This article explores the fears and perceptions of rape amongst fifteen women studying or working at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa who claim to have never been raped.1 It highlights the manner in which these women draw on common discourses of women's sexuality to construct certain spaces as potentially dangerous. Thus the article aims to show that spaces are discursively constructed and sexualised, and may become dangerous for women because of socially constituted ideas about what it means for them to be present within different spaces. The article draws on feminist literature concerning rape and women's sexuality and fear to make this argument.
Women's Sexuality in Public Space
It is popular and academic knowledge that women tend to greatly fear rape, and that this fear may inhibit their use of public space [1]. When asked what it meant to live in a country in which rape and other forms of violence against women are said to be rife, Janet*, a UCT student, replied: "You don't feel like you're in an environment where you can be safe. You don't feel like you're in an environment where you can be free to... demonstrate your sexuality." With these last words, Janet was referencing the popular notion that women encourage their rape if they appear sexy, and therefore sexually inviting, to men. Suzanne, another student, echoed this idea. She recalled that in the past, she had sometimes dressed in an explicitly sexual manner in public to attract men's attention. Yet reflecting on this behaviour now, Suzanne felt that she had perhaps walked "a thin line. Maybe I was sort of tempting danger." In fact, because she had since gained weight, Suzanne reported feeling less at risk of sexual violence now: "I feel safer than I did because I feel I'm not as attractive anymore and. I'm sort of less of a sex object in a way. So I feel good, it keeps men away."
Many feminists critique the notion that women court danger, rape specifically, in their manner of dress and self-presentation [2]. They call this a "rape myth" because it naturalises rape as an outcome of stimulated or uncontrollable male sexual desire, ignoring its basis in social, gendered power inequalities. This myth has the effect of shifting blame for rape away from men on to women. As Janet and Suzanne's comments above suggest, a related effect is that it warns women to mute their sexual expression in public, that is in spaces in which their bodies may be visible to all men. By positioning women as men's 'sex objects,' to recall Suzanne's expression, the discourse constructs public space as a domain in which women manifest their sexuality at their own peril. Conversely it implies that sexual modesty and respectability will render a woman safe from sexual violence.
Yet the daily experiences of the women I interviewed complicated this last notion. Despite many of the women's efforts to freely and discreetly inhabit public space, they reported being constantly sexually objectified by men they encountered. For instance, Sasha complained that the mere fact of being a "young attractive girl" made her the object of unwanted male sexual attention in public, even when she was simply going about her everyday business. When unknown men on the streets stared, called, whistled and so on, Sasha felt both self-conscious and sexually vulnerable. The sense of vulnerability came because it seemed to Sasha that if men "can shout those things at you, they have a sort of right to, or a right to you." In other words, Sasha felt that the men noticing her on the streets presumed to have the sexual right to her because she was a woman and because she was there, hence the audacity of their comments and gestures. Alex also experienced unsolicited sexual remarks from strange men on the streets as threatening, such as when one had said: "Nice legs! When do they open?" Such experiences were for Alex "the most common thing you get that reminds you of the fact that it is dangerous" to be a woman in South Africa. They were seemingly mundane yet poignant reminders that some men seemed to view her as always necessarily sexually available to them.
Feminist scholars have long argued that multiple ideologies and discourses of public space construct it as a masculine domain, a place for male bodies, while the private sphere is feminised [3]. One result is that public space is for women strongly associated with danger, vulnerability and fear. The above examples from my interviewees suggest the ways in which dominant ideas of women's sexuality may participate in such constructions of public space: in discourse and in practice, women in public were often positioned as the objects of men's sexual gaze and power.
Women's Sexuality in Private Space
Whereas women may tend to fear sexual violence from unknown men in public, research has extensively shown that most experience this violence from known men within intimate spaces [4]. The personal experiences and secondhand accounts of the women I interviewed are suggestive of the discourses of women's sexuality which may render them vulnerable in such spaces. One student, Violet, shared that she had chosen to be sexually abstinent. However, she discovered that some men did not take this choice seriously. Violet recalled a conversation she had once had with a man who was interested in her who dismissed her assertion of abstinence by saying: "if you were in my room, I'd show you... please you're a woman at the end of the day, and if we were in my room... you would be telling me something different."
