A question of violence: women raping men.

There's two parts of me, one that says turn the other cheek and you forgive and forgive and forgive the actions of mankind... and yet there's another part of me that thinks `enjoy the reversal of the roles' and `enjoy the reversal of what has taken place' and the fact that I don't see it as violent because a woman did it to a man, whereas I would have seen it as violent if a man did it to a woman. (Beth)

I am interested in the ways in which women make sense of experiences in relationships as violent or otherwise. In this article I explore women's responses to a story about a woman raping a man. Female to male rape is an anomaly, and throws into question hegemonic conceptions of rape, sex and violence. It allows women to think about the constructions of rape and violence that are often taken as given, namely the aspects of rape concerned with sex/gender and power. This allows a development of understandings of violence in ways that disrupt the notion of violence/non-violence as a binary. This article is based on interviews with fifteen women, most of whom were studying a sex and gender subject at a Victorian university. (All names used in the article have been changed.) My experiences, and more pertinently, those of the women in this study, suggest that understanding an experience, and more so a relationship, as violent, makes violence anything but clearly identifiable.

During an interview with one of the women I heard a particularly confronting story. The woman, who I call Sarah, told me about a time when she felt she had raped a man. My first inclination was to turn off the recorder, to omit it from the study, as it raised issues that seemed difficult to deal with. But on reflection it actually seemed a significant story precisely because it was confronting. I discussed it with some male friends, and was struck by their response, which was to laugh about it, to trivialise it. They said things like `Half his luck', and `Oh yeah, that happens to me all the time'. In trivialising this experience, in turning it into a funny experience, it suggested to me that the idea of a woman raping a man was not as subversive as I had thought (I also laughed as she told the story, because it had seemed powerful, as if she had acted out some revenge I secretly wished for). Listening to these men's responses showed me that the idea of raping a man was not threatening. It failed to disrupt dominant constructions of heterosexuality--it was not frightening for men to hear, and became instead a comment on masculine desire. It was disturbing to hear the `provocation theory', which feminists have challenged, employed by men to explain their sexual prowess. These responses prompted me to use the story to see how an act which on one level seemed subversive and confronting was understood by the women in the study. It seemed to offer a way of teasing out the nuances of defining an act as violent, of taking the theory into practice. Here is the excerpt from the interview.

Sarah: He is someone that I found I was in love with, um, we just got along really really well, great friendship, go out and have fun, just enjoy the whole thing basically. And I kept sleeping in his bed but we never had sex. And there'd be a couple of times that I'd kiss him but he'd sort of pull away and `no, we're just friends', and all this sort of crap.

And I eventually wrote him a letter because he told me that he was in love with my best friend, and I hadn't told him how I felt, and it was when I told him how I felt that he told me about this other girl, and I'm like `oh good, thanks'. That's just exactly what happens to me all the time. And I was so pissed off, and I felt like such a substitute for this other girl that he actually lives with, who is my best friend.

And I--this is so bad--went back to his place, he was really drunk. He couldn't get himself undressed so I undressed him, got into bed with him... hugging, kissing like what we usually do. He fell asleep and I thought fuck this, took his jocks off, and started fucking him while he was asleep! Like, oh god--the desperation, the desperation. And he was snoring! It was so bad, man--I was just like what am I fucking doing! Got off him, and sort of had a breather for a while and thought I can't believe he's asleep, and got back on and started again... and then thought nup, you can't do this, get off and deal with it. So I got off and just thought shit, pissed myself about it for days, but then realised: I raped a man. I raped a guy.

And for me to register that I've like raped a guy--that's, that's--I thought fuck, I'm so desperate to be loved that I have taken someone else's sex from them, and I've raped him. You know, that's what rape is.

Alice: So how did you feel at that point?

Sarah: Disgusted--and unbelieving--and so sad in myself really that I had to go to that extent to try and get the love that I wanted him to try and give me, like that's just fucking phenomenal. Um, I don't want to discuss it with him--I mean I just feel so bad that it happened. I still find it funny though, like there's always two sides of me. Um, I think, and I'll tell you why I think it's funny is because--it's something that women don't do--like it's the complete opposite of what would normally happen--if it was a guy we would be up in arms about it. But it's like turning the tables completely and that's what makes it almost humorous, that you know, for once it's a woman doing this, needing a fuck and going for it.

Alice: Is that what it was for you?

