16. Whether we scream or not*
The question of what sort of person can be deemed to have been raped is the addled, male-gazey question that has dogged jurisprudence from time immemorial.
There was a sentence that E. Jean Carroll left unfinished in a passionate statement she made about rape and silence, testifying this week in the battery and defamation suit she had brought against Donald Trump. She was addressing the issue of why she hadn’t screamed in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing-room where she says Trump raped her in the 1990s. “I’m not a screamer,” she explained to Joe Tacopina, one of Trump’s battery of lawyers, who was cross-examining her. She was characterizing herself as a certain sort of person, just as she did the previous Monday, when Tacopina asked why she hadn’t gone to the police. “Mr. Tacopina, I was born in 1943,” Carroll explained. “I’m a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught and trained to keep our chins up and to not complain.”
It’s been pointed out that Tacopina’s is a rather benighted way of looking at rape, one that sees it through the lens of Victorian morality. In this view, rape was an assault on a woman’s virtue not her person, so only a virtuous woman could be raped. And what constituted virtue was a willingness to be controlled by men because a woman’s person wasn’t really her person at all, it was the property of the men in her life.
It was sort of thrilling to hear Carroll say she hadn’t screamed because she was a certain sort of person, because exactly what sort of person can be deemed to have been raped is the addled, male-gazey question that has dogged jurisprudence from time immemorial, and what kind of person a woman was judged to be rested on men’s ideas of how women should behave in certain situations. A woman who was raped would scream, the logic goes, and you can finish out the thought yourself, as Carroll did on the first day of cross-examination, when Tacopina mocked her for not having had a “story” for why she hadn’t screamed before talking to a psychiatrist. “I wasn’t coming up with a story,” she countered.
It’s usually—I would say more than usually—under discussion when a woman is raped and she doesn’t scream. … E. Jean, why didn’t you scream? It’s what a woman—you better have a good excuse why you didn’t scream. Because if you didn’t scream, you weren’t raped. I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not.
If you didn’t scream, you weren’t raped. Check out that sentence fragment, though, just before Carroll said “you better have a good excuse…” It’s what a woman—there are only so many ways one could finish out the sentence in that context. I can only think of two, actually. “It’s what a woman who was really being raped would do.” Or “It’s what a woman who had any decency would do if she were being raped.” It’s the same idea; one statement just spells it out a little more starkly and in more blatantly outdated terms.
Men are always trying to control our voices or castigating us for using or not using them in a particular way, especially in rape cases.
Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you go to the police? Why didn’t you tell anyone?
Why didn’t you use your inside voice? Why didn’t you use your outside voice?Tacopina had begun by literally forcing a particular utterance out of Carroll—before he’d even begun asking questions. He addressed her with a “Good morning, Ms. Carroll” and then, instead of beginning his cross-examination, waited for her to return the greeting. As Mitchell Epner reported in The Daily Beast, Carroll “did not respond in kind.” There was no reason for her to: she had not been asked a question. According to Epner, though, Tacopina was angered (“visibly perturbed”) by her non-response and repeated the words “Good morning, Ms. Carroll!” more loudly and more forcefully. Whereupon Carroll answered, “Good morning.”
Throughout his cross-examination Monday, Tacopina continued to question Carroll in ways that suggested her behavior didn’t conform to his idea of a rape victim. She’d gone back to Bergdorf’s—numerous times! She’d once said something positive about Trump’s game show in an email to a friend! Tacopina wanted a rape victim who would be timorous and haunted, afraid to return to the luxury department store and so traumatized that the mere mention of “The Apprentice” would send her screaming from the room.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why one would not scream while being raped, as an outpouring of stories on Twitter attested last Thursday.
He was a friend of my father. Married, with two children. I tried to get away… I said - my dad will kill you. He laughed and said - God damned right he will! Then he said my dad would go to prison and it would be my fault for telling him. My secret for 45 years. #IDidntScream
When you know your attacker, you're less likely to scream because you're in disbelief someone you know, or trusted, is doing it. The shock silences you. I cried, and tried to push him away, but that actually seemed to excite him more, so I went limp in the end.#IDidntScream
I was 7. I didn't scream. You don't scream when your abuser threatens you at that age. #IDidntScreamEither
And on and on.
You could fail to scream because you couldn’t believe what was happening or because you were afraid of getting your face smashed in or because you were dissociating or because, like Carroll, you were too busy trying to fight him off or because no one would scream in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room—not in a million years. Because then people might come and see and know what had been happening to you.
Not screaming, not speaking about rape are inherent in the nature of the act itself. They’re baked in. The ancient Greeks knew this. In 5th-century Athens rape was part of a class of crime that fell under the term “hubris,” which doesn’t just mean what we’re taught it means in school. In fact, some people assert that it didn’t mean that at all, and that the literary definition of hubris as overweening arrogance or pride is based—I quote from The Oxford Classical Dictionary—"on misunderstanding of ancient texts, and concomitant and over-simplified views of Greek attitudes to the gods [which] have lent support to many doubtful and often over-Christianized interpretations, above all of Greek tragedy.” What “hubris” did denote was a class of assault committed for the sole purpose of humiliating someone. It was the ability to shame another person, Aristotle wrote, that gave the doer pleasure in cases of hubris. “The cause of the pleasure for those committing hubris is that by harming people, they think themselves superior.” In other words, rape doesn’t just have a shame component, that’s its purpose, its whole raison d’être.
As for Mr. Tacopina’s image of the suitable rape victim? That’s an image of womanhood—the “angel in the house”—that Virginia Woolf famously declared it is “part of the occupation of a woman writer” to kill.
I think E. Jean did her job.
In a just universe, E. Jean Carroll would ask, "What does that have to do with anything? Red Herring."