I have been thinking a lot about the recent Steubenville rape decision and its coverage in the media. The one phrase that has been stuck in my mind all day today is this one: “asking for it.”
I have spent much of my life playing with words, sometimes building them, sometimes dismantling them. To study language and to love writing: both involve no less than this. So when I think about words and phrases, I want to break them down and look at them. And with some phrases, I want to break them apart, to crumble them into small pieces of sand. I want to look at the pieces in my hand, then scatter them into the wind.
If you don’t know the extent that the sentiment of “asking for it” has been invoked following the Steubenville verdict, you can visit here. Countless twitter users, not to mention the mainstream media, have articulated sympathy for the Steubenville rapists while simultaneously chastising the victim. The chief basis for this victim blaming is that the victim was drunk when she was raped. The logic of victim blaming will tell you that this young woman should have been aware of her surroundings. It will tell you that she invited dehumanization and violence on her body. That she implicitly requested to be raped. That she asked for it.
But, as a phrase, what does “asking for it” really mean? What has it come to mean? Through use and repetition in media and subcultures, words and phrases take on particular, honed meanings and connotations beyond their literal structure and origin. At this point in time, “asking for it” does not actually mean to ask. It does not mean to vocalize consent. It does not signify an articulation of desire. When you think about it, it is actually not used to suggest that a young, unconscious woman literally or implicitly said, “Do this to me.”
Instead, what it says is that she deserved it.
“Asking for it” has come to be used in reference to perceived weakness and the perceived necessity of punishment. This is clear in uses of the phrase outside the context of sexual assault.
“Asking for it” is used by the tired parent whose child won’t stop yelling in the middle of a busy mall. The parent slaps or spanks the child. The child cries even more. But that’s okay, right? She, the child, was asking for it. Her misbehaviour, the parent believes, warrants such stern reprimand.
“Asking for it” is used in military strategy games when your opponent is distracted and lets down his guard for that crucial moment. His defences are down. So you take action, because you are playing a game and the purpose of this game is to win. As a consequence, you make major ground. Your opponent is upset at your success, of course. But he let it happen. He displayed his own weakness. He let his guard down. He was asking for it.
I could think of many more similar scenarios, but I think these two are enough to make my point. “Asking for it” is used when someone has acted in a way that reveals a weakness. It is used in situations when someone is seen to deserve violence in order to discipline them for bad behaviour.
It does not really mean to ask. And yet, strangely enough, it is conflated with the concept of consent, as if consent could be implicitly given by being drunk or unconscious.
All day, I have asked myself how it could be that so many people have expressed the sentiment that a young woman who was unconscious was “asking for it”? But as I think more about it, I think my two examples above are oddly appropriate. We live in a culture that so often sees young women as small children who need steering and discipline so as to protect them from themselves. And we also see young women as military-esque targets that are the objects of battles and conquests. We tell women not to wear certain clothes because we believe men cannot help themselves. We tell them men only want to conquer. We tell them don’t walk in certain areas. Watch your drink. Don’t wear that skirt. And if you don’t behave as we say, you are responsible for the punishment that others allot to you. You should have better guarded your fortress.
But, as a culture, we don’t tell men not to rape.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate that I have never been raped. I know so many people, all across the gender spectrum, who have been subject to sexual violence. I am humbled by their strength and their resilience in overcoming what they have been through and speaking out about it.
Statistically speaking, you know these people too, whether or not you have heard their stories. This kind of violence is all too common.
I haven’t been raped, but I have been beaten up. I think of the Steubenville victim, who was only sixteen when she was raped. When I was sixteen, one night I was at my then-boyfriend’s apartment. He and I were drinking wine. He picked a fight with me. I told him that I wanted to go home. It was after midnight, and I was tired of being called names. I told him I wanted to see my dad. I reached toward the doorknob of his room. This was the first time he hit me. It didn’t leave a visible bruise, but for a week after, I had a small red blot that seemed to hover just on the surface of my left eyeball. Like a tiny red planet in motionless orbit around my iris. No one else noticed.
When I started to be vocal about him hitting me, I was keenly aware of how many people within my group of friends (who were also his group of friends) started to change in how they acted toward me. I knew what was said behind my back. I knew that some people sympathized with me. But I knew that others expressed in so many words behind my back that I had asked for what had been happening to me, because I was a strange, awkward girl who wore particular clothes and flirted too much and should have been more sensible about where she went and who she spent time with.
I have no idea what it is like to be raped. I have no idea what it is like to know that there are images of your rape around the internet. I have no idea what it is like to be revictimized at trial and then once again in the trial of public opinion. But I do remember a little bit about what it is like to be a drunk sixteen year old girl, even though I’m almost twice that age now. And what I know about that is that no matter how drunk you were, you did not ask to be mistreated. More likely than not, you believed in the goodness of other people. You did not ask to be treated as a thing. You did not ask to be someone’s object of conquest. You did not ask to be punished, dehumanized, and humiliated. Your body did not ask for discipline.
I know that you were never asking for it.
Because asking for it, if you really, really take a moment and think about what that phrase should mean, would involve a girl opening her mouth and speaking consent. Or writing it down. Or making some kind of meaningful communication. It would involve an action: to ask. Not lying down limp and unconscious or saying nothing. We all deserve, and we must demand, a better world than the one that exists now. And part of demanding this better world is refusing to accept the idea that others have some kind of implicit right to articulate their rage on girls’ bodies.
No one ever asks for this.
The Shadows of Birds 
Well said, Allison.
It is very apparent that the young woman in this case was not ‘asking for it’. I would hope no woman would choose or be willing to have this happen to her (drunk or not). But this is the argument being used against her. Regardless, what does it say about the characters of the young men who were willing to do this to her? Even if she was ‘asking for it’ (which she was not) their behaviour was appauling, degrading and disgusting. They have been presented in the media as the poor boys, who’s football careers are now over. People sympathize with them. It makes me sick. So whether she was ‘asking for it’ or not. What they chose to do to her speaks volumes about the kind of young men they actually are.
