Understanding the Monster Myth

The year I turned 13, I learnt what it was to feel afraid of an older man. I learnt that reading by myself in the school courtyard wasn’t always safe. I was younger than some experiencing their first sexual assault, but I was older than some too. I felt lucky. I didn’t say anything.

As I grew older, I expected cat calls as I walked down to the fish and chip shop with friends after school. I used to tally the calls in my head, using it as a measure of how toned my legs looked in my school dress. I felt desired, even if only by truckies passing through a small country town.

When I started university, I began to pay attention to rape cases in the media. I was most interested when the victim was young, female, white, middleclass—when the victims could have been me.

I learnt that rapists were bad, evil men who attacked defenceless girls in dark alleys. They were monsters and they were strangers. They were rarely someone known and trusted. I knew that if I watched what I wore, didn’t walk alone at night, didn’t drink too much and carried a pedestrian weapon—keys hidden in a closed fist or a sneaky can of peppy spray in my purse—I would be safe.

The year I turned 19, I started dating the boy of my dreams. He was smart, driven, attractive, and valued strength and intelligence in a woman. But he started to push me beyond what I was comfortable with and I started to question if the dark, dangerous man was always a stranger. I knew that had no defence against someone I trusted and worried about how far he would go, but I didn’t leave. I knew him and thought he would look out for me.

Later that year, my faith in the Monster Myth started to crumble.

I began to read more widely about violence and assault, particularly against women—literature, biography and cultural analysis, as well as news stories. I read an Angela Carter collection until the pages began to fall out and Julia Kristeva until my eyes stopped taking anything in. I tried to understand those who commit unspeakable acts of violence. I longed to know why they did it—was it for control? For power? I started to worry that it was simply because they could.

When I graduated from my undergraduate degree and got a new job, my obsession started to wane. I ended things with the boy I’d been dating and blocked him on every channel I could think of. It was time for a new start and time to move on. I gave up on understanding what happened and what I could have done differently. I focused on my hair, my clothes, instead of anything that might make me think. I read formulaic young adult fiction, and Kristeva was lost under a world of protagonists meeting the loves of their lives in a crazy, messed up world. I put off all of my questions and concerns about rape culture—in both its extreme and its smaller doses—for over a year. When Brock Turner’s name and sentence took over my News Feed, usually flooded with videos of cute dogs, or selfies from friends and fitness models, I took a break from social media.

I didn’t want to think about him, or what he did, didn’t want to feel the outrage that everyone else seemed to, but his profile forced itself into the back of my mind: star athlete, charismatic, privileged, supported, and then: rapist, abuser, criminal. And the thoughts wouldn’t fully merge. I couldn’t see the Star Athlete as the Rapist. I could only see them as two different parts of his identity. I hated myself for that.

I started to read again. I put down Veronica Roth and John Green, and picked up Maggie Nelson, Zadie Smith and Ariel Levy. I started to think again. I started to pick apart the way a lot of men spoke to me and to question my culpability. I tried to figure out what I could do to achieve change, at least in my own little bubble. I couldn’t find an answer. I had no clarity. I poured over transcripts from the Turner case, read South of Forgiveness, watched 13 Reasons Why, cried every time I read or heard the word ‘rape’, stared at a wall for hours after I’d seen it depicted on TV. I felt scared when I read about the victim’s level of intoxication in the Turner case and confused when Brock claimed she had consented, despite witnesses claiming the opposite. It seemed easy to blur the distinction between romantic interest and consent, not just in legal proceedings, but in the media’s depictions of rape. Consent, rape, assault—the concepts bounced around my head with no clarity. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

I read ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words”: ‘rape is not only scripted—it also scripts’, and then ‘Public Rape’: ‘representations of rape, and the figure of the raped woman… operate as the ground over which the terms of the social—and the sexual—contract are secured’.

I reflected and thought back over the instances of assault and harassment I had witnessed or experienced. At no point did I try to change the situation, I just removed myself from it, and found myself in the next one. I knew that I didn’t want to be the victim—the defenceless, innocent woman I read about, when they, and I, were so much more than that. I thought that by saying nothing, I could avoid that classification. I still don’t want to be the Victim and nothing else, but evading uncomfortable truths never helps conversations and culture to move forward.

I don’t think I can make a big change or significantly adjust the scripts surrounding rape culture. But maybe if I keep questioning how we relate to one another, keep reading about other people’s experiences and keep trying to understand my own, I might be able to contribute to change. Ignoring the problem won’t provide an answer, but maybe there’s a way to collectively find a solution.

I have high hopes that, one day, we can live in a world where ‘no’ means no.

References

Marcus, Sharon 1992 ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’ in Judith Butler and Joan Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 385-403

Horeck, Tanya 2004, Public rape: representing violation in fiction and film, London and New York, Routledge