The Michigan Review

Carnacchio "Collude[s] With Rapists"

Let’s skip the flowery introduction and the usual lead into the letter and get straight to the point: C.J. Carnacchio’s Campus Commentary from April 22, 1998 titled “Take Back the Night From Feminists” was not about supporting the ideal of a humane utopia and making rape a community issue. It was a blatant attack on women courageous enough to speak out about rape. Women courageous enough to share their stories with strangers, not “accept, even embrace the mantle of victim status.” The mantle that we embrace is that of survivors. Did you not hear Kalimah Johnson lead us in our chant “I am not a victim”? There were no victims at Take Back the Night, only survivors. It is a badge of honor to be a survivor, to have lived to tell.

We will not be ashamed of ourselves for politicizing rape, for we are not the ones who have made it so. Rape has always been political. The first rape laws were written as property laws, a crime committed by one man against another. The woman raped was as inconsequential as a stolen plow. Even currently, rape is a spoil of war. Soldiers understand it to be their right. Ask thousands of Bosnian, Rwandan, and Israeli women. Rape is an exercise in power and control. It is violence used to exert power and control over someone else. All rape is a means to a political end. Every rapist in prison committed rape to subjugate and control someone else, not because they are demented or perverse. If we label rapists as perverse, two things happen. First, we forget that rape is violence, because perversity is sexual. Second, we provide rapists with an excuse. There is no excuse. All rapists choose to be [rapists].

According to the FBI, 80-90% of men would commit rape if they could get away with it. All men are potential rapists, some men just choose not to be. Most rapes are committed by an intimate partner, men women trust, not strangers in dark alleys. This image of rapists as “social deviants” is just not true. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that women are more at risk for violence in their own homes than anywhere else.

An “explicit yes means yes” absolutely does not imply that women have trouble communicating. It does the exact opposite, encouraging women to be clear in stating what they want and what they do not. How is it that “the idea of active consent bolsters the stereotypes of men just out to ‘get some’ and women who don’t really want any”? Women who are giving active consent are very clearly stating that they want to “get some” too.

The essence of Take Back the Night is not “anti-male paranoia.” The essence of Take Back the Night, indeed, the essence of “rape-crisis feminism” is to celebrate our survival and our commitment to ending violence against women in our culture. To personally attack us by stating that we are “beneath contempt” for this celebration is to collude with rapists and support violence against women. That is beneath contempt.

Thank you,
Staff and Volunteers at the Domestic Violence Project, Inc./SAFE House

Mr. Carnacchio Responds

Not yet available.

This article was published in the 16 September 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 1).
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