“Rape Culture” is a term being bandied about in conversation and in the media lately, thanks to the antics of Daniel Tosh and our society’s growing need to hop upon any identifiably emotional bandwagon with a destination to Controversy Town. Honestly, I swore this was a blog I would never write, because in my experience rape is a complicated topic to write about, either from a cultural or societal perspective. I say this as a rape survivor: It was a cold night in October twenty-two years ago when I was assaulted.
One of the reasons I swore I would not write such an essay was because, at this point in my life, I have such mixed feelings about discussing my assault. My reasoning concerns a huge misconception many people will initially have as they begin reading all this: Believe it or not, I can tell the story of my rape without any recurring trauma. In fact, it really doesn’t bother me to discuss it with anyone else anymore. What bothers me are the varied responses which the facts of my rape elicit from the people with whom I share my story.
This is what I have learned: Suffering, for all people, is powerful and we as a culture feed off of it in so many bizarre ways. I believe this to be true because every person at some point has suffered, and it is only through each of our unique abilities to experience and process the mysterious qualities of pain that we can truly appreciate joy, pleasure, and safety. But if we cannot understand our good without a concept of our bad, people will often assume, then the bad must also be wrong and must be condemned. It is my belief that it is in this effort always to distinguish between goodness and badness where the concept of rape culture gets dicey.
What pushed me into writing this essay? This year I opted to participate in the Knoxville Horror Film Fest’s Grindhouse Grind-Out filmmakers' competition. Last year I wrote a piece for a peer of mine and truly I enjoyed the experience. I love horror movies and especially the genre of exploitation. One of the only memories I have of my father was of him taking me to a drive-in in the late '70s and eating buttery popcorn we had popped at home that afternoon and packed in a paper bag to enjoy in the privacy of my Dad’s car. I remember he took us to some campy exploitation movie with a Charles Bronson-type guy swaggering through the story with a gun in hand and a need for revenge. I can’t remember what had happened that incited such vengeance, but I remember loving the whole feel of the movie.
I also remember laughing at the absurdity of the entire scenario. Back then, in my limited life experience, I understood that in no reality I knew of would one person go through such insane effort to exact such specific revenge on anyone else--although I will admit I did love the idea of such extreme justice. Now that I’m forty-two years old I understand that true justice is incredibly rare to come by and is never easy to achieve because it, like the discussion of rape, is very complicated. It became my goal this year to create an homage to my favorite exploitation film, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. One of the paradoxes I find myself dealing with more often than not is my love for exploitation and horror films, meanwhile remaining an outspoken and proud feminist. I sometimes find these two parts of myself at odds. But it is exactly this combination of elements that puts I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE in my high esteem as a female filmmaker.
Several months ago I found myself in the middle of an interesting conversation on the Knoxville Horror Film Fest Facebook page. The conversation was about the representation of rape in film. Paradoxically, this is a topic for which I have done much personal and academic research. I have no issue with the representation of rape in film if there is something genuine about the rape. What that means to me is that the rape of a character not be used to propel another character through the story. I hate watching a story about a woman who is raped and then is too weak and damaged to function, so the men in her life feel the need to go out into the world and use her experience as their story. In doing so, these guys--who have not actually experienced the direct pain of rape--then cause more havoc than is actually necessary. What sucks in this form of storytelling is there really is no revenge. There is only violence for the sake of violence because the person who truly experienced the rape is no longer in the story--and it is her story.
In I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE Jennifer the protagonist is raped. It is an awful assault. It is incredibly cruel and violent to the point of being absurd. However, it is in some context very realistic. I can say this because twenty-two years ago I found myself being beaten, stabbed, and sexually assaulted before my rapist left me in a ditch believing he had killed me. It has taken me all of these years to understand that, although this is my reality, it is not most people’s reality. This is why we as a society need to understand that reality is shaped by the perspective of the individual. That being said, we also need to chill the fuck out and learn to laugh at ourselves, because the very act of living is itself absurd. This can only happen through balance.
I have worked on balance for twenty-two years. I can honestly say that I may not be the definition of balanced, but in so many regards I live in my own balance based on forgiveness, love, defining boundaries, and dealing with people on a daily basis. This is to where being a rape survivor and thriver has brought me. I can live with my experience, understanding that my experience may be unique but it is in no way more profound than anything any other person on this planet may go through. And sometimes, people have to laugh to keep from crying, because we all suffer, and our laughter keeps the pain in perspective.
Here then is the story I wanted to tell: I wanted to say it’s okay to laugh at rape. Laughter, in point of fact, relieves the tension we as a society feel about all the pain we cannot control. And there is a sense of loss of control in regard to the topic of rape: Unfortunately the current statistic is that one out of every three women and one in every ten men are directly affected by sexual violence. I hate this statistic. I pray it changes. But it is where we are as a society, and ignoring the topic, or brushing the topic under the rug, or cleaning the topic up to make it more palatable is not helping. Genuine feminist use of exploitation in art does none of this. The essence of exploitation as exhibited in art is that it takes on any discomforting topic head on, and forces the audience to address it in a very real, often exaggerated, and sometimes absurd manner.
My thought is that if I’m going to write about rape then I’m going to tell the story of the person being raped. And I can also say that after all these years of learning to nurture myself as a survivor, I have had to laugh at so much of it. From looking down at the scars on my left leg that will always remind me of the experience, to the naivety of a fellow "co-ed" in a college writing course who, after I read a poem about my rape experience aloud for the first time, exclaimed that she wished she had been raped too--so that she also had something interesting to write about--I shall always be able to find something about my rape to reflect back upon and laugh about in my own lifetime. Ironically, when I told a peer of mine--who is a fellow adult survivor of child abuse--about what the young woman had said in my writing class, he laughed and replied, “Oh, yes, there are other writers you will now have to deal with who believe that because you are a rape survivor, you’ve already won the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket for writing.” I laughed at the idea of this. It was the first time I remember ever laughing at the concept of my rape. Does laughing at my own rape make me a bad person? I do not think so. I think it makes me a human being, one who seeks my own personal harmony, and harmony for the people with whom I share space.