Sarah: No, no, no, no, no. It was I want him to be inside me, I want to feel him inside me, I want him to love me. I felt used and hurt to that point that I did it, that I felt like a substitute for my friend. And that you know, fuck you've used me, so I'm going to use you. But my feeling doing it was not that, it was I want him to love me.

A form of revenge...

A woman who was so hurt by this experience and so hurt fundamentally by herself for wanting this much, wanting his love--a form of revenge is how I understand it, that ultimately destroyed her, because what she did was unbelievable. (Beth)

I still see it as a bit of a hoot. I don't really have a major struggle with it as a woman. I don't. I just think it's a bit of a hoot and I feel sorry for her, very much so, I think it's very sad. But other than that, he got what he deserved. (Noni)

The idea of a woman raping a man is more than logistically complex. It challenges ways of thinking about violence and gender at the levels of the personal and the political. In the women's understandings this is visible, with ideas about feminism and patriarchy, and also personal responses to the woman in the story, colliding in places. Almost all of the women felt that the story generated contradictory responses. Ways of making sense of this narrative demonstrate the difficulties of articulating theories at the level of practice, and more importantly the uncomfortable fit between competing discourses about sexuality, violence and gender. Above all, the discussion is subversive in that it is a forum in which only women are speaking about this episode, and the woman involved is the subject--the man concerned is nameless, faceless, and is little more than a penis.

Many of the women empathised with Sarah, and identified with her desire and her desperation. Kate links her perception of the woman's feelings to her own response, and says `She's desperate you know, she's kind of in love with him and he's in love with someone else and she's so desperate that she would do that, I think that's sad. But I kind of can understand it, I'm not condemning her.' Similarly Gina initially responds not to the act, but the `motivation', saying `I can understand the wanting so much that you can't understand how it can't be--and I've been there millions of times'. These responses were common, with only a few women arguing clearly that her actions were unacceptable regardless of her feelings. Marie says:

I don't feel a bit sorry for her, I don't care how obsessed she was with him or how inadequate she felt. Lots of men, most men rape women for that reason. That is the reason they rape, is they're inadequate, they want sex, they want women or they want a power over somebody. She's getting something that she wants...

Even Marie's understanding draws on what was happening for the woman she read about, and still identifies her feelings as being relevant to the act.

Defining the experience as one of violence is complicated, and it is here that contradictions emerge. Most of the women did not regard the story as containing violence. For some, such as Olivia, this was because there was no physical hurt or struggle involved:

Well it's not physically violent. Violence has to have a physical or mental effect upon that other person. The act she described to me was certainly not rape, in the sense that this man has no recollection of it, he has nothing in his subconscious with which he's going to live for the rest of his life. That to me is a violent rape, that was--to me it was just a joy ride. It certainly wasn't an act of violence because there has to be, the other person has to be aware I think, that violence is being committed upon them.

Chris is the only woman to suggest that it is a violent act `because it's an invasion, and I think invasion is one of the main things about violence'. And yet it is precisely that Sarah didn't invade his body physically that offers some of the women a way of distinguishing between men's violence and this incident. So Olivia suggests that `a woman is not invading a male space in the same way as a man would be invading a woman's space, because... she will have a memory that she will carry, even if it's not in vivid detail, she knows someone has invaded her body'.

Yet while many of the women did not think that this experience was violent, most thought that it was rape. For those who didn't, articulating why it wasn't rape seemed difficult. Noni responded with:

God I find that difficult. Because I suppose there's a logical side of me which says yes she has raped hint... she has done something to his body that he didn't say yes to. And that's what we're telling this society, that men can't do things to women's bodies if they don't say yes to it... I think because the reason that she did it... it doesn't stand up though, does it, because I'm sure there's lots of men who rape because they're lonely... they want to give the girl love, they think that if they do this that she'll love them.

Here Noni grapples with the dissonance between her understandings of rape and violence in theory, with a story which is, as she suggests, `turning it around'. These understandings collide with the sex of the protagonists, such that for Noni, and indeed almost every other woman in the study, their sex, and the fact that it is a woman `raping' a man, disrupts ideas about rape and violence.

Distinguishing rape from violence, Ingrid says:

If it were the other way around, if it was the man harassing the woman, it probably would be regarded as violence. But I think it's the issue of consent, I mean he didn't give her any consent to do that, and so she did rape him.

This is one way of making sense of this narrative, to reverse the sex of the actors, consider what it would mean if it `were the other way around', and then reverse it back. Similarly Kate says:

I mean, urn, you can't help thinking that for some reason there's some, I don't know, the guy's snoring, I don't know, some complicity there by the guy that he's in some way, it's not rape because she's able to do that, so....

