This piece was written in the aftermath of the Delhi rape case in 2012, which horrified the world: twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh Pandey was attacked and gang-raped on a bus, on which she was traveling with a male friend. During the astonishingly, incomprehensibly brutal attack—during which six men, including the bus driver, raped her—Pandey had a metal pole forced into her vagina, and her intestines torn from her body. She later died from her injuries.
That broken, ex post facto bastard’s curse—“She was asking for it”—reached its spiteful apogee last week, in the wake of the Delhi gang rape.
The lawyer representing three of the men charged with her murder, Manohar Lal Sharma, gave an interview you will want to hide from your children—but whether more urgently from your sons or your daughters, I cannot say. Both become more doomed if they read it and believe it.
“Until today, I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady,” Sharma said—insisting that the partner of the dead woman was “wholly responsible” for her death. The unmarried couple should not have been out so late at night, using public transport.
This woman, now dead, had brought this upon herself. She left the house, intending to be fucked on a bus. She had essentially walked through the streets, looking for six men to help her commit suicide via an iron bar. She was searching for the quiet sound of a fly zip, as ruinous as the sound of a bullet being thumbed into a gun. This is something women do.
The idea of “asking for it”—whether said by an Indian lawyer in Delhi, a drunkard in an NYC bar, or a careless woman in an office in Slough, tapping through the Daily Mail website—is the single, toxic pathogen from which all our problems with rape blossom. Culpability. Blame.
It’s so hard to convey the notion that rape happens wholly unprompted, with the lights on, to a cheerful woman who had done everything “right.” Surely she had a token of ill luck somewhere on her body? Some evil glamour left in a pocket, a glance that would have been better off left at home? Even though a new report shows one in twenty British women have been raped—someone you have been in a room with, today—we think black lightning cannot fall on a sunny day, although we know it can with all the other crimes: on the bonnet of the drunk driver; in the nursery, with a shotgun.
The awful issue of victim-blaming the injured is what makes rape so iniquitous—like telling children in care they should simply have picked better parents in the first place. Why does this happen?
Well, the problem with rape is the sex. As a species, we are still confused, overwhelmed, afraid of, and intoxicated by sex. It is a cocktail mixed in with religion, politics, suffrage, power, love, magic, fear, self-loathing, and things left widely unspoken. It makes us drunk. It makes us dumb. It confuses us in manifold. Look here, at this pile, in merely its nonfatal complications: Fifty Shades of Grey, with its duct tape. Happy marriages, with their rape fantasies. Count the sex counselors, and agony aunts. Rape couldn’t happen on a bigger moral and philosophical fault line. Rape couldn’t strike in a worse place.
That’s why I sometimes think we should do away with the word “rape” altogether. Let’s not call this a sexual crime anymore—with its baggage of shame, and blame, and ruin. A word so hard for an injured woman—or a man, or a child—to say, now that we’ve used it in too many places, for too many disparate things, for it to be functionally descriptive of a crime.
Let’s call this crime something simpler, and less confusing, instead: internal assault. Intramural attack. Regard it just as we would an assailant violently forcing a hammer handle into a mouth, or puncturing an eardrum with a knife. Does it make any real difference if it’s a vagina being brutalized or an eye? If the weapon is a penis or a cosh? This is punching, but inside. This is the repeated piercing of someone’s body. When you put it like that, suddenly the issue of rape becomes very clear: How many women would ask for that?
The phrase “sexual assault” confuses a million men, and women, like Manohar Lal Sharma, right across the world—that troubled word “sexual” casting a shadow so deep that it hides the “assault” part altogether. It makes people think of rape merely as some sex that just “went wrong.”
The police report of the Delhi gang rape alleges that the victim was so badly broken, one assailant “pulled her intestines from her body with his hands,” before throwing her from a moving bus.
And yet, still, everything we debate about this incident is framed around it being a sexual assault. That they attacked her below, before they attacked her above, has defined it. It’s become another argument about men and women and desire and politics and culture. Rather than what it is—what all rapes are: one human ripping another human being to pieces.
Not sexual assault. Just—assault. Not a sexual crime. Just—crime. Not rape—with all the confusions we can’t afford, can’t bear, another generation to painfully sift through, as we have had to.
Just a violence, like any other.
Perhaps I Don’t Believe in Redemption Anymore
The awfulness of being a female writer is that you know you will not write about rape just once. There will always be terrible new outrages to respond to; another extraordinary story to make you simultaneously fearful and furious for your daughters, for yourself.
This next piece was written after the high-profile case of footballer Ched Evans. Evans’s friend Clayton McDonald took a drunk nineteen-year-old woman back to his hotel, had sex with her, then texted Evans, saying, “I’ve got a bird.” Evans then arrived in the hotel room and had sex with the victim as his friends filmed them through the window. He then left through the emergency exit.
He was subsequently convicted of rape, after it was deemed the woman was too drunk to consent to sex.
For many reasons—the main one being Evans’s utter unwillingness to repent or apologize—this felt like a tipping point for me.
I have always believed in redemption. That however awful life may be to us—and, indeed, we may be to life—at the core of every human being there is an inextinguishable atomic core that wishes to be good—to progress—to change. And that to deny that is, in some way, to try to negate the essence of humanity.
