved on to the question of how to minimize the occurrence of rape, and here it should be obvious that assertions about rights or justice or empowerment have little value. The reason for that is that while rape is always a crime, and as such inherently speaks to issues like rights and justice and other facets of civilization, it is also an act, and as such speaks to our physical and animal nature as living beings.

As it turns out, rapists don’t really care about the former, while they seem to care a great deal about the latter. That is not to say that rapists are not aware that rape is against the law, or that they do not often go out of their way to avoid being caught, or even enact premeditated plans to commit rape which make it all but impossible to be accused, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned. Most rapists, no matter how dim, know that what they’re doing is against the law, and thus try to minimize the chance of getting caught. In effect rapists are constantly working to increase the odds of being able to rape without getting caught, meaning there are some variables which they believe they can manipulate toward that end. That in turn means those same variables might be useful to potential victims who are trying to decrease the likelihood of a rape being committed.

While we could posit some sort of relentless rapist who attempts to commit rape at every conceivable opportunity, what we would really be describing is someone in a psychotic state. Even the most brutal, animalistic, remorseless rapist will show some base cunning, for example, by wearing clothing instead of running around naked so as to be that much more prepared. In that sense, the vast majority of people who commit rape can be said to be opportunistic rapists, where opportunity is defined by whatever criteria they deem important. Some rapists are only looking for a moment in which to drag a victim into a dark alley. Others are meticulous in their preparations, maintain an impeccable cultural facade, and resort to drugs to render the victim unable to defend themselves, or even to recollect what happened.

While there are laws against rape in many locales, laws don’t matter if they are not enforced. In the vast majority of rapes there are no law enforcement or judicial personnel present to object or intervene if you are being raped, but even if there were that’s no guarantee that they would do so. Because human beings are human beings a certain percentage of people involved in the courts or law enforcement or leadership at any level will turn a blind eye to rape, if not turn out to be rapists themselves. In fact, if you wanted to become a really good rapist, with great plausible deniability and all the on-the-job training you could ever hope for avoiding detection, you would be hard-pressed to find a better career than law enforcement.

Again, laws provide legal protection. Laws against rape, at least in the United States, are stronger than they’ve ever been, but the law doesn’t usually walk you to your car at night or chaperon your dates. When it comes to protecting yourself from rape, or tornadoes, or your neighbor’s pet lion, or any other threat, the last line of defense, always, is you.

Rape, Date Rape and Acquaintance Rape
If rape is rape, and it is, and no means no, and it does, it’s telling that we still make cultural distinctions about different situations in which rape occurs. While we insist, rightly, that no distinctions be made regarding victims of rape, we nonetheless acknowledge that there are differing classes of perpetrators, which in turn makes clear that there are different ways in which we need to think about protecting ourselves. All rape is still rape, but by classifying attackers we reveal differences in the methods used by rapists, and those difference may be material to our own well-being.

In differentiating rape from date rape or acquaintance rape we make a distinction not between crimes — because all rape is rape — but between that act perpetrated by a stranger and that same act perpetrated by someone we know. In the case of stranger rape the entirety of the interaction involves victimization. In the case of date rape or acquaintance rape, there may be social or professional interactions which are consensual, there may be flirtations, there may even be sexual attraction and behavior, but at some point no is ignored (or yes is not obtained) and rape is committed.

To be clear, date rapists and acquaintance rapists may be no less predatory than a stranger. That is in fact the whole point of premeditatedly procuring date-rape drugs — to use a consensual pretext as an opportunity to administer chemicals which make victims unable to defend themselves. In some instances, however, date or acquaintance rape does not involve the premeditated introduction of drugs, but occurs opportunistically when the victim is in an altered state of consciousness from electively ingested chemicals. And of course there is also date rape and acquaintance rape which is physically forced, as tends to happens with stranger rape, except the rapist is known to the victim.

Just as you probably wouldn’t voluntarily allow anyone to slip you a date-rape drug, if you knew that someone you were with was considering or even capable of rape you probably wouldn’t voluntarily ingest chemicals which lowered your awareness or your ability to defend yourself. The reason you wouldn’t do that is that even if you don’t have a great deal of experience with mind-altering chemicals, you know that pretty much anything that affects how your brain works also affects how your mind works. Unfortunately, that means every time you get high or drunk you are effectively self-administering date-rape drugs if there is an opportunistic rapist nearby.

