[LINK] "Rolling Stone’s story was never about rape on campus"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing in today's The Globe and Mail, Tabatha Southey makes the very good case that the recent disproved Rolling Stone article about sexual assault, "A Rape on Campus", would have been fundamentally flawed even if it was true. It positions rape as something that only happens to good girls, in clear-cut fashion. It ignores the much messier realities involved in favour of stereotypes.

[I]t’s the story of a woman who went on a proper date, wearing “a tasteful red dress with a high neckline,” to a fraternity event with a boy from work.

“Jackie,” the reader is assured, “discreetly spilled her spiked punch onto the sludgy fraternity-house floor” – as a lady does, it is implied. Yet, despite this undeserving-of-being-raped behaviour, Jackie was led into a dark room, thrown against a glass table which shattered, punched and gang-raped by seven men, in what is depicted as a horrific fraternity initiation ritual.

Afterward, she called three friends to fetch her and, with the frat house “looming behind them” like some crumbling gothic castle, two of them warned her – we switch genres here, and this part is scripted by John Hughes – that she will be a total social outcast if she reports her rape. This, her stock-character friends are alleged to have done, minus the word alleged, “while Jackie stood behind them, mute in her bloody dress.” Lest we missed the point.

[. . .]

The reader of Rolling Stone’s story is not asked to believe a woman who says she was raped over a man who says she consented. The man is conveniently not in the story (or very possibly anywhere else on this earth, for that matter, as he was never contacted or identified by anyone from the magazine). But the rape and the aftermath are described very much as though the writer saw it all. Issue avoided.

The virtue of the woman who says she was assaulted is never in doubt – it is, in fact, Victorian-novel clear. Well played, Rolling Stone, it’s always easier to dodge a question than it is to dispute the validity of its premise. This was very much a rape story that catered to the sensibilities of readers who do not naturally trust women or who see “everyday rapes” as a real problem.