Why would we not believe in redemption? Why would we not believe in a troubled human’s desire to burn all their old clothes, and diaries, and start again: clean, newborn, determined to be better?
If we need to believe that is possible for ourselves—and I think we do—then we must believe it for everyone else. We must defend it for everyone else. And I do.
Recently, when Jamie Oliver’s charitable rehabilitation scheme, Fifteen, took on a former sex offender as an apprentice, there was the predictable outcry.
“It’s disgusting that [this lad] can be gifted the kind of opportunity that honest, hardworking youngsters across the country are crying out for,” one of the sex offender’s “friends” told the Sun.
In reply, Andrew Neilson of the Howard League for Penal Reform said, with calm logic: “If we expect people who commit crimes to never do it again, then we have to accept that once someone has served their sentence, they deserve a chance to be a safe and productive citizen.”
And I was totally behind Neilson. I have always believed in redemption.
But. But. Ched Evans. The Sheffield United footballer convicted of raping a nineteen-year-old. Ched Evans, who is still unrepentant—no apology to his victim—but has now served his jail term, and wants to play football again. To become a safe and productive citizen. Ched Evans, who—by combination of his fame and continued lack of remorse—has now become a lightning rod for female protest.
For when Evans left prison it was rumored that Sheffield United had offered him £500,000 to rejoin. In protest, Sky Sports presenter and Sheffield United patron Charlie Webster, who herself was abused as a child, resigned her patronage of the club.
The next day, another club patron—Lindsay Graham—also resigned. The day after that, Jessica Ennis-Hill—one of our greatest Olympians—asked
for her name to be removed from one of the club’s stands, should Evans be rehired.
And at this, I was torn. These women had decided the club’s attitude to Evans, and rape, was so intolerable that they could no longer publically support it. Powerful women who know about both Sheffield United and abuse had left the club they loved—to stand with this woman who they have never met, but wish to protect.
And while I loved the solidarity, I was also troubled—for this means, surely, that these women do not believe in redemption. They would take from Evans his livelihood, and make him an unemployable pariah in this country: ruined by raping one girl, one time.
And here’s the thing: perhaps this is how it will be, now. Perhaps it must. Perhaps “raping one girl, one time” should be the moment the rapist’s life is ruined—rather than his victim’s. Perhaps this is what women are deciding we have to do, as we get a little bit of leverage, and a little bit of power: we make raping women risky. We make it outright dangerous—because we stop believing in redemption. We become unkind. We clench our fists, and wrap them in steel, in order to protect ourselves: to protect women everywhere.
For those rape statistics remain monolithic. One in five women will be sexually assaulted: 85,000 reported rapes in Britain every year, 85,000 raping men.
And yet, the nearest we have come to dealing with this small army of sexually violent men is to instruct girls on how not to get raped. We give them rape alarms, and Mace, and fear. So far, in the twenty-first century, our best idea has been to try and make the victims more difficult to catch—instead of stopping the source of the problem, instead: the brutal, entitled, fearless greed of the boys who go hunting.
So—maybe this is what we do now. Perhaps young, rich, fit, unrepentant men who have raped do need to see their lives reduced to ash—without prospect of forgiveness, employment, or absolution—until the day they die. I’m starting to see the sense in choosing, say, a hundred rapists and making their lives publically, endlessly awful—unrelentingly humiliating, without prospect of absolution. Of making them famous for being appalling—recognized everywhere they go, regarded as untouchable. So that cold, hungry men become terrified of raping—in exactly the same way women are terrified of being raped. So that rapists spend their lives dealing with the night they raped—in the same way raped women currently do. We reverse it. We turn everything upside down.
Perhaps the only way society can be good—to progress—to change—is to stop believing in redemption for a while. Perhaps redemption does women no good at all.
FGM—It Takes Just One Person to End a Custom
So much of what is onerous, or dangerous, to women, comes down to “custom.” “Traditions.” In this piece on FGM, I tried to follow the logic of “tradition” upstream, to defuse it.
“Custom” and “tradition” are odd concepts, aren’t they? When you come at them from the side—curious, but emotionless.
What does the dictionary have them as? “A long-accepted belief that has been passed on from one generation to the next.”
So—these aren’t necessary things, then. We do not need our customs and traditions. We do not talk of the “custom of breakfast,” for instance—or the “tradition of sex.” These are things that must happen, for us to survive. They are not custom, or tradition. They are needful.
A tradition, or custom, on the other hand—they are simply a thought. An idea thought up by someone, somewhere, and then able to survive through the millennia because it has had fierce weapons, and traps, bolted to it.
“Traditions” and “customs” are basically old, prehistoric clockwork bombs—the kind of thing you would see in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They defend themselves from obsolescence by being rigged out to trigger all manner of fear, anger, revulsion, and determination, should you try and reach your hand into the center and decommission them. If you try and switch them off, traditions are programmed to clamp around your arm, like thousands of teeth, and rip your skin down to the bone. A tradition will do anything it can to keep on surviving. Because a tradition that does not survive just joins a billion old ideas now forgotten. The primary directive of a tradition is to just keep being passed on. To stay alive. That’s all it wants to do. It fears its own death.
