Carolyn Gage
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Confused About Rape? Occupy the Dictionary

8/28/2012

8 Comments

 
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Wow. A lot of confusion about rape in the news these days.

We have Congressman Todd Akin telling us that “legitimate rapes” don’t result in pregnancies. We have Senate candidate Tom Smith comparing pregnancy from rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”  Last year, Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban federal funding of abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” a term which he has refused to define, because, as he insists, it’s “stock language.” We have all kinds of liberal folks (seriously… Noam Chomsky?) insisting that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault, should not have to respond to Swedish police questioning, because—you know, he’s one of “our” guys. 

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 Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) declaring that it was not a “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski drugged and vaginally, orally, and anally assaulted a thirteen-year-old who claimed, “I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!’, and then I didn't know what else to do.” This week the Guardian ran a story with this headline, “How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?”

My sisters, this is a boatload of confusion. 

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And, I would submit not just confusion on the part of the perpetrators and their allies. I remember teaching an Intro to Women’s Studies class not all that long ago, and I conducted an anonymous survey. Turns out that all of the women in the class (they were all under twenty-two) self-reported as sexually active and not having orgasms. When I attempted to teach a workshop on how to communicate with partners about what one enjoys in bed, I discovered to my chagrin that none of my students had the slightest interest in this. Apparently, what they were having was not really “sex-sex.” One had to wonder whether or not it might be “rape-rape.”

Later on, teaching at an elite private college, I began asking questions about the experiences of the young women I was teaching. When asked if they knew of cases of date rape on campus, they expressed uncertainty as to whether or not their experiences with men would qualify. Since studies have shown that one in four college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape, and since studies have also shown that one in twelve male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and since studies have also shown that one third of males surveyed said that they would commit rape if they could escape detection, and since one fourth of men surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if the woman asks the man out, and the man pays for the date or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date… well, I don’t think it's going too far out on a limb to suggest that a significant number of these confused young women had, indeed, been date raped.

The problem here appears to run deeper than “No means no.” Looking for the source of the confusion, I believe that I may have found the culprit.

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It’s the word “sex.” Check it out:

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sex is defined as “sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.” Not too helpful. Kind of like looking up “tennis” and reading that it is a  “tennis phenomenon or behavior.”

Looking up “sexual” is not much help either:  “having or involving sex"...  which of course leads us back to “sexual.”

Sex, like “forcible rape,” appears to be “stock language.” Nobody needs to define it, because we all know what it is.  But--see above--apparently not.

I am a writer, and like under-celebrated, African American  genius Toni Cade Bambara, I believe in “acts of language.” I’m going to commit one now. I’m going to suggest a new word for sex. And it’s going to be a gynocentric, subjective word, referencing the clitoris not the vagina.

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I’m going to propose the words “cypriate” and “cypriation” for female genital activity initiated by the subject, for the primary intention of experiencing a pleasurable arousal of the clitoris. For example, “Last night, next to the waterfall,  I cypriated with my partner.” Or… “Cypriation at the full moon can be especially intense.” 

I admit, I am taking my cue from the late, great Monique Wittig, whose acts of language opened my eyes to wild possibility. In her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, she and Sande Zeig coined the word “la cyprine” to refer to the vaginal secretions that signal sexual desire.  [“Sécrétion vaginale, signe physique du désir sexuel. Une agitation trouble l'écoulement de la cyprine.”]  The derivation for her neologism is the island of Cyprus, legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

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Obviously cypriation does not refer to many of the acts that are considered sex or sexual in the heteropatriarchal world. In fact, it probably refers to only a tiny minority.  But adopting the use of this word will require that the subject own her agency, and it will also validate her own pleasure as something of primary, defining significance.

In other words, these young women who are unclear about whether or not they are experiencing date rape will have absolute clarity as to whether or not they are experiencing cypriation. Furthermore it will facilitate their understanding that any interaction with their vulva that is not cypriation is a potential form of violation and not acceptable... unless, perhaps, the woman's primary incentive is achieving pregnancy.

PictureFragment of Sappho
There should never have been one word that could be used to refer to pleasurable, welcome sexual activity for women and, at the same time, any and all violations or torture of her genitals. There should never have been a word for sexual activity that confused an act designed for procreation with an act designed for a woman’s pleasure. There should never be a word that can be taken to assume that actions pleasing to men and their genitals are or should be pleasing to women and our genitals. Sex and rape are only synonymous for rapists. Vagina and vulva are only synonymous where the clit and the woman’s pleasure are incidental or irrelevant.

