American Prudes
When we think of American sexuality, prudishness is often not the first thing that comes to mind. We might think of public sexuality: partially nude models, airbrushed and Photoshopped, selling items that do not even appear on screen with their glistening bodies. We might think of promiscuity on college campuses, hookup culture, and apps designed to find desirous people a quickie. Our minds turn to sex scenes in films and music videos, taut bodies on display. We might think of the changes occurring over the last sixty years, beginning with the advent of the birth control pill but spreading through the rest of society: permissiveness around single parent households, LBGTQIA rights including same-sex marriage, decreasing stigma surrounding promiscuity, and the explosion of self-help media focused on sexual pleasure. This doesn’t seem like a culture of prudes.
Prudishness manifests in a variety of ways within a sexually permissive culture: we have sex but have difficulty speaking about it openly, including with our sexual partners. Because we are not taught how to talk about sex, a lot of our thinking on the matter is very simplistic, dualistic, and binary. That’s unhealthy by several measures. In America the “unintended pregnancy rate is significantly higher … than in many other developed countries” (Singh and Hussain). Furthermore, America sees a high rate of sexually transmitted infections. The CDC released a recent report showing that “from 2017 to 2018, there were increases in the three most commonly reported STDs,” which are syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia (“New CDC Report”). There is no federal law mandating comprehensive sexual education and, as a result, many people never receive formal education on STIs or contraception. Almost no Americans receive formal education on sexual pleasure or how to communicate before, during, and after sex.
As a sex educator, I find all of these things to be related: we are not taught the importance of communicating about sex and thus we have unsafe, nonconsensual, and coercive sex that is not focused on pleasure and intimacy. We think we’re sexually liberated but it’s a veneer hiding our cultural prudishness. What we’re taught is to say “no” to sex (particularly if we’re female), to wait until we’re married, to only have sex with someone we love; but there’s no conversation about the intersections between love and lust. These vagaries are not doing us any favors.
I got my first speech about how to say no in middle school. The boys were asked to leave the room and a woman shared her story of date rape. She led us in a chant: “no, no, no, no.” What I learned from that experience is that boys shouldn’t be present when girls talk about sex.
Years later, I discovered that I had also internalized that I shouldn’t say yes. “Yes” makes you a slut, it makes you a bad girl. Boys don’t respect girls who say yes.
The first time a partner asked for verbal consent, I froze. Let me be very clear: I wanted to have sex with this person; I’d given all of the nonverbal cues. But he wanted verbal confirmation and the word stuck in my throat. Because girls who say “yes” are whores. When I didn't immediately say “yes,” he stopped. “Do you want to have sex with me?” he asked. I swallowed that prudish lesson hard and said it: “yes.”
This experience gave me the opportunity to reflect on what society teaches women. We are taught to be the gatekeepers of sexuality. We are taught that “all men want it” and that “good girls wait.” We are taught that our pleasure is secondary to our partner’s. Sometimes we are even taught that women don’t experience sexual pleasure: that women derive emotional intimacy from the experience and that is where our pleasure lives.
This is the real root of the problem. This is where rape culture originates. When we can’t talk about sex, consent becomes impossible. Women are taught to say no and men learn that “no means yes.” Or that no words at all mean yes. How many times have we heard a rapist defend themselves by saying “but they didn’t say ‘no’”?
Here’s another personal story: I went to a party at the apartment of a friend of a friend. The apartment was in possession of a man older than us by a few years. I was nineteen, making him 24 or 25. At one point in the evening I found myself alone on the balcony with him. We chatted, the typical getting-to-know-you kind of talk. And then he said, “I think I raped someone.”
The night leaped into Technicolor focus as I became aware that only the two of us remained on the balcony. The door into the apartment was closed. We were on the second story. I was alone with him.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He rested his elbows on the railing and looked contemplatively into the night. He told me about a time a few years prior when he’d had sex with someone who may not have wanted to. He said it had been weighing on his mind: that she hadn’t seemed ready, that she’d tried to push him away. That she’d refused to see him again. “But she didn’t say ‘no,’” he said.
“It’s hard for women to say yes or no,” I told him. “It’s your job to wait until we give consent.”
He nodded. “It’s not fair,” he said, “that men have to have all the responsibility.”
