Jason Clark Claims Joffe-Walt’s Substance is Crucial

To the Editors:

Last Friday, on Feb. 15, the Review published two responses to Benjamin Joffe-Walt’s excellent letter from the previous week, which charged men with the responsibility of confronting their male privilege and fighting against its violent manifestation in the crime of rape. Both letters, one by Mark Simmons and another by Paul Wilczyniski, entirely ignored the substance of Mr. Joffe-Walt’s argument and instead simply provided claims repugnant for their absolute lack of any acknowledgement of social reality. In the end, the letters only prove the very thesis put forth in Mr. Joffe-Walt’s letter, and to which both Mr. Simmons and Mr. Wilczyniski were either too ill-informed, ill-intentioned, or cowardly to actually respond.
Mr. Simmons’ basic argument is essentially that the crime of sexual violence is unique because it provokes a particular emotional state — hysteria — in which all rational capacities are abandoned and the presumption of innocence is thereby threatened, all of which endangers the rule of law and the basic foundations of our legal system. The presumption of innocence in rape cases “protects the accused from the hysteria engendered by as heinous a crime as rape and ensures that their trials will be as fair as possible.” I am obliged to use the passive voice in my reproduction of his argument because he fails, as the previous quotation attests, to indicate who exactly becomes overwhelmed by hysteria — who, exactly, is threatening our legal system. His very use of the word “hysteria,” given its historical origins and continued use, and the violent and sexist social reality that his letter both denies and ultimately aids in that denial, indicates who those people are. According to Mr. Simmons’ chosen language and argument: they are women.

Hysteria — that emotion “engendered” by a crime such as rape, according to Mr. Simmons — has a very real gender-specific historical use and connotation. It was first used in classical Greece to describe a condition peculiar to women in which the uterus would detach from its lower abdominal position and drift about the body causing havoc in all the bodily and mental systems through which it would pass. Up until the late nineteenth century, scientists used the term “hysteria” to describe the supposedly frequent unstable emotional states of women (and only women), attributing them to their psychic conflicts, sexual desires, and other internal deficiencies. Female survivors of sexual violence to this day, and, more broadly, those women who experience and chose to resist patriarchy’s many oppressive penetrations into their lives, are systematically dismissed as hysterical, irrational, overwhelmed by affect, and irretrievably insane.
This and other sorts of sex-specific language have a purpose. Whether used unintentionally or with purposeful malice (and I do not know which was Mr. Simmons’ motivation in his choice of diction) these words are used to support patriarchy. What does that mean? They provide sometimes subtle and sometime explicit cultural messages that women (and especially women of color or little wealth) are inferior persons; that their ideas and experiences are illegitimate or unfounded; that their minds and bodies are available, deserving, and, indeed, wantonly receptive to exploitation and abuse; and that a structure supportive of such treatment — through law, government, markets, and private institutions — is justifiable, appropriate, and socially beneficial. This is not to say that the words themselves do all this, but simply that they support it and aid in its authorization, and frequently in its continuance through its reinforcement of linguistic and, thereby, cultural norms.

More directly supportive of the continuing systematic sexual assault of women is a legal system that denies its systematic character or its very existence. Rape exists. It is, by far, mostly men who commit it, and it is, by far, mostly women who suffer it. This is not just incidental; it is systematic. Mr. Simmons does not acknowledge the totality of this — perhaps because he does not know it. His advocacy of neutrality and his version of fairness indicate that these social and material facts about rape have no bearing upon legal systems and the legal theory he wholeheartedly supports. How, though, Mr. Simmons, is an absolute presumption of social equality and probable innocence a defensible presumption given a society that is structured to favor males in almost all aspects of life? Mr. Joffe-Walt, contra Mr. Simmons, only advocated for the mild assumption that male rape defendants have some partial burden in demonstrating consent. He does this, I believe, because he takes notice of social reality and uses it to inform his legal recommendations.
Mr. Simmons, as well as Mr. Wilczynski, attempt to give something like counter-evidence. Mr. Simmons assures us that, for him personally, the thought of committing rape makes him “sick,” and of someone raping his loved ones, it “enrages” him. His personal fortitude and preferences (though the reasoning for their being in the letter is admittedly unclear) are meant, I think, to demonstrate that indeed the social and legal system is sound and that its fundamental biases towards women are probably not too much of a problem. As for Mr. Wilczyniski, he tells us — “honestly” — that he has “never thought” of using his penis has a weapon of sexist privilege. In the end, both men conclude that they are not potential rapists. This is all very heartening but ultimately distracting. Their autobiographical confessions may be pleasant, but they are used in their letters for a reactionary social purpose. Both men provide their self-purported good character to both deny the existence of the system of violence and privilege that surrounds them and deny that systems’ endowment of privilege on them as individuals, whether they like or not.

If either men had confronted the reality of sexual violence and the way in which social systems confer privilege and the consequent responsibility for ending that privilege and its attendant violence, a more candid and informed debate about jurisprudence might have been possible. Instead, through their effective denial and covert argumentation, both Mr. Simmons and Mr. Wilczynski provide only examples of why Benjamin Joffe-Walt’s letter is so right and so urgent.

–Jason Clark
College senior