Again, that doesn’t mean you’re in any way responsible for your rape if that happens, but it does explain why many rapes evolve from what initially seem to be innocent circumstances. Either your own elective behavior creates a greater opportunity to be victimized by an opportunistic rapist, or, by encouraging you to lower your own defenses a rapist makes you feel complicit in your rape. Neither circumstance excuses or mitigates rape in any way, but as an actuarial matter the ingesting of mind-altering chemicals in any social situation almost certainly increases the risk of being raped. Not necessarily a lot, but still — if there’s a rapist nearby, that elective behavior could mean the difference between being raped and not being raped.

From the point of view of rape and prevention, then, date-rape drugs are not a separate class of chemicals. What we think of as date-rape drugs are simply a highly targeted, highly refined class of chemicals which are produced and administered for the express purpose of committing rape. They work much faster than alcohol, but if you consume enough alcohol you will produce the same effect because alcohol itself is a date-rape drug.

Unfortunately, if you voluntarily ingest alcohol you not only increase the opportunity for someone to take advantage of you, you increase the likelihood that you yourself will feel as if you were complicit in the attack, or that others will feel that way if you report the attack, or that your rapist will be able to make the case that sex was consensual and avoid prosecution on that basis. Again, emphatically, no means no, and only the rapist is responsible for committing rape, but here we’re concerned not with the crime of rape but the act, and how to prevent it.

Should you be able to get passed-out drunk or deliriously high whenever you want? Well, I hope you won’t for other reasons, but no one should take advantage of you in any circumstance. As just noted, however, there does exist a certain class of people called rapists, who belong to a much larger class called criminals, and they don’t care about laws or ethics. They care about getting whatever it is that they want, and for rapists that’s access to other human bodies — preferably in circumstances where the victim can’t fight back, can’t make a coherent accusation, can’t make an accurate identification, or can’t even be sure what they themselves did or said prior to, during or after the rape. Like, say, could happen if a rape victim was drunk at the time.

One practical way to decrease the risk of rape (or theft, or anything else) when ingesting chemicals has been known for a long time. Make sure, to the best of your ability, that the people you’re with when you get drunk or high (or even have a single sip or hit, because you never know what’s in that stuff) are people you can trust to take care of you. For example, at the time of her rape, Chrissy Hynde was hanging out with a motorcycle gang and high on quaaludes, which almost certainly increased the odds of her being victimized. Even if you only party with close friends, however, or use the buddy system when partying with strangers, the risk is still there, because some opportunistic rapists are pretty damn sneaky. Instead of stalking you on one occasion, they may recurrently ply you with booze or drugs until you are convinced that they can be trusted, which is what they are waiting for.

Again, it’s never the fault of the victim when rape happens, but there are things you can do to minimize your risk and make it harder for a rape to occur. If you choose to do absolutely everything you may still be raped, and if you do nothing — or even if you do everything exactly wrong — you may get lucky, but the risks do rise and fall. The question is not whether you can control the fates completely, but whether you can exercise any amount of control, and you can. Whether you choose to or not is up to you, and any rape that occurs is entirely the responsibility of the rapist regardless of the precautions you do or do not take, but it is also factually true that you can make choices which will decrease the likelihood of being victimized.

Rape and Attraction
The idea that we can ever exhaustively determine why a human being did anything — what their motive truly was — is a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Based on hard data, however, we can still conclude that some factors increase or decrease the likelihood of rape not only in terms of opportunity, but also in terms of interest on the part of the rapist. Again, while some rapists may be hard-wired to attack anything that moves, most rapists make choices, and one of the choices they make is whether they feel like raping the people around them at any given moment. Because it would obviously be to everyone’s benefit to encourage rapists to rape as little as possible, it makes sense to look at variables which might factor into interest in a particular victim, and chief among those is the broad and amorphous concept of attraction.

In the context of rape the question of attraction is particularly difficult to deal with because it has been consistently used by small-minded, disingenuous, unscrupulous, mendacious individuals or groups to advance their own political and cultural agendas. If you are attractive — whatever that means — or you have done anything to make yourself more attractive — whatever that means — there are some people who will conclude that your rape was partly if not entirely your fault. To be absolutely clear, anyone who thinks that is an idiot, if not themselves preying on victims of rape.

