Roman Polanski has been arrested, finally, on an outstanding warrant for the drugging, sexual assault, and sodomization of a thirteen-year-old girl. That girl is now 40-some years old — he’s had 30 years to live in various chateaux in France and Switzerland, make a series of interesting movies, and so forth. Neither the time that has passed nor the talent that he displays in other arenas or any of the mitigating circumstances of his biography (parents murdered by the Nazis, wife murdered by the Manson gang…) changes the fact that he is also a convicted rapist who has yet to serve jail time.
Since this is a history blog, let me throw a little context into the mix. When a story about rape becomes all about how terrible the (convicted, mind you) rapist is being treated, you know you are in a screwed-up place and you should investigate how it came to be this way. Luckily, history can help you out.
There’s an excellent book by Sharon Block (titled Rape and Sexual Power in Early America) that lays out why and when sexual violence against women was considered a crime in colonial America. She argues (persuasively, I think) that what was considered consent depended greatly on who the victim was — and that so-called “great men” began to turn what was clear coercion into a plausible narrative of consent even before the act was done. In fact, since it was to be expected that a moral woman might resist sexual advances even if she was interested (the “your lips say nonono but your eyes say yesyesyes”), the mere fact that a woman struggled was not considered particularly important evidence that she was an unwilling partner in the sex act. In fact, she finds that women involved in rape trials in the colonial period often felt resigned to the act and powerless to stop it, giving up their physical resistance to forestall greater social shame or violent retribution. That’s coercion, not consent, but it was often good enough for courts to demonstrate that a woman secretly wanted sex (even if she was young, poor, and unable to say no.)
What determined who could get away with otherwise felonious behavior? The aggressor’s social standing — typically a “great man” with a powerful social network — was a determinant of who even came to trial. However, the victim’s biographical particulars (class position, racial identity, connections to the wealthy and powerful) became the real issues at controversy in cases that came into court. Once at trial, the greater resources and social standing of a powerful man nearly always carried the case in the man’s favor — the exception being when the victimized woman’s body became a battlefield on which a war between men (rapist versus failed protector) was waged.
Block explains that by 1800, narratives of sexual violence became mostly about a man’s impugned honor against the beastly smears against his good name and social position OR about the harms done to men when “their” women were damaged by sexual aggression (for example, the rape of Patriot women by British troops).
In the Polanski case, we can see echoes of this. At the time of the deed (way back in 1973), there was a widespread counter-story that suggested that the girl involved was a precocious dabbler in sex and drugs and while sex with a 13-year-old was a statutory offense, the sex had been consensual. The grand jury transcripts (yuck, not for the faint of heart or those with a history of sexual violence trauma)
make it clear that this is not the case. There was no consent — a deliberately drug-impaired minor cannot consent to anything. Later, there was an undercurrent of “oh, poor great man, oh poor tragic brilliant artist…”
coupled with “if the rape victim has forgiven, why can’t the legal system?” Well, listen carefully to what the rape victim is saying. She is resigned to the idea that the wrong done to her is never going to be righted. Making your peace is psychologically necessary, but it’s not the same as saying that what happened was in any sense “ok.”
Then there is the “oh, it wasn’t really a rape-rape, for heaven’s sake.” Whatever that means.
My point: there’s a history to the way that we talk about sexual violence that is linked to some rather awful things in the American past and that past doesn’t cease to matter just because you don’t know about it.
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