What has happened is that women’s experience and women’s anatomy and women's pleasure have been stolen in a linguistic equivalent of three-card monte.

Sisters, take back the clit! Occupy the dictionary! And as our great foremother Sappho would sing, “We shall enjoy it/ as for him who finds/ fault, may silliness/ and sorrow take him!”

8 Comments
Sudie Rakusin
8/29/2012 08:19:14 am

Carolyn, this is an amazing article. It covers so much, and it is so sad and discouraging to me that nothing really has changed for womyn. We are still in collusion with men to make our needs/desires/pleasure not just unimportant but non-existent. The definition of "sex", at the present, is what happens when a male's genitalia becomes aroused, erect, enters an orifice (our vaginas) and orgasms. It has NOTHING to do with us. Most men not only don't care, they don't even know if we have had an orgasm or not. Heterosexual sex is/has been only about males. It is so sad to me that girls think it a rite of passage in order to stay popular with males and accepted by other girls to blow them. It goes on all the time. Girls/womyn continue to rate themselves below and beneath their opposite gender counterparts and their sexual satisfaction non-existent. This is taught to them by their mothers who are perpetuating this more. What if womyn/mothers showed their daughters how to satisfy themselves and THEN to expect this to occur when/if they decide to be sexual. And that anything other than this is not OK. Rape and Rape-Rape would have new definitions.
The fact that these men think they can make permutations and exceptions to forced heterosexual sex, i.e. rape, is reprehensible. Given what I know of Whoopie Goldberg, that she aligns herself with these men is truly not surprising.

This article is so important because it clarifies/de-mystifies what these men in office are actually purporting as "fact." There is a really good documentary called "miss-representation" about how the media is also in collusion to degrade girls/womyn into believing this is the way things should be.

Reply
Carolyn Gage link
8/29/2012 08:54:03 am

Hi, Sudie, Thanks for your thoughtful response. It is really shocking... and especially so many decades after the Second Wave. I do feel that language plays an enormous role in this confusion.

Reply
Kate Moran
8/30/2012 03:45:45 am

I run SAFEWalk at UW-Madison, and conducting the training with the Rape Crisis Center here. I asked my student workers why they talked about getting consent for sex, instead of desire. Seemed like a foreign concept to them. Not surprised so many students are not having orgasms. Not surprising, but sad.

Reply
Heart
8/30/2012 05:41:24 am

Stuns! Just wonderful, Carolyn.

Reply
Artemis
10/18/2012 12:41:05 pm

Hi Carolyn,
I'm still reading but this caught me:
"Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) ..."
Whoopi Goldberg *did* retract what she'd said, clarifying that she was trying to talk about the specific charges that he'd plead guilty to and was NOT attempting to imply that the girl had not been raped. She was very clear that she was not justifying his actions.
"Some people got the idea that I was condoning what he did. I'm going to be very clear: I was trying to make sure we had our facts straight because that's my job - particularly about what he was arrested for and what he was charged with, which was unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, not rape, which was my point."

Her comment was made in a discussion over whether he should be deported/forced to return to the U.S. to submit to justice. She was clarifying what he had actually plead guilty to, not what he'd done. And she was not saying he was not a reprehensible rapist. We run into trouble in trying to discuss what happens to us in that we have our language and legal system to include in our discourse. Both of these conspire against us as women.

Whoopie Goldberg has done some awesome work for both women and African Americans. I hate to see her contribution to all of us discredited (and, by some, downright shunned) based on one mis-statement that she does NOT stand behind. We can at least not continue to claim that she never reacted to the criticism of her because of those oft quoted words. Vilifying her out of context and without the clarification she made the next day is trashing her reputation and depriving us of her strengths and contributions to women. I know it hurts more when a feminist slips like that, but we need to not let that extra pain we feel, slip over into punishing women more harshly for being imperfect and messing up sometimes. The media only sees sound bites, we can do better than that I think, when it comes to a sister feminist.