Limiting ourselves to the dynamics between rapists and their victims, it should be clear that attraction does factor into rape, just as it factors into many other choices that human beings make. If you have two plates of food in front of you, and one looks delicious, and the other looks like diarrhea, you’re probably going to eat the food that looks delicious, and pass on the food that looks like diarrhea. Which is to say that in discussing attraction we don’t have to define what it means to know that it exists and affects people’s choices. There may be no accounting for literal or figurative taste in any instance, but we can all agree that most people have likes and dislikes.

Without going into specifics we can also acknowledge that likes and dislikes, including physical attraction, run the gamut from hard-wired, brain-level responses to cultural biases to individual quirks. For example, most human beings are not sexually attracted to cans of soup, while most human beings are sexually attracted to other human beings. Even allowing for some deviation, that preference is as much a biological reflex as anything else, akin to the same kind of reflex that makes you look at movement in your periphery. Still, whatever the norms of attraction are at the species, cultural and individual level, some people will be sexually excited by the exact opposite, including the opposite of whatever standard of beauty seems to predominate.

While that variability makes it impossible to minimize attraction in all instances, we can say that there are some general truths about attraction which do seem to hold, and particularly so about physical attraction. By taking note of those factors it’s thus at least conceivable that we might be able to decrease the likelihood that a rapist would be attracted to us. Again, there are no absolutes, and rape is always the fault of the rapist no matter how enticed a rapist may claim they felt at the time. (One important side benefit of no meaning no is that rapists are no longer allowed to excuse their own crimes. There is no enticement to rape, just as there is no enticement to murder.)

Nobody reading this post, and I mean nobody, would deny that human beings can do things to make themselves more physically attractive — albeit usually in a conformist or normative way — and that includes increasing sexual attraction. That is in fact the whole point of a great deal of time and money that is spent on physical appearance: to be more attractive to other human beings for a wide variety of reasons and in a wide variety of circumstances. (For that same reason, you seldom see people adorn themselves with garbage or manure prior to a social event or work function.)

By extension, then, asserting that how you look or dress or act should have no effect on the people around you is incoherent because it’s often the whole point of making those choices in the first place. If we didn’t respond to difference in physical appearance between individuals, or even in terms of a single individual over time, we would all wear generic clothes and there would be no cosmetics industry. Or better yet, we would all run around naked because our physical appearance had no effect on what anyone thought about us or wanted to do to us.

As we know, however, that’s not the case. Physical appearance, including which parts of our bodies we expose, does affect what others think, meaning such variables in themselves literally have the power to change the thoughts that run through other people’s minds. Unfortunately — and if you remember nothing else from this post, please remember this — you do NOT get to control how your physical appearance is perceived by others. What you see as a personal right of self-expression may be seen by others as enticement, and no matter how many laws are passed to the contrary there is no way you can prevent that from happening.

As frustrating as it may seem, you cannot assume that what you’re saying with your words, behavior or appearance is being heard or interpreted the way you intend it. Everything from what you wear to how you move to which parts of your body you show or do not show has an effect on the people around you, and again that shouldn’t be a controversial point. Stop and consider how often you make choices about aspects of your own appearance and it will be clear that you do so not only because of how those choices make you feel, but at times because of your own awareness of how those choices make others think or feel about you. It is understandable that you might want to choose when such choices do and do not have an effect, but you don’t get to do that.

Note, too, that context matters a great deal both in terms of attraction and the messages that other people think you’re sending. If you’re wearing your favorite swimsuit at the beach you’re not going to stand out in the crowd. If you’re wearing your favorite swimsuit in a business meeting or at school, you’re probably going to attract more attention than you otherwise might. In each case you could rightly assert that you were wearing the exact same clothing, and that you were doing so for your own personal comfort or happiness, and even that any difference in response was the result of cultural bias or social oppression. As a factual matter, however, how people interpreted your choices in those two instances would differ, even if everyone was wrong about your motive for making that choice in both instances.

