Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal (review)

In her book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo, translated from German into English in 2019, Mithu Sanyal traces connections between narratives that have come to inform how we talk about rape. For Sanyal, the di scourse surrounding rape informs our discourse on gender, sexuality, and the relationship of the sexes to each other. Sanyal draws on a variety of disciplines—cultural and historical narratives, rape laws, #MeToo and Title IX controversies—across much of the Global North. Sanyal aims clearly: "to start a discussion and open up new ways to speak about rape, prevention, and healing, as individuals and as a society" (3). The central question posed is that despite our increasingly nuanced understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality (compared to binary models of the past), why is it so hard to "speak about rape other than as a crime that only men do to only women—even though that's not the whole story?" (8). How did rape become the most gendered of all crimes and why, rather than a specific crime, is sexual violence often expressed as an "inherent risk of being a woman" (4)?

Sanyal delves into the history and construction of sexuality, looking back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to examine the explanations for rape in the fields of evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, and the legal system, as well as the prevailing cultural norms, social and moral expectations, and sex scripts within each time period. Sanyal also examines how the women's movement and feminist works have shaped our discourse about rape. She gives special attention to second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book, Against our Will, which defines rape solely in terms of "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" (25). While the text was criticized widely for reproducing racist stereotypes, Sanyal observes a lack of criticism directed towards the biological assumptions made in the text, such as the idea that "the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey" because of the construction of their genital organs (24). Since the book had an immense impact during the time period it came out in, and helped change rape laws in the U.S. and other countries, Brownmiller's definition of rape, according to Sanyal, made rape the origin story of patriarchy as well as second-wave feminism.

Sanyal revisits what we might, in a post-#MeToo era, think of as outdated gender norms or binary definitions about masculinity and femininity that, although unspoken, end up becoming part of the discourse on rape. This confines us to the men-as-perpetrators and women-as-victims binary, which not only makes male victims of sexual abuse invisible, but also seeps into language, or lack thereof. Sanyal points out how the language used to talk about sex has historically depicted sex as something men give to, or take from, women. Words like penetration focus on male genitalia, without a corresponding term for female genitalia, even though there are alternatives such as Bini Adamczak's proposal to use "circlusion" as a possible antonym to penetration, since both words depict the same physical process but from opposing perspectives (19). This lack of language, Sanyal says, also directs our attention to the problem of translation. Both "victim" and "survivor" become problematic when translating across historical and cultural contexts. In Germany, the term "survivor" is mostly used for Holocaust survivors and implies a life or death circumstance. The term "victim" is also rejected by many as a restrictive label, a box they cannot escape from and heal. Indeed, Sanyal refers to conversations, court cases, and interviews where those who were sexually assaulted felt guilty for healing their trauma, for whom moving on feels like a betrayal and trauma is held on to as evidence of the sexual violence (Sanyal critiques Naomi Wolf's claim in Vagina that "[w]e should understand that while healing is possible, one never fully 'recovers' from rape; one...