Anti-rape campaign #ThatsRape ⑤ |
By Doctor W
Published on Mar.
24, 2016
Translated by
Marilyn Hook
Editor’s note: The Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center is leading a
campaign against sexual assault committed with the help of alcohol or drugs,
called #ThatsRape. This 5-part series of articles explores the discussions held
by the campaign’s planning committee,
as well as their questions and recommendations for change.
Expression “fuck a sea snail” is a joke?
One day, I got a
call from a close friend. She had been drinking with a man who had expressed
interest in her, and then there was a gap in her memory before she woke up
lying naked in a motel bed. I was furious, but my friend simply sighed that
there was nothing she could do because she didn’t know
the man’s name or phone number. In the end, she decided
to consider it her own drunken mistake and bury the painful memory. And I
decided to participate in the #ThatsRape campaign.
 |
| “Sexual Assault of a Drunk Person is a Crime”: A picket sign seen at the ‘Parade for Doing It With Consent’ held in the Sinchon area of Seoul on Feb. 14 ⓒ Korea Sexual Violence Relief Centerd caption |
I live in a
society in which the expression “fuck a sea snail[1]”,
is thrown around like a joke, with the context of rape removed. The victim of “fucking
a sea snail” was my friend. To her, and to me, that expression isn’t funny at
all.
While working on
our campaign to prevent sexual assault committed with the help of alcohol or
drugs I’ve looked at ‘reviews’ of rape drugs posted on the Internet, and they
are astounding. One poster wrote, after secretly putting a rape drug into the
drink of the woman he was with, “The sex was consensual because she got excited
and came onto me. Neat and clean.” The drug’s seller replied, for others’
benefit, “Feed her the drug in total secrecy.”
It seems we are
living in a society that is insensible to the crime of rape. Because of these
experiences, women are required to live in fear, wondering “Is he a potential
rapist?” about the majority of men.
Why are there men
like this? All of the men I know seem okay, but during the campaign I’ve been
plagued by uncertainty that they too are potential rapists. Do they consider
raping a woman who’s been given drugs “consensual sex”, or toss out the term “fucking
a sea snail” to describe the rape of a drunk woman?
Determined to rape as long as they go unpunished
On the basis of
this fear, I did a small experiment on the men around me. I made a
questionnaire on the topic of “the sexual culture enjoyed by men”, and spend
four or five hours administering it to a group of three coworkers. The results
were shocking.
They said that it’s
instinctual for men to have fantasies of committing rape, and that all men have
them. They confessed that among men there exists a kind of culture of “verbal
rape” of women. The clearest example of this was talk about sharing rape
fantasies about female celebrities during their military service, saying they’d
like to strip the woman and do this or that to her.
In the most
extreme cases of verbal rape, it may target someone like a female university
classmate listening to the same lecture as the perpetrator, and take on a cruel
and sadistic form that is vindictive of the woman in question.
 |
| The final presentation of the the #ThatsRape campaign, on February 25 ⓒThe Korea Sexual Relief Center |
I asked them – if they found a drunk woman passed out, and knew that they would never face legal consequences, would they rape her? All three men said “probably”.
But there was an
ironic conclusion to all this. I asked them what we should do to stop
widespread sexual assault, what kind of action would be effective. All three
forcefully asserted that you can’t remove men’s instinctual desire to rape, and
so argued that you can’t expect a change in their morality or thought.
Therefore, they asserted, convicted sex offenders must face harsher legal
punishment.
It was a
conclusion that brings up a lot of questions. Even as they think about it every
day and enjoy rape culture without a care, they argue that the penalty for rape
must be strengthened?
Rape culture produces rapists
Men’s sexual
culture otherizes the action of rape, as if it were something only other people
do. They reason, ‘Rapists are mentally ill and brutal criminals, so I’m nothing
like them.” By otherizing rape and making it taboo, I felt they were
rationalizing away the guilt they naturally should feel about the verbal rape
and other sexually violent behavior that they do engage in.
