Blind Still to the Clarity of Rape

Like millions, I’ve become a big fan of “Mad Men,” AMC’s stylish, brooding and sexy drama series focused on Kennedy-era New York City and its anti-hero Don Draper, the ad man with the bizarrely complicated and purposefully unexamined life.  The treatment of women and minorities (Jews, African-Americans and homosexuals most prominently) provide a tragic and illuminating undercurrent for the entire series.  Many of its brilliant plotlines focus on the struggles of these individuals to reconcile their circumstances with the hyper white-male dominated world they navigate.Given this important backdrop, I was happy to see the show focus on sexual assault as well, particularly intimate partner sexual violence.  The players are the head of the secretarial pool, Joan Holloway (played brilliantly by Christina Hendricks) and her fiancé, a handsome, young doctor who rapes her in an office while visiting her workplace before a dinner date.  I was then promptly disheartened, although not surprised, by viewer reactions, many of whom put quotes around the word ‘rape’ when discussing the scene online, as if what happened to Joan was somehow unclear or arguable.  It was neither.In fact, the scene is extremely well done and remarkably realistic, based on my experience with survivors of this most prevalent kind of sexual assault.  Joan’s fiancé wants to see one of the ad men’s offices and have her make him a drink.  She reluctantly agrees and leads him to the small bar.  Once there, he gropes her from behind, innocently enough at first for a betrothed couple, but she reminds him that its not her office and they can’t get physical.  He continues to grope her, not taking ‘no’ for an answer, and then grabs her forcefully when she turns to him, pushing her against the bar table.  Bottles shake and Joan’s eyes grow wide.  It’s at this moment she realizes she’s no longer in control of her body.  He turns her, his arms grasping hers, and pushes her to the floor while she protests.  He quickly overpowers her, forces her arms away from her body, spreads her legs, works himself out of his pants and rapes her.  With his right hand he turns her face away from him and she stares silently at a couch and a coffee table in her line of sight.  The next scene is of him waiting outside the office for her, presumably as she’s straightening her clothing and composing herself again.  She emerges and they leave together.I sometimes show this scene when teaching sex assault dynamics to cops and prosecutors.  Just about all of them readily recognize what they see as rape, and can pinpoint the moment at which Joan’s choices and physical security evaporate.  The general public, however, seems to be behind the curve.  As Hendricks herself reports in a New York magazine article from last fall, many viewers (blogging on the show or commenting on it online) either didn’t see this incident as rape (not “real” rape, anyway), or were dubious about Joan’s reaction to it.  Many also seemed to believe that, because she didn’t cry out and was willing to continue on with their evening, whatever her fiancé did to her, it was obviously something less than rape.  This is particularly disturbing to me because what is depicted is unequivocally a sexual attack.  During it, what Joan’s character experiences is every bit as brutal, terrifying and life-altering as any other form of sexual assault.  It’s also far, far more common than the “guy-in-the-bushes” stranger rape that too many people believe is the only kind worth seriously addressing.  Her reactions to being raped, both during and after, aren’t evidence of a less serious crime; they simply bespeak her reasonable reaction to the assault given the shock of it, and also given her options, in 1962, for dealing with it.  They also demonstrate the steely strength of the character, for better or for worse, in composing herself so completely and continuing on with her night, and whatever lies beyond it.  This isn’t to say that Joan didn’t have choices after she was raped.  She makes the choice to remain in the relationship, and to maintain the façade of a happy engagement with an enviable catch.  Feminist friends of mine would correctly remind me that the point isn’t to relieve her of any responsibility for those choices, as long as they are understood in the context of her reality.  Rather, what desperately needs to be clear is that the choices she makes and the context in which she makes them don’t speak to the gravity of what he does to her.  She was raped.  Forcibly.  The fact that the rapist is someone she’s been intimate with before doesn’t make it less traumatic; if anything it’s more so because of the betrayal of trust involved and the pure shock and terror of such a thing done by a loved one and in a mundane, presumably safe place like one’s own offices.It’s now nearly 50 years later.  For an American woman in Joan’s position, the options are less bleak and the path forward more hopeful, but not nearly enough.  Sexual assault by men against the women they share a life with is still rampant, and rarely successfully prosecuted or even reported.  It’s remarkable how recently we’ve begun to attempt to deal with intimate partner sexual assault; in large part it’s been a welcome outgrowth of the valiant effort to deal with domestic violence.  But in many ways sexual violence is the final frontier.  Violence is one thing.  Sex, the most private, compromising, titillating and repressed aspect of human interaction, is another.  Because of our discomfort with the subject, the mysteries our own bodies present us with, and 1000 other cultural implications, we tend to paint gray actions by men (and some women, particularly in same-sex relationships) that are very clearly black and white.Witness, then, how millions still confuse an utterly clear-cut example of a violent, vicious act with something vaguely unwanted or unpleasant.   A tiff between lovers best left between them.  An event for which a bouquet of roses appropriately makes amends.  It’s been a long 50 years.