October 13, 2013, was both the anniversary of my rape and a day I found myself co-directing a trailer for a fake movie in which my very best friend portrays a character who is raped by a group of redneck sex freaks a La DELIVERANCE. What I feel I should now specify is that my best friend is male. It was important for me as a filmmaker to make the statement I hope some of the audience members eventually understood, though in the moment of viewing they may not have. In the horror and exploitation genres of filmmaking, women are always somehow easily drugged, beaten, fucked, raped, violated, used, and murdered. It is the part of my love for these movies with which I struggle constantly. I feel like a human Frosted Mini Wheat. The sweet side of me eats up the traditional camp value of the genres, but the crunchy wheat feminist side of me hates seeing my wonderfully talented sisters in acting being used as ornamentation, a convention, A cliche--nothing more than tradition. I knew that if I had women in the trailer they were not going to be raped, beaten, violated, or murdered. I want to see women have fun, be silly, and feel pleasure. But the most important thing I wanted to achieve in this instance was to let men have a genuine voice about rape in a feminine context. The media has taken every opportunity it can to allow women and men to discuss how insensitive it is for other men to joke about raping women. And while I think it great that there are sensitive and respectful men out there who are willing to stand up for women, what if they had to stand up for themselves or other men instead of women?
I also wanted to show a genuine representation of a man seeking revenge for his own violation without the assistance of the opposite gender, because this rape is his story and one he must live through. I am very grateful to my friend, both for taking on this role and for doing such an amazing job with it. My primary objective was to take the actual rape out of the context of the ridiculous, much like the original film did. I believe this to be why the original film still leaves a lasting impression on the audiences who see it. If a person were to watch the video of the trailer without the audio, it is incredibly disturbing due to its graphic nature. The lead character's clothes are ripped from his body, he is thrown against a tree standing up, and he is anally raped from behind by one man while two other men are pinning him against the tree by his arms. Honestly, there is nothing at all funny about this situation. I didn’t want it to be funny, although the events leading up to it and the events after the rape meander into the ridiculous, but with honesty. I had my friend re-enact in three short vignettes what it felt like for me to go through my own recovery. I cried a lot, I ate a lot, I could not get clean enough… and I worked on me. Even when it felt like the recovery would kill me, I worked on me. I wrote the character sitting on steps crying while working out with a Shake Weight. I wanted a glimpse of the character’s recovery to imply that he did the work. And, likening him to every person in this world who wants to change, I wanted to show a character responsible for his own well-being and his own justice. I wanted to say to male filmmakers of horror and exploitation: “Hey, how about you stop using women to propel your male characters through your stories? Let the women have their own stories, their own justice, their own failures, and their own victories. We are no different from you. Understand that rape is not about sex; it’s about power. We all need to stop sexualizing rape... it’s all about the victim being overpowered and losing control.”
Gentlemen: Until you can address rape in your own gender in the instinctively co-defensive and chivalric manner you feel for the female gender, there is going to be the negative stigma which the idea of rape holds. We need to understand that rape is not a feminist issue per se. It is a power issue. I say this absolutely loving men myself. Feminism is not about hating men or thinking women are better because I do not believe that. I believe in gender equality. This is why I am just as bothered by the story of an ex-boyfriend’s rape as by my own or any other woman's. He was raped his freshmen year of college by his dorm mate. He never told anyone else because of the shame and stigma male-on-male rape seems to provoke. What I find incredibly bothersome is that two months after his own rape he found himself driving a female friend to a rape crisis center after she had been raped at a party, but when he walked her into the rape crisis center he was immediately treated like the enemy by the staff and asked to leave the building. He was told by the woman on duty that evening that there was no way possible he could understand what his female friend had just gone through. This is only a part of the irony inherent in the complexity of the topic of rape.
This being said, when men stand up for the cause of recovery from sexual assault and rape prevention in the context of awareness, they can do so in the most compassionate and profound ways. Personally, I’m not sure I ever thanked my English professor Larry Thompson for saving my academic career at the community college I was attending when I was raped. I had missed so many classes that I was in danger of failing. He helped me get incomplete grades for the classes instead of failing. Also, my theatre professor Douglas Hoppack convinced me that seeking therapy would help me recover from my assault. And, like I mentioned, I’m grateful to my friend Mike Stanley who fearlessly took on a role that I know many actors would not be brave enough to do in fear of ridicule. These are just three of the numerous men who have shown me that men are not the enemy on this issue. They are men who did what they did because they love me as a person, and their love is not limited by my gender or orientation or sexuality.
As for my sexual assault survivor brothers and sisters, I have one huge wish for you: I wish for you the moment I had October 13, 2013. While standing on a mountain path watching my dearest friend re-enact a violent rape scene, I laughed at the concept of rape. I laughed at its existence. I laughed at its absurdity. I laughed at how it had defined me for so many years. I laughed because I realized I could laugh at it, because it had finally lost all its power over me. But until the trailer I made is no longer relevant at all, and rape is no longer a factor of human existence, I wish for the sort of recovery for all sexual assault and incest survivors which will allow them the joy of just laughing at the ridiculousness of all of it.
A still image of Mike Stanley from S&M Production's Grindhouse Grind Out 2013 trailer.
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