“I too want to
rape a woman, and I’d do it if I could get away with it, but I’m different from
the psychopaths who actually do it and get prosecuted.” In this way, men as a
group express disgust with rape but also want to commit it.
Actually, many
studies into the characteristics of rapists have found that they are not very
different from ordinary members of society, are in fact more similar than not.
Sexual assault committed by men merely reflects the particularities of the
society in which they live, and (according to research by Sarah Brown published
in 2005) some of it has even been explicitly taught.
Ultimately, the
problem is not individual rapists, but the rape culture shared by our entire
society. Social messages like “aim for a sea snail to score easy sex”, or “conquer
a resistant woman with rape drugs”. Shared notions about rape such as “rapists
are mentally ill” and “a woman’s silence is consent”. These social values and
beliefs – they are raising men who intend to commit rape as long as they think
they won’t get caught!
In a context in
which rape is othered, we consider behavior to be “not that bad” if it isn’t
overly cruel or grotesque, and enforce silence about some types of sexual
assault. We make a category called “hidden rape” for these unrecognized types
of rape – of women who are unconscious or who have been fed aphrodisiacs – and
thus reinforce rape culture. This culture ultimately makes even victims unable
to recognize or respond to sexual assault. When you consider this, you see how
vast the gap between reality and how we perceive it might be.
 |
| The final presentation of the the #ThatsRape campaign, on February 25 ⓒThe Korea Sexual Relief Center |
Destroy the myth of “hidden rape”
Therefore, we need
a new culture to replace rape culture. Rape is occurring as if is a trivial
thing, but we need to make perpetrators realize that their “trivial deviances”
can be sexual assault. We need a culture that recognizes and continually
reminds us that anyone can become a perpetrator of sexual assault.
Throughout the
#ThatsRape campaign, we’ve thought about what that new culture could be. One
relatively successful case that was mentioned was Korea’s ongoing “etiquette
education” for university events involving alcohol. At the schools where this
is happening, when there are signs of sexual violence, students at least say, “You’re
going to get hauled off by the sexual assault prevention brigade if you keep
that up,” jokingly using words that encourage caution.
But in society at
large, it’s much harder to say “don’t rape” to the perpetrator than it is to
say “be careful” to the victim. Societies that otherize rape are extremely
reluctant to point out harmful sexual behavior. I think that the alternative
for stopping rape culture may thus take the form of society fastidiously
pointing out its members’ deviances.
At the final
presentation of the #ThatsRape campaign, after our long period of fierce debate
and contemplation, we considered what to say to ensure that the feelings and
thoughts that we had shared did not end with our movement but lasted into the
future for the sake of continued sexual assault prevention.
The first steps
are to destroy the myth of “undetected rape” like that occurring with the help
of rape drugs, and to reveal the criminality of rape culture. We need to put a
stop to men’s otherizing of rape that causes them to see it as something that
only other people do. In rape culture, women are taught from a young age to
internalize a fear of rape. I suggest that we need to teach men to be aware
that anyone can become a rapist and to be sensitive to the possibility that
they are sexually abusing someone.
Furthermore, this
movement must be accompanied by legal and structural changes. Unlike the West,
where all sexual activity without consent is defined as sexual assault, Korea
only recognizes as rape that which can be proved in court to have taken place
under violence or threat, or when the victim was unconscious or otherwise “unable
to resist”. Attempts to instill sensitivity to rape will lead to a change that
allows sex without consent to be legally recognized as rape.
While writing this
article, I heard news of another friend. On the previous weekend, she had
suddenly passed out in a bar and been rushed to the emergency room. This
reinforced to me the importance of campaigning to prevent sexual assault
committed with the help of alcohol or drugs. I’ll close, then, by making a
declaration of war: our fight is just beginning.
*Original article:
http://www.ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=7415
[1] “Sea snail” (golbaengi)
is a slang term, based on the vulva’s appearance, for an unconscious woman.
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