Reply
Northern Free Thinker
8/1/2013 01:25:07 pm

As much as I find your article interesting, informative, necessary, I would like to point out that to equate pleasure strictly with clitoral orgasm is part of the problem. As a bi, I've experienced a very vast array of intimate and pleasurable physical experiences... from pleasuring myself rubbing my clit against the seam of my pants during a long bus ride, to full-on orgiatic copulations. Maybe only 30% of them (big maybe) provided orgasms, but 99% were awfully pleasurable. And out of the whole lot, at least half were initiated by me. The idea of who "initiated" the act is risky. Two persons having a sexual experience should play an equal role of initiating... if not every single time, then at least in frequency.

My lesbian sister recently derided penis-vaginal copulation for not providing as frequent orgasms as lesbian clitoral stimulation.. But my question is when the fk did orgasm become the only goalpost??? I love orgasms, and I love sexual stimulation other than orgasms, I seek out both, on MY terms. In my case the most reliable method to achieve orgasm is my telephone shower... it also happens to be the least satisfying. So there. I do it when other options are not available. But having an orgasm is not the purpose of sexual intimacy! and therefore orgasms should irrelevant in the definition of rape.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are trying to transform all uninvited actions into rape... what about the term sexual molestation, does it no longer have any utility?

I'm a big girl and a bad-ass with a horrible bitchy attitude, but I love sex, I've never been raped, but it's come awfully close several times, because I do live dangerously. I was once coerced into a blow-job in exchange for a ride home as a teen.

Frankly the word sex should disappear from the language of sexual activity, sex should be reserved for the biological concept of XX vs XY chromosomal configuation. All other actions should get specific descriptions... copulation, sodomy, fornication, masturbation, cunnilingus, finger fucking, etc etc etc. There are plenty of much more specific words out there. Let's use them and forget about euphemisms, they are duplicitous.

Reply
Northern Free Thinker
8/1/2013 01:42:14 pm

On the topic of a goalpost for successful "sex" one must also note that "orgasm" is one of the goalposts for successful transsexual MtF surgery... a very patriarchal perspective IMO. Once the penis flesh is inverted inside the body to imitate a vagina, these people still expect to have penile orgasms.

Reply
Kristen
11/11/2013 11:50:17 am

I still can't figure out how Polanski got away with that crap... So screwed up...

I know many girls that have let themselves be pushed into having sex when they didn't really want to. Would I call that rape? Not exactly, I think it more has to do with this insane idea chicks have about not enjoying sex so they almost expect it to be that way. The expectation that they don't really want sex and that the guys do, I think causes them to just say, "well, whatever, I didn't really want to but that's how it is." I think those kinds of problems are more with the mentality of women and how they personally think about sex. Of course, guys want sex but woman shouldn't be thinking that bad sex aka nothing in it for them is the norm. That's my personal opinion on the subject and from my observations of the females in my life. For example, my wonderful SO is the best lover I've ever had and one time just to see what would happen, he asked me to "not enjoy sex" and I said I would do my best, so I laid there doing the best I could, looked at the ceiling, tried to think of other stuff, didn't make a sound. When we were done, I told him that was the worse sex I've ever had. He said sadly, "that's how sex usually is for me until I met you" I mean, come on girls! Expect better from your lovers! And don't just lay there like a fish expect an orgasm to just show up like girl scout cookies at your door!

Keep in mind, I am not talking about the kind of rape, in which someone is slipped a ruffie or forced against their will. Totally different kind. Though I would think women have a lot of choice in that too. I mean the kinds of rape that are the least avoidable are the least likely. Such as rape at gun point. The highest percentages of rapes are those that are the "date rape" kind, girl gets drunk or otherwise incapacitated, and has no friends to keep her safe, and the guys like sharks can smell blood in the water so to speak. My rules when I go out with friends are a) if someone is getting to that point of no return it's time to pack it in, all of us b) you always need a sober friend, I am usually that person c) keep an eye on your stuff, or have a friend watch it, don't leave drinks on a random table come back and gulp it down.Be smart ladies! Please!

Do guys have a responsibility not to rape you? DUH, of course. Do girls have a responsibility to themselves and friends to watch our backs, you bet! But bad people and bad decisions don't mix. Last time my friends went out, my friend got way too drunk. Why? I have no idea. I had only a small drink I barely sipped on. There was a guy wanting to drive her home, of course I told him NO WAY, and we left, needless to say, she did not get raped.

And as far as vaginal sex vs clitoral sex, in my personal opinion, clitoral sex always leaves you wanting more. Is it easier to have an orgasm rubbing on the outside? Of course! Is it more satisfying, not even close...

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    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

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