Again, none of that should be surprising. At a fairly young age almost everyone learns that the simplest thing they can do to attract attention is to wear a tight-fitting shirt, which means the simplest thing you can do to decrease attraction is wear a loose-fitting shirt. None of that excuses the actions of a rapist, or makes a victim complicit in any way even if they were completely nude, but it certainly may factor into the question of what initially attracts a rapist in the first place. One obvious way to decrease the likelihood of attracting the attention of a rapist, then, would be to extend such choices to the nth degree, making it all but impossible for anyone to gauge what you look like physically. Which of course brings us to the burqa.

Attraction and the Burqa
There are important cultural and even humanitarian concerns surrounding the burqa, but the nature of those concerns also tends to preclude any other conversation. As a factual matter, wearing a burqa actually does all of the things you would want it to do in terms of preventing others from seeing your physical form. In that sense it functions like camouflage, or a disguise, precluding attraction even as to gender, let alone in comparison to whatever personal criteria others might use to determine interest.

It’s entirely possible that some famous people might prefer to wear a burqa while mingling with the rabble, though in most cultures a burqa would probably attract as much attention as a swimsuit in a business meeting. Having said that, however, we also can’t rule out the possibility that some individuals might be more attracted to a person in a burqa because of curiosity — perhaps even to an obsessive degree. So clearly even the burqa is not a panacea for rape or any other type of victimization that follows from initial attraction.

The problem with the burqa is not that it’s ineffective at preventing attraction, because it’s manifestly successful at doing so. The problem with the burqa is that it’s often a sign of cultural oppression. If anyone wants to wear a burqa on their own, as a means of being a private or modest person, we would probably all support that choice if we knew it wasn’t coerced, because we know that the burqa as a garment does exactly what it’s designed to do.

Although many cultures don’t wear burqas, most cultures do favor some type of clothing, and even when clothing is minimal it tends to cover the sex organs. So while it’s one thing to assert a right to dress how you want, or to reveal as much or as little of your body as you want, it’s quite another to assert that doing so has, or should have, no effect on anyone else. Again, such an argument is actually incoherent given the realities of attraction, to say nothing of the senses and brain function in animals.

Within the bounds of the law everyone has the right to physically present themselves however they see fit. Unfortunately, because how you look does have an effect on others, and you can’t control that effect, asserting your rights fails to account for how rape as an act may be triggered — not excused, but triggered — by your appearance. Such animal or psychological responses will never make you responsible if you are raped, no matter how you appeared at the time, or what your motive was for looking that way, but there clearly is a connection between attraction and attention in human beings, and denying that reality only increases the risks you’re exposed to.

In American society, and in many other countries around the world, the burqa is seen as a sign of oppression, and in some countries it clearly is a sign of oppression. But just as we must make distinctions between rape as a crime and an act in order to keep ourselves safe, we need to take note of the effect of the burqa as a garment, without ignoring or excusing its use as a weapon. Somewhere in the world someone is wearing a burqa of their own free will precisely because it limits attraction, and by limiting attraction that person has almost certainly decreased their risk of being raped. Even if you never wear a burqa, there’s an intent in its design that is worth considering.

Predator and Prey
Whatever it is that separates human beings from all other animals — and we seem to be less sure of that with each passing day — it remains true that we are also animals. We may aspire to more, and we may have laws which insist that we aspire to more, but at root many of the choices we make are driven by or at least influenced by animal drives. While acknowledging that we are not only animals, then, it would be a mistake to look at rape solely from the perspective of whatever it means to be human, while ignoring the animal perspective of predator and prey.

Imagine that late one might, perhaps after you’ve had a few drinks, you decide to take off all your clothes, rub raw steak all over your naked body, then sneak onto your neighbor’s property to play with their pet lion. What do you think would happen? And whatever happened, assuming you survived, would you think you got what you deserved? Would you think of yourself as a victim in any way?

How about if someone else did something like that? Would you place any blame on the lion, or maybe the lion’s owner, or would you blame the trespasser entirely? Even if you wouldn’t ascribe blame in any sense, either to the naked person covered in bovine blood or the lion, would you think that the resulting carnage was predictable?