“It’s not,” I agreed. “But men have more power and have to take more responsibility.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t ever want to rape someone again.”
That is when I learned that men can commit rape without knowing that they’re doing it. I wonder how many men have committed rape and never had the moment of introspection and awareness that this man shared with me. Years later I read “Dear Therapist: Is it Possible to Apologize for a Sexual Assault?” (Gottlieb) and thought of this conversation. How many people are rapists and don’t know it?
When the #MeToo movement started a few years ago, my first reaction was one of relief. Millions of women and girls, quickly joined by men and boys, trans men and women, and gender nonbinary folx, flooded social media with their stories of harassment, molestation, assault, and rape. It became impossible to ignore the widespread presence of sexualized violence. In the United States just over 27% of females are raped in their lifetimes (Rape Statistics by Country) and almost 100% of women and girls have stories of harassment and assault. About 97% of accused rapists walk free with no prison time in the United States (ibid) but at least now we’re talking about it. Allegations of sexual misconduct are news and men (most perpetrators are men) who have a pattern of abuse have been fired, forced to resign from powerful positions, prevented from running for public office, and prosecuted. (Of course, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh are exceptions.) Maybe we are finally starting to take survivors seriously.
And yet I worry that our conversations around sex are still too simplistic. Let’s take a look at the allegations against Donald Trump and Joe Biden as examples.
Twenty-five women have publicly accused Donald Trump of harassment, groping, and rape. While a misperception persists that women lie about being raped, the truth is that sexual assault is misreported at about the same rate as other crimes: between two and ten percent (Kay). If ten percent of Trump’s accusers are lying, that means twenty-two of them are telling the truth. Furthermore, the man himself has a long pattern of misogyny, including admitting, in 2005, that he likes to “grab them by the pussy.” As president he leaves a legacy of undermining women’s rights, from eroding reproductive justice and access to contraception and abortion to blocking laws ensuring equal pay for equal work (Zoellner). The man has every indicator of a serial perpetrator.
Joe Biden has been accused eight times of touching women in ways that made them uncomfortable. One of those women, Tara Reade, says that he inserted his fingers into her vagina without permission – this action meets the minimum criteria for rape. The other seven women say that Biden’s behavior, while discomfiting, does not constitute sexual harassment or assault. To add insult to injury, although Biden has apologized for making women uncomfortable, he has also made light of the accusations (Relman and Sheth). He did ask the Senate to search for a report Reade alleges she submitted in 1993 (Smith). (The Senate refused Biden’s request.) When it comes to sexualized violence, Reade is Biden’s single accuser. (I am not suggesting that I don’t believe Reade. Please take a look at Dr. Kate Manne’s excellent article “I Believe Tara Reade. And You Should, Too.”)
Unlike Trump, Biden has a long history of supporting women’s rights. He crafted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994, calling it “the single most significant legislation I’ve crafted during my 35-year tenure in the Senate.” He built upon that legacy as vice president, launching “It’s On Us,” a campaign to eliminate sexualized violence on campuses in 2011. He supports reproductive justice, equal pay, and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Biden and Trump both stand accused of rape. Neither should be excused for their behavior. The national conversation needs to include the complexity surrounding their actions.
I want to turn now to another man recently accused of rape: Dr. Willie Parker. Dr. Parker is an abortion provider who travels between clinics in the South providing access to reproductive justice for women who often travel hours to reach a clinic where they can obtain termination of an unwanted pregnancy. Dr. Parker is a devout Christian who has elevated the conversation around access to control over one’s body, framing his practice as an issue of Christian justice. He sees control over one’s body as the primary factor in human equality and argues that God called him to abortion work.
In March 2019, Candice Russell accused Willie Parker of raping her. Russell and Parker had become friends in reproductive justice circles, texting one another for several months before having sex. Russell did not “write that she’d told Parker she didn’t want to sleep with him, but she strongly implied that, having downed ‘four martinis and an entire bottle of wine,’ she was inebriated beyond any practical ability to consent” (Bullock).
Comparing Russell’s version of events with Parker’s, it becomes clear that sexual intercourse took place. They agree on this point. Russell maintains that the encounter was rape due to her claim that she was too drunk to consent. Parker states that, while aware that Russell had ordered drinks, she did not appear to be overly intoxicated and gave verbal consent.