This man was drawing a distinction between women's public and private sexual identities. Embedded in this distinction is the notion that a woman, especially if young and unmarried, is disreputable if she is known to be sexually active [5]. With this comes the idea, evident in the quote above, that a woman may publicly say one thing about sex but mean and do quite another in private. Thus she may 'play hard to get,' she may 'say no but really mean yes.' These are common claims about women's sexual behaviour yet, again, feminists have denounced them as myths which encourage and excuse rape [6]. These myths exacerbate women's vulnerability to rape because they may encourage men to disbelieve them when they say no to sex. This may be all the more so if women have willingly entered private spaces with men because the mere fact of being there might be interpreted as a further, though unstated, sign of a woman's 'real' desire for sex.
Indeed a number of the women I spoke with told of incidents in which visiting or being alone with male friends in closed spaces had been incorrectly read as sexual invitations. Tumi knew of two women students who had been forced to "scuffle" with their male friends to fight off their sexual advances while visiting them in their campus rooms. What had happened, she explained, was that the women were "chilling" with their male friends but "the guy seems to get the impression that this is going somewhere. And when [the women] say 'no, wait, what are you talking about, I'm going home,' then [the guys] act all rough." The "impression" such men allegedly had was that the women, by virtue of simply being in their rooms, had signaled their sexually availability. Physical struggle apparently ensued when the women had made it clear that this was not the case, frustrating the men's expectations.
Neo, another student I interviewed, recounted a similar personal experience. Finding herself alone in a locked room with a male friend, she feared that she had unwittingly walked into a rape scenario. This fear was heightened because she had already shown her romantic and sexual interest in the man. Neo recalled that when she realised he had locked the door:
I freaked, I was like frozen... [I thought] what if he decides to force himself on me? I mean look we'd been flirting or what have you, like kisses here and there like the whole week, but nothing substantial... So that's why I froze you know, because I had no idea what this man was gonna do.
In Neo's immediate reading of the situation, the fact that she had previously kissed and flirted with the man made it more likely that he now expected and intended to have sex with her. She imagined that he had read her mere flirting, "nothing substantial" to her, as a sign that she was necessarily game for more. Neo was invoking here the common discourse that women are at once sexually manipulative and passive, that is, subjects who flirt, play games, drop hints, but do not initiate or explicitly state their desire for sex [7]. Knowing of this discourse directly shaped Neo's imagination and fear that she was about to be raped in the locked room. The discourse shaped and sexualised the meanings of the space, in short.
Conclusion
This brief article has aimed to show how social ideas about women's sexuality may affect their fears and experiences of certain spaces as sexually dangerous. The examples from the women I interviewed have suggested that women may in fact have or perceive no real haven from sexual danger in either public or private space. If this may be linked to a discourse of women's sexuality, I would argue that the discourse is, quite simply, that women's bodies are ultimately available and subordinate to men . It is this idea that is fundamentally in play in the examples and experiences of fear and danger we heard from the women above. If so, the work of reconstructing safe spaces for women requires that we challenge this discourse.
Endnotes
The article is based upon my master's research thesis which aimed to explore the imagination and fear of rape in South Africa amongst women who have not experienced rape.
* All names are pseudonyms to protect the women's identities.
References
[1]Du Toit, L. (2005). " A Phenomenology of Rape: Forging a New Vocabulary for Action" in Gouws, A. ed. (Un) Thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa . Aldershot: Ashgate.
[2]Fonow, M., Richardson, L., and Wemmeus, V. (1992). "Feminist Rape Education: Does It Work?" Gender and Society .
[3] Hyams, M. (2003). "Adolescent Latina Bodyspaces: Making Homegirls, Homebodies and Homeplaces", Antipode 536-558.
[4] Mehta, A. and Bondi, L. (1999).
[5] Posel, D. (2005). "The Scandal of Manhood: Baby rape' and the politicization of sexual violence in post-apartheid South Africa", Culture, Health and Sexuality 7.1:239-52.
[6]Shefer, T., Strebel, A., and Foster, D. (2000). "'So women have to submit to that. . .' Discourses of power and violence in students' talk on heterosexual negotiation", South African Journal of Psychology 30. 11-19.
[7]Ward, C. (1995). Attitudes Toward Rape: Feminist and Social Psychological Perspectives . London: Sage Publications