We don’t like to acknowledge that we can trigger such responses in other human beings because we expect other human beings to be rational and in control of themselves. Yet we also know that not only are people not always rational and in control of themselves, but some people who are rational and in control of themselves are also criminals. Whether a given rapist is acting purely on animal impulse, or harnessing all of their human faculties in order to commit rape, in the context of preventing rape as much as possible it might actually be useful to think of all rapists as predators. Meaning not as thinking beings or confused souls or anti-social types, but animals.

If you’re wearing exactly the right (or wrong) clothes, or the right perfume, or the light’s just right, or you’re the right type, or you innocently make eye contact at the wrong moment, you could trigger an attack. Legally the attack would still be the fault of the attacker, and that’s never going to change even given the most deranged rapists, but the causality of the attack would still be real. Something about you, as distinct from others around you, prompted that person to attack you.

The problem with acknowledging that potential, again, is that it seems to make the victim complicit, but there is also an attendant cultural problem to which we previously alluded. To whatever extent causality in any instance could ever be proven, the very premise of animal attraction and the choices people often make to increase their physical attractiveness make it very easy to falsely equate the two. If you are trying to be more attractive by whatever means, and you are raped, a certain miserable segment of society will assert cause and effect, often as part of an overarching scheme to impose behavioral codes little different from forcing people to wear burqas. Rape victims are thus not simply victims of rape, then, but also victims of character assassination by those who would use the act of rape — as opposed to the crime of rape — to argue for stringent standards in dress and comportment.

To see the error in such hateful arguments let’s strip the human element out of the equation all together and assume that you’re a thirsty deer eyeing a refreshing waterhole. You know you need water, but you also know that tigers hang around waterholes because tigers like to eat thirsty deer. It’s all part of the existence conundrum, and you get it — the tiger is just being a tiger. Still, as a thirsty deer it would be a potentially fatal mistake to equate animal behavior with mindlessness. Tigers do not simply loiter by a watering hole in full view because that would be a deterrent to the approach of thirsty deer. Instead, tigers hide in the weeds because they have coats that look like weeds, and even when a tiger is moving it stalks its prey using all kinds of behaviors and approaches which mask its bone-crunching intent.

Likewise, as a card-carrying deer you don’t just amble up to a waterhole and start glugging away. Rather, you approach cautiously, like the most neurotic deer in the world, because your life is quite literally on the line. In fact, the less neurotic and wary you are as a deer, the more likely it is that a tiger will eat you. And yet at the same time, no matter how neurotic you are or are not, you have no expectation that you have a legal right to tiger-free water — and even if you did have that right, you would have grave doubts about whether tigers would honor such laws.

The cultural protections of any society are real. Laws matter. Unfortunately, there are predators in the world, and in order to keep yourself safe you need to remember they’re out there. You shouldn’t become paralyzed with fear, but you should be wary, because no matter how sophisticated they may be in their methods, rapist are also animals. Just as tigers are just being tigers, rapists are just being rapists.

Rape and Prevention
Whatever else we might want to say about human jurisprudence, and however long it’s taken to shake off the trappings of animalistic excuses and cultural agendas to recognize that rape is always the fault of the rapist, we now live in a world (or a country, or an idea of a country) in which the law doesn’t care whether you committed rape because you were just being true to your biological nature or because you really do think other human beings exist only for your personal gratification. If you rape someone you have broken the law, and if that case can be made in court you will go to prison.

The problem, as always, is that the law may not be around, or may not even care — or may even be responsible — when a rape does take place. Which means, like a neurotic deer, that you’ll probably be on your own if a tiger does show up. So how do you take care of yourself as best you can? Well, as with tigers and deer, the most important factors in preventing rape are almost all biological, and almost all out of your control.

Leaving aside date-rape drugs and incapacitation, rape is, largely, a crime of the physically strong against the physically weak. If tigers were the size of deer, and deer were nine feet tall and weighed eight hundred pounds, then deer would be a lot less neurotic and tigers would all have hoof prints on their heads. So if you want to minimize the chance of being raped, the first thing you should do is grow to be nine feet tall and weigh eight hundred pounds — preferably most of it solid muscle. Then also avoid getting blind drunk or accepting drinks from people you don’t know, or from people you do know but don’t implicitly trust.