Female genital mutilation is a custom—a tradition. Like Christmas, it has a season, and in Britain that is summer. Girls go to “visit relatives” in their parents’ hometowns, during the school holidays, and come back with the centers of them cut away and left on the floor, like scraps of meat, in North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The WHO estimates 140 million Muslim women and girls have undergone the operation, including a very conservative estimate of 66,000 in Britain. There has never been a prosecution for FGM in this country, despite it being illegal.
People often used to call it “female circumcision,” but it bears no resemblance to male circumcision—which is essentially cosmetic, and does little more than change the appearance of the penis. As with most of the female reproductive system, most of the female genitalia is hidden from view—kept safe, unseen, under skin. The difference between male and female “circumcision,” then, is the difference between merely pruning the branches of a tree, and coming at it with a bulldozer and taking the roots up. Girls who are circumcised are girls who have been hollowed out, as by a machine.
I don’t know if you have ever seen a picture of a girl—maybe four, eight, or twelve years old—who has just been “circumcised.” Unanesthetized, held down on the floor by relatives and cored, with a razor, or a blade, they walk out of the room transformed by not only the pain, but also what they just realized they are.
A girl, this tradition has it, is born wrong—the center of her body has a physical mistake, as ugly and fatal as a cancer—and those who really love her are prepared to cut it away, to save her. Because the lifetime of painful sex, repeated infections, traumatic childbirths, and utter physical muteness, where desire should lie, are nothing compared to the shame of not circumcising. If that is your tradition, of course.
For many years now, anyone who criticized the practice of female genital mutilation has been cautioned not to comment on the tradition, and custom, of others.
But remember—when you’re arguing against custom, or tradition, you aren’t arguing with the millions of people who have followed it, or a whole country. You’re not arguing against a force field, a law of nature, or the word of God.
Instead, you are reaching back through time to the first person who ever came up with this idea—some woman, or man, hundreds of years ago, in a world infinitely more terrifying than this one now, who was so scared that their best survival plan seemed to be to core out their girls—and going, “No. No. Your idea is that this should happen. And my idea is that this shouldn’t. Let us now argue this out, as equals.”
And this deactivates all the weaponry of tradition, and custom, until we all just become humans again—talking about which ideas we want to take on with us, usefully, for the next hundred years.
Last month, Bristol-based activist Nimco Ali succeeded in getting ChildLine to set up FGM phone lines for girls at risk during this long, dangerous summer.
Ali’s parents’ idea was that she should be cut. Her idea, in turn, is that the next generation should be able to find help so that they are not.
So now we will see which idea—not “custom,” not “tradition”: just an “idea,” by a person—will eventually, over the next decades, win.
This Is a World Formed by Abortion—It Always Has Been, and It Always Will Be
Let’s face it—we could easily have called this section “Why Having a Vagina Is Often Terrifying.” Here is a piece on one of those other subjects feminist writers find themselves having to revisit, over and over again: women’s right to control when they become mothers.
In 2013, in Spain, the ruling Popular Party drafted legislation to radically tighten the country’s abortion laws. They proposed to make it illegal for Spanish women to seek an abortion save in cases of rape,
incest, or risks to physical or mental health. Following an international outcry, the PP eventually backed down—but this came at the same time as American women began to experience notable restriction to abortion access in many states, and British clinics started to see regular protests on the pavements outside, with clients—many of them young, and traumatized—being met with a barrage of abuse. There seemed to be a surprising reframing, in many otherwise advanced countries, around the subject of abortion. It was as if abortion were some relatively recent, morally licentious activity that blew in on the same wind as disco, homosexuality, and Dallas, and which must now—in more sore, sober, and reflective times—be curtailed once more. That the only abortions are these modish, legal abortions—these clinics, and these doctors—and that now, enough was enough, and they must be stopped.
This is an odd logic for modern countries to take—as it ignores the constant, immovable, historical presence of abortion. Its commonness, currency, and necessity. We live in a world formed by abortion—and we always have. Examine the social records of any time and they have their abortion remedies: pennyroyal, tansy, hellebore. Silphium was the remedy of the ancient Greeks—the main export of Cyrene, it was in such huge demand that it was harvested into extinction, but not before its image was imprinted onto the Cyrenian coinage.
Coat hangers, candles, carved wooden tools—fasting, bloodletting, pouring hot water onto the abdomen. Hippocrates recommended jumping up and down, so that the heels of the feet made contact with the buttocks.
And, of course, in all this there is no pictorial or documentary record of the most common thing of all: desperate, terrified prayers, over the millennia, from girls and women desperately hoping they will miscarry.
Women trying to control their fertility, in order to have mastery of their lives, is as ancient a practice as humans trying to control their fields in order to eat. The society we live in is shaped by abortion—how can it not be, with a third of women now having an abortion in their lifetime? That is a gigantic force in the way we live—it informs every aspect of our economy, industry, and sexuality—but the merciful, positive aspects of it are never seen, or discussed. Squeamish and frightened, we only ever discuss abortion when someone seeks to curtail safe, legal access to it.