Even in this groundbreaking #MeToo moment, the age-old myth that a woman who says she was raped is a liar – covering up a regretted act of consensual sex – remains as popular as ever. In Dave Chapelle’s new comedy special, “The Bird Revelation,” he jokes that if Harvey Weinstein looked like Brad Pitt, he would not have been accused of assault and rape.
But the myth of the woman who falsely cries rape should never serve as a punchline. I’ve been tracking slut-shaming – when girls and women are labeled “sluts” and “hos” – for over two decades, interviewing hundreds of teenage girls and women who have been ostracized, harassed and assaulted as a result of their sexual reputation. Their experiences show that it is highly unlikely for any woman to lie about being raped.
In our culture of slut-shaming, women are routinely treated as sex objects but then punished for doing (or presumed to be doing) what is expected of them. Nearly all teenage girls and women are at risk of being labeled a “slut” or “ho” at some point, regardless of their actual sexual behavior.
As a result, teenage girls and women often are defensive about their sexual reputation, even when they have been sexually assaulted. One poignant example is the statement made by the woman who was raped in 2015 by Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. Never mind that there were witnesses who saw the violent assault and that she had been unconscious. The victim felt compelled to share that the night of the assault, she had been dressed demurely in a beige cardigan, “like a librarian”; had a boyfriend, and therefore wasn’t looking for sex; and was not accustomed to drinking – she had made “an amateur mistake” that night by drinking too much.
That the victim defended herself as modest and respectable speaks volumes. She suggests that had she dressed and behaved differently, the rape would have been deserved.
Another strategy to avoid being called a slut or ho is for heterosexual women to lie about their sexual history. They lie not because they are untrustworthy people or because they have a pathological problem. They lie because within a culture of slut-shaming, this often is the smartest, shrewdest way to protect themselves. Lying in their circumstance is rational and understandable.
One 24-year-old student was rejected by her boyfriend because he couldn’t handle that she had been sexually active with 10 men, a number he judged too high. It didn’t bother him that his number of sexual partners was also 10. She told me she regretted having told him the truth.
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Some women lie to their health care providers about their number of sexual partners because they’re tired of being met with judgment. A 26-year-old therapist in California felt so ashamed after a nurse expressed alarm over her number of sexual partners, she told me she never wanted to go to the clinic again.
No one ever has told me, however, that after a regretted consensual sexual encounter, she lied and accused her partner of sexual assault. Instead, women who regret an act of consensual sex are quick to blame only themselves.
Yet many people believe that women falsely “cry rape,” including jurors (such as those in the Bill Cosby rape trial) and public officials (such as the top civil rights official at the Department of Education who said last summer that “90 percent” of accusations of rape on college campuses “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right'”).
There is no evidence or reason to believe that women lie about regretted consensual sex, claiming it was coerced. But this narrative does make sense in a perverse way: If you think that women should feel ashamed of their sexuality, then logically it follows that a woman could be tempted to lie to cover up her shameful behavior.
The facts, however, demonstrate that women do not fabricate accounts of sexual assault. To the contrary, sexual assault is under-reported, since most assaulted women know that coming forward means facing retaliation or ostracism; they feel ashamed because they imagine they did something wrong; they may have conflicting feelings about their abuser.
Sexual objectification is also so utterly routine that it wouldn’t even occur to most women to lie about a degrading sexual experience: Who lies about, say, whether she walked or took the bus to work? Heather Hlavka of Marquette University has shown that sexual violence is so widely considered “normal” among young women that they don’t even know to identify abusive behavior. As one 15-year-old girl told me, “I pretty much expect to be groped and touched by random guys every time I leave my home in the morning.” In the workplace, nearly half of women report they have experienced some form of sexual harassment.
According to the research of Alice H. Wu, economists chatting among themselves on an anonymous online message board regard women almost entirely in sexually demeaning ways. The 30 words most uniquely associated with women, Wu found, included: hotter, lesbian, tits, slut, hot, vagina, sexy and prostitute. This behavior is hardly limited to economists. We learned last month that Miss America Organization leaders have laughed for years behind closed doors about pageant winners, referring to them in vulgar language reminiscent of the president’s.
The situation is far worse for girls and women of color. Black girls as young as 5 years old are regarded by adults as more sexual and less innocent than their white peers, according to Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality. Adult black women are more likely than white women to be presumed inherently sexualized and therefore unrapeable.
When it comes to lies and sexual assault, the one that women are most likely to tell is the one they tell themselves: That they did something wrong and deserve to be mistreated.
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