What can you do if you’re smaller and physically weaker than most of the human beings you’re likely to encounter? Well, going back to my experience as a motorcycle safety instructor, if you can’t compete physically you’re going to have to adjust your mindset. The bigger and stronger you are, whether you’re a living organism or a motor vehicle, the more likely you are to survive when you tangle with something. That’s simple physics, even if the letter of the law says that physics doesn’t matter, or that you’re in the right even after physics ends up doing you serious damage.

If you’re physically imposing you don’t have to worry a lot about avoiding rape — providing you’re not incapacitated — because you’re just dang huge. If you’re small, however, like a motorcycle, everyone is a potential threat for the simple reason that they’re bigger than you, which means you may need to adopt the mentality of a motorcycle rider or prey animal and think of everyone as a potential rapist. You don’t have to do so in a paranoid way, and you don’t have to become neurotic about going to your local watering hole, and you shouldn’t accuse anyone of anything even if you have deep suspicions (because they wouldn’t admit it anyway), but it does make sense in terms of safety to remain consciously aware of the risks around you.

If you know a thousand people, or maybe only a hundred, one of those people may be thinking that if the right opportunity comes along, including particularly one with a plausible deniability component, they will compel you to do something you don’t want to do. They may be thinking that right now, which means there should be a small part of your brain devoted to figuring out who that person is, or at least who it might be. You won’t ever be sure, of course, but far better to be wary than to be naive. Is someone constantly suggesting reasons to get together for alone time? Is someone showing up at places you don’t expect them to be? Is someone asking questions — maybe almost interviewing you — when you don’t have or want that kind of relationship with them?

It’s not enough simply to oppose rape as a crime. In your own life, in your own conduct, you have to oppose rape as an act, including minimizing the opportunity for a rapist to attack you or incapacitate you. Yes, it sucks, it’s not fair, and that’s not the way the world should be, but that is reality. Which means, among other things, that when it comes to the subject of rape, there is more than one point of view you need to consider.

Rape is a crime but it is also a physical act. The battle to protect victims of rape in the legal system and in the courts has largely been won — at least at the theoretical level. Whether you’re a deer or a human being walking around in the woods, however, you have to keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel, and all of life is the woods. Sometimes you may feel more at risk, sometimes less, but the times when you are entirely safe will be few and far between.

Be aware. Listen to your animal gut. Listen to it. There is more to your senses, brain and mind than you know, and if something doesn’t feel right you should assume it is not right. Your gut may be wrong, but given the potential downside it’s better to be safe than sorry. The moment anyone actually does anything that makes you question their intent, however, get away from that person and stay away from that person. The ground rules are known to everyone, and anyone who professes not to be aware of those ground rules, or who tries to make you complicit in their professed ignorance, is a tiger in the weeds.

On that point, in order to also avoid being mistaken for a tiger, note that the standard among adults — meaning developmental adults, not necessarily all individuals over 18, or even over 50 — is not simply that no means no, or that affirmative consent is mandatory, but that any sign of uncertainty, doubt or ambiguity also means no. Intimacy among consenting adults is not the result of a successful sales pitch, and it certainly does not involve pressure tactics. When people want to give themselves to each other that’s usually quite clear. Any hesitancy is a sign not that a more aggressive campaign needs to be waged, but that the hesitant person is not ready — or worse, not capable of making that decision. Which is why you respectfully say no for them, in a way that does not make them feel as if they’ve done anything wrong.

Rape and Chrissie Hynde
There are many different ways we can cleave the whole of literary history in twain. One classic division involves works which are about the way the world should be, and works which are about the way the world is. That duality mirrors the divide we’ve been straddling in this post, between the way the world should be as embodied by our laws, and the way the world is as revealed by the crimes people commit.

Imagine you are Chrissie Hynde at the age of 61, looking back on a long life. What would you say to Chrissie Hynde at 21, if you could? What do you remember about her? What do you regret? What would you do over again if you had the chance?

Here is Chrissie’s first quote from the top of this post:

“This was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” she said. “You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naïve.”

While I can’t speak for her, I think what Chrissie is saying here is that she did not do everything she now feels she should have done to keep herself safe. I think she feels genuine grief about that, and I think it would be hard for anyone to disagree that she was naive about the situation she found herself in.