It is imperative to raise our boys to see that this behaviour is not acceptable. That is does not define them as being true men. It is an uphill battle largely because the media etc continue to place so much emphasis on the sexualization of women. So much, that it has become the norm for young men to think that treating women this way is ok, that in these circumstances women do ‘ask for it’. So much more education is needed for our children (girls and boys alike). In my opinion, we need it now more than ever.
Allison – thank you for putting into words all that I have been feeling these last few days.
Thanks for this thoughtful deconstruction, and for your story. I found this really thought provoking. This line of thought ties together a lot of mainstream assumptions that so often go unspoken, that they are sometimes hard to put my finger on:
1. that letting your guard down is against the rules (and of course, so is being alone after dark, wearing certain clothes, going on dates, etc.)
2. that everyone knows the rules, and is playing by the same ones, and that some people get to decide which rules others use (in this case, disproportionately men setting the rules for everyone else)
3. that the rules govern a “game” in which we are competing against each other for scarce currency
4. that women’s bodies are in fact that currency
5. that when people break the rules (especially but not exclusively women), it is natural that they will be punished (another catchphrase that applies here: “taught a lesson”)
6. since women are expected to know about #5, then letting her guard down means she knows she will be raped, and chose to let her guard down anyway. In other words, she either didn’t care one way or the other, or she “wanted it.”
These are a pretty depressing list, but I’m afraid it gets worse. If the points above are true, there are some even scarier corollaries:
– that anytime it is possible for someone to be raped, they will be (in other words, in any situation, there is always at least one man around who wants to and will).
– This implies a kind of constant surveillance that is pretty shocking when I think about it in that light. If any transgression could be punished, then we have to assume we’re besieged by the enforcement … pretty much for our whole lives. In other words, male supremacy is a police state.
– This implies that all men want to rape, or at least are incapable of stopping themselves, at least some of the time (maybe they take shifts). I’m always shocked that men are willing to accept such a morally bankrupt portrait of themselves. (Maybe they’re “asking” to be seen as morally degenerate. *sigh*)
– If women “deserve” punishment for breaking the rules, it also follows that men deserve to do the punishing. It’s possible that the “winner” in these aggressions sees only that they are gaining something for themselves — not taking something away from someone else (something like, “you’re not inferior to me; I’m just superior to you”). This could help explain why people who belong to culturally dominant groups find it so difficult to see ourselves as “overprivileged,” even when we are willing to see the “other” as “underprivileged.”
– if men are entitled to do this enforcing, and if they also see it as a way of gaining something, then they have a huge incentive to manoeuvre women into breaking the rules, through deceit or otherwise. This spreads through our culture in ways that go far beyond physical violence: the way many men who aren’t getting the access they want to a woman (or women) feel entitled to cajole, coax, pout, use false reassurance, and exaggerate their pain/discomfort in an attempt to get a woman to let her guard down in some way.
To live this way, we all would have to assume the worst about the people around us, all the time… a depressing an exhausting proposition. It gets me thinking about who is benefitting from that exhaustion and cynicism. It keeps bringing me back to the same place: that ending male dominance, while necessary for those who are oppressed by it, can’t help improving the lives of those who supposedly benefit from it, too.
I hope you’ll continue to write. If you’re interested, I’d be curious to know what you think of Terence Crowley’s essay The Lie of Entitlement, which is also about how gender enforcement works and who deserves what.
Something else you might find helpful… this essay’s 30 years old and depressingly not out of date. I Want a 24-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape
This has led to interesting conversation in our house as of late. We are a family with a mom and dad, and 4 boys aged 19, 17, 15, and 4. Some of the conversation that has taken place is conversation I wouldn’t have necessarily thought of having to this point living in a “free society”. Not really understanding my own dis-empowerment as a woman in Canada, but now with lights being shone down on entitlements and behavior, how could we keep our heads in the sand as women who head households with men who love us, and raising a generation of sons. I hope I do honor, as a woman and a mother, women who have suffered at the hands of men who are uneducated, holding strong sense of entitlement and superiority. I pray for my sons to be strong minded and protective with a sense of equality for all humans. I pray they understand the wrongness of violation. I will work to that end and start there. I pray for the victims of rape..sweet justice..in courts or through God.
As a parent you need to TEACH your children to respect women, not just hope that they understand. You need to make them understand yourself because too many parents haven’t taught their sons to respect women
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A day or two ago, a young boy was shot to death while sleeping in his bed. The boyfriend of his mother was angry, and he shot up her house with a gun. The boy was a casualty. The gun was not the problem, it never is. To me the problem is men not being men. Period. I am mentioning this particular incident because while discussing the tragedy, someone whose opinion I hold in high regard – an older woman – said that the mother needed to chose her boyfriends better. This usually thoughtful woman made this statement without any idea she was actually blaming the mother for the man’s actions. This saddens me beyond belief. The comment was seen as being a rational, practical reason – the mother picked bad men, and seems so inbred into society’s thinking, that it isn’t even seen as blaming the victim, which indeed it is. There may be truth that the mother had bad taste in men, but that does not give reason for a man shooting up a house out of anger. Mind you he could have blown the house up, drove his truck into it, taken a baseball bat to everything, a myriad of things – it was not the gun, it was the person who pulled the trigger. Added to which I’m sure everyone reading this can think of an example of a woman trying to get away from a man, or simply saying no, and that attempt ending in tragedy. I have this inner sense that men are supposed to protect women and children. I wish it were true all of the time. Bless the men who are real men. And there are many of you all out there. I know.