What interests me about this case is how it highlights the complexity of sexual encounters in a country that does not have a lot of good role models for sex. In a patriarchal culture, men have more power than women. More power means more responsibility. Men should be absolutely certain that their partners are capable of giving consent and do so enthusiastically throughout the entire encounter. It’s not fair that men bear more of the burden for establishing consent, but there it is.
However, to deny that females have some power in a sexual encounter is to treat women the same as patriarchy has always treated us: paternalistically. Is it reasonable to hold Parker accountable for counting Russell’s drinks? On the one hand, yes: men should be absolutely positive that their partners are capable of giving free and informed consent. But, on the other hand, no: one person cannot be expected to know the experience and mental states of another person. This is the paradox patriarchal culture creates: men are incapable of reading a woman’s mind, women are taught not to say yes, men have more power and thus more responsibility, and we are trying to create a world of equality. All of these things are true.
Prudish American culture continues to cast women as being less sexual than men, the recipients of sexual interest and not the instigators. If a woman does not say “no” then she means “yes.” If #MeToo is to be successful, we must change the conversation we’re having about sex and consent. We need to learn to live with the world’s complexities, recognizing that Russell feels violated, that Parker should have abstained but might not be guilty of sexual assault, that Biden may well have thought that his advances were wanted, that Reade identifies herself as a survivor because of Biden’s actions, and that Trump is in a different category than both Parker and Biden. These stories highlight how our society continues to encourage men to be sexually aggressive while teaching women to stay silent, both when we consent and when we don’t.
If we ever have any hope of ending sexualized violence, we need more conversations about sex. We need to stop being prudish. We need role models that demonstrate what consent really looks like and how to have conversations about contraception, STI prevention, and pleasure. I want every sexual encounter in every film and television show to portray partners engaging in these conversations in authentic ways. I want characters, from mainstream media to fiction, to break down the false stereotypes of men as aggressive and women as permissive. I want to live in an era where masculinity is defined through respect and care, not performances of dominance and control. I want sex scenes built around communication and sexual play. I want all people to be able to pursue sexual pleasure and desire without having negative labels applied to them. I want to see a partner say, “I really want to have sex with you but I think we’re too drunk right now. Why don’t we resume sober so that we can really have a good time?” I want scenes that involve responsible use of alcohol in recognition that less inhibited sex can be really fun. I want a world where it is impossible for any partner in a sexual encounter to feel exploited or to worry that their partner(s) didn’t want to be there.
And I want to vote for people I am certain are not rapists. Is that too much to ask?
Sources
Bullock, Maggie. “The #MeToo Case that Divided the Abortion Rights Movement.” The Atlantic, 3/2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-abortion-doctor-and-his-accuser/605578/
Gottlieb, Lori. “Dear Therapist: Is it Possible to Apologize for a Sexual Assault?” The Atlantic, 11/2/2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/sexual-assault-apologize/573502/
Kay, Katty. “The Truth about False Assault Accusations by Women.” BBC News, 9/18/2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684
Manne, Kate. “I Believe Tara Reade. And You Should, Too.” The Nation, 5/5/2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/tara-reade-biden-allegations/
“New CDC Report: STDs Continue to Rise in the U.S.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 10/18/2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2019/2018-STD-surveillance-report-press-release.html
“Rape Statistics by Country 2020.” World Population Review. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/rape-statistics-by-country/
Relman, Eliza and Sonam Sheth. “Here are all the Times Joe Biden has been Accused of Acting Inappropriately Toward Women and Girls.” Business Insider, 5/4/2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-allegations-women-2020-campaign-2019-6
Singh S, Sedgh G and Hussain R, Unintended pregnancy: worldwide levels, trends, and outcomes, Studies in Family Planning, 2010, 41(4):241–250
Smith, David. “Senate rejects Joe Biden's request to search for records on Tara Reade.” The Guardian, 5/4/2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/04/joe-biden-tara-reade-senate-records-reject-request
Zoellner, Danielle. “Five Major Things Trump has done to Roll Back Women’s Rights.” The Independent, 3/6/2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-women-international-womens-day-abortion-policies-healthcare-a9380411.html