Looking back on herself as a young woman that has to be hard to deal with. Chrissie Hynde was raped at 21, she’s now 61, so that’s 40 years of living with the attack and trying to come to terms with it. And what she has concluded is what almost anyone would conclude in terms of the way the world really is, which is that she was naive.

Now here is Chrissie’s second quote from above:

“If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk … Who else’s fault can it be? You know, if you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him.

“If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. But if I’m being very (flashy) and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged … that’s just common sense.”

The first part of that quote again comes from the point of view of the real world. In saying, “Who else’s fault can it be?” Chrissie goes too far, because in blaming herself she excuses the rapist. But note that Chrissie doesn’t say she’s responsible for turning someone into a rapist. What she says is, “…if you don’t wan to entice a rapist…”, meaning the rapist — like a tiger — was already there, and she blames herself, perhaps inellegantly, for not recognizing that danger.

You can see that much more clearly in the second half of the above quote, where Chrissie talks about things that do influence attraction. She’s quite clear about that, but unfortunately — from her detached point of view as someone looking back on her own life — she parallels the victim-blaming rhetoric of social and cultural scolds. And yet the tiger is still there because she says, “…someone who’s already unhinged….” That’s not Chrissie Hynde blaming herself for enticing another person to rape her, that’s Chrissie Hynde blaming herself for stripping off her clothes and rubbing raw meat all over her body in front of a tiger.

The biggest problem with Chrissie’s quotes is that they’re declarative. To resolve any discomfort, however, all we have to do is append, “I feel as if….”, to the front of her statements, and they all make emotional sense. Maybe she didn’t make her point as eloquently as should could have, but in the context of preventing rape, and keeping herself safe, she is not wrong in her assertions. She cannot be, because relative to rape as an act she’s right: she did almost everything wrong if her goal was to avoid being raped. And I think anyone reading this post would have to agree, and would not suggest that anyone else make the choices that Chrissie Hynde made when she was 21. Her rape is not her fault in the legal sense, in the moral sense, in the philosophical sense, or in any sense, yet it is abundantly clear that she did not do everything she could have to done to protect herself, and she knows it.

Attacking the comments of anyone who was raped, without taking a moment to understand that person’s point of view, is not empowerment or vigilance or solidarity, but a perversion of all of those ideals in service of a world view that is necessarily incomplete unless you have been raped yourself. When we pick up a book or sit down to watch a movie we can choose between works which depict the world the way it is or the way we think it should be. In going about our lives each day we don’t get to make that choice — or at least we shouldn’t, because that way lies cynicism and madness, respectively. What we should do is recognize the world for what it is, and prepare ourselves for that world, while also working to make the world the place we think it should be.

Life is messy, and attempting to silence people who are wrestling with regrets and self-recriminations doesn’t actually make the world a safer place, except maybe in the minds of the people who are doing the silencing. I think Chrissie Hynde did something courageous in talking about her rape, and even if she didn’t do it the way everyone would have liked, she said something important. It’s one thing to be raped. It’s another thing to spend forty years thinking that you didn’t do everything you could have done to prevent it. In looking back, I think Chrissie Hynde wishes she would have done more to protect herself, and I understand why she feels that way.

While long overdue, the fact that the law is finally on the side of rape victims is important. But the law only comes into play after a rape has been committed, and I think most people would prefer to go through life without taking advantage of those important gains. Doing what you can now to avoid wondering later what you might have done to prevent your own rape does not mean rape is not always the responsibility of the rapist. It simply means taking precautions in the real world, in the same way you look both ways before you cross the street.

So have that conversation with yourself. Do what you can to limit the opportunity for a rapist to attack you as best you can, within the limits of whatever freedoms you’re willing to forego in the moment in exchange for an increase in your personal safety. Doing so is not an admission of culpability or guilt, but if you’re careful and something does happen you won’t ever wonder if you could have done something more.

If that once again seems to imply that rape victims are at least partially responsible for their own rapes, remember that there are two points of view. When you think about the proactive steps you can take to decrease the likelihood that you will be raped, don’t frame those choices relative to the way the world should be, tests of ideological purity, social media flame wars, or even your rights under the law. Instead, think about the way the world is, and particularly about rapists who intend to victimize you regardless of what you or society thinks about right and wrong. That’s what I think Chrissie Hynde was trying to say.

— Mark Barrett