One of the ways to explore this, without suggesting Sarah raped a man, is to identify with her, to emphasise her feelings in the situation. Noni elaborates on this, drawing out the intersections between her response to the woman in the story, and her ideas about sexed violence:

It's funny isn't it? I don't see it as being violent although it's how you look at it, isn't it, whether you're... I don't see it as being violent only because she wants to be loved. She's taking, I mean she's saying she took the sex from him, she wanted some love. Whereas I think when men rape it's got nothing to do with love, it's got more to do with power. They don't do it because they are wanting love from some body or they are wanting to give somebody love. They're doing it because they are bigger, they're stronger and it's a power thing. It's an ego thing, l don't see her talking about her ego, or that she felt powerful or that she wanted to hurt him... She wanted to give him something. She wanted him to sort of, I think wake up and acknowledge that what I'm doing for you, you know I'm doing this because I love you. But their again, I mean somebody else would say...

Like Noni, Chris distinguishes between love and sex for Sarah, and rape and power for men. She adds, referring explicitly to the discursive manoeuvre she employs in order to describe the experience as non-violent:

I don't know why, for some reason it doesn't seem as violent as a man raping a woman, but in another way I can't really think of a way to describe it as being non-violent, other than talking about the emotional thing.

Gina illustrates this in saying:

From her point of view (I think I relate to her more than the male--it's destructive emotionally, I mean he slept through it, and that in itself would be hurtful, like here I am pulling all stops here, and you're snoring.

By identifying with Sarah's pain and desire, these women construct her, rather than the man, as damaged by the experience.

The dissonance between feminist theory, men's violence and this narrative are disquieting. Some of the women spoke of an uncomfortable pleasure in the story. These women highlight a contradiction between an understanding of what Constitutes rape at the level of theory (rape involving lack of consent, penetration, power), and ideas about women's sex and desire. It is confronting to read about the physicality of Sarah's description, that she speaks about not only her. pain or sadness but also her pleasure, her choice: `I thought `fuck this'... took his jocks off... and started fucking him while he was asleep!' At the same time that it is perhaps shocking, this is also what appeals to us, what makes us smile, laugh uncomfortably, even feel excited. Sarah describes details that make the scene vivid, details that take us into the scene and remind us of the physical and the practical. In not describing her own body in the same way however, Sarah positions herself as the subject, as the actor, while the man is described for us to view. This is what Jo points to when she says:

The excitement about it is something about taking women off a fucking pedestal, that boring bloody pedestal.... Women have been put somewhere stupid, they're not allowed to have their bodies.

In this narrative Sarah is in charge and the man is positioned as object, really only in terms of his dick. This in itself is subversive, for, as Sarah says, `For once it's a woman doing this, needing a fuck and going for it'.

This story is also understood at the level of broader sexual politics. The women quoted here located this excerpt firmly in the context of feminist discourses of men's violence against women. Ella, for example, Who argues that what Sarah did was unacceptable, still makes sense of this from her position as a woman and as a feminist:

I think that, as a woman, as a member of a sex that is constantly violated, intimidated and terrorised by the idea of rape, it is easy to laugh at the incident and think that we're getting our own back. But you just can't do that.

Sarah's act is located within feminist discourse in other ways, being constructed as almost `for' the other women. In identifying with Sarah, the other women inscribe this story not only as one about the rape of a man, but as a comment on sorrow, desire and violence against women. By far the most emphatic response is to the feelings Sarah describes and her desperation. In this way a distinction is drawn between male rape (being about power), and Sarah's motive (being about love). In this way the women can view Sarah's actions not as violent, but nevertheless as rape. To construct Sarah as a rapist, Beth not only locates the event within the context of a history of violence against women, but casts her as a man, saying `It's just that it's been done so often to women... not that he deserves to be raped, but that she had the balls to do it'. But the meaning of rape is internalised, and extended to become metaphor, as Gina suggests:

I think in a sense she raped herself as well, her inner self, who she really is... So yeah, she raped him physically, but emotionally she harmed herself.

In this way meanings of rape are reworked so that Sarah can be both a rapist and raped within the same experience. Dissonance between mainstream and feminist constructions of violence remain messy. Yet by engaging with this ambivalence, these women are developing alternative ways to deal with contradictions of violence.

Alice Bailey is a PhD student in Women's Studies at La Trobe University. Another version of this article appeared in the DVIRC Newsletter.