When we allow bullying to go unchecked we make rape culture okay
Watching the Steubenville case unfold I have been brought back to my childhood. As a ten year-old in suburban New Jersey in 1989, I heard way too much about rape. In the wake of the Glen Ridge rape case in which several popular members of the high school football team raped a mentally handicapped girl, disturbing details were everywhere. I heard them every morning from my little purple clock radio, I saw them on the front page of the paper we had delivered daily, I had them recounted to me by an older family friend who was a student at Glen Ridge High at the time- it was as “everywhere” as it could have been in that pre-social-media time. That said, when I was older I still felt compelled to read Bernard Lefowitz’s Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb – I wanted to understand the “why” and the “how” and what I was left with was this: This group of young men was revered by their community to the point that they felt untouchable, they were told (and bought into the idea that) they mattered more than other people. Their wants, their needs, theirs goals, their desires, their pleasure, even their amusement all mattered more than anyone else’s happiness. They came first and they knew it. They wielded that power effectively- anyone who got in their way was going down.
Looking at everything that’s coming out of Steubenville 24 years later it’s eerily similar, the kids just have way more effective technology for documenting their abuse, letting the world know about it and beating each other down. (Although it’s worth noting that at the time of arrest the Glen Ridge kids had secured someone to video tape a planned second attack on the same girl, so while the technology has improved the idea is nothing new) The horrific video of Michael Nodianos illustrates the “if it’s not about me it doesn’t matter” idea in chilling detail. At one point someone asks him how he would feel if it was his daughter and his answer is simply “but it isn’t” Once again we see a group that feels untouchable, more important than those around them. A group that values a night of giggling front of cameras for them over the dignity of a young woman because, well, she’s not them.
It’s clear that these cases have a lot in common but what’s grabbing me is that I don’t think these kids are rapists because they are sexual predators by nature, I think they are rapists because they are bullies.What do bullies do? Bullies beat smaller kids for fun. Bullies torment students of different sexualities to the point of necessitating the “It Gets Better” campaign for laughs. Bullies perpetrate pranks that humiliate classmates scarring them for years after the fact because they’re bored. Bullies take and take and take from weaker people around them without thinking about it while leaving those people beaten down and broken. It easily follows that bullies sexually use, abuse and degrade young women for their own amusement. We always say that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power and the currency of the bully is power- they get off on wielding control over their victims.
We give a lot of lip service to anti-bullying initiatives. We talk about self-esteem and zero-tolerance policies. We hold assemblies and have kids group hug-it-out. Then we proceed to tell them that athletes deserve more than other people for no reason other than the uniform on their backs. This isn’t just silly high school social structure either. This week creepy ESPN announcers devoted a not-insignificant amount of airtime to ogling a young woman and then declaring that she was the kind of prize that quarterbacks apparently are all just entitled too and lesser men who don’t play football don’t deserve to speak to- and this is how we get there.
When something like this happens we want to start talking about teaching boys not to rape and teaching everyone about consent and yes that is important but really we need to think bigger and start earlier. I posit there would be less of a problem with young men not respecting young women if young men were taught to respect and value everyone. I think the consent piece would feel more like common sense if we taught our kids early on about respect for self and others- all others. I think a huge cause for teenage rape culture is that we allow bullying, we permit kids to not respect one another, hell sometimes we, as adults encourage and participate in it. We send kids, in these cases talented athletes, into the world thinking “I’m more valuable than you”. We need to end this culture of entitlement, cruelty and disregard for the dignity of others. .
Finally, as adults we need to consistently extend that respect to each other, even when it’s hard. We need to not engage in bullying. It’s easy to see what I mean in cases like these- The adults of Steubenville have done some truly horrifying things to protect the rapists in this case (including suing a blogger who brought attention to the case) and that kind of thing just goes further to show kids that they are beyond reproach and no one should dare question them. However, I want us to look at ourselves, our own community, how we relate to each other. The idea for this piece started forming for me when I was thinking about Steubenville and then read Joanna Shroeder’s response to the Nice Guys of Ok Cupid. Now, I’ll admit, I had some laughs about that site but I could also see her point. In making that point she talked about how we tend to approve of bullying, when we believe the target deserves it. I thought back to some of the things I witnessed in December. I saw people who I know want to do good things and help women launching vicious attacks on writers and sites they disagreed with, going into character-assassination-mode and engaging in Twitter conversations one would expect from teenagers (“We don’t like them, if you keep associating we might not like you anymore & we’ll tell people”). It was saying, “I disagree with you and what I’m saying is more valuable so I will now take a certain degree of pleasure (and I saw some of you take immense pleasure in it) making your life unpleasant for daring to think differently than me”. I know people thought they were fighting an important battle but no matter how you slice it, that was bullying and it was ugly. If we are all as opposed to rape culture as we seem to be that can’t be how we deal with differences. We need to place an embargo on bullying.
To create the world without Steubenville and Glen Ridge we need create the world where it’s never ok to take someone down for fun. We need to create a world where everyone understands that everyone else is valuable and has the right to be and to be heard. Where each child’s personhood is weighted equally. We frequently treat rape culture as a sexual issue (and you know I’m all for comprehensive childhood sexual education) but I think it’s bigger than that- I think it’s a “human” issue and until we’re all willing to step up and be better humans we won’t quite get it.
