Jane Doe, Patriarchy, and Rape Culture

For thousands of years us human beings have lived in patriarchal societies. These societies are ones in which men monopolize wealth and power. Patriarchal societies don't have to be as extreme as, for instance, Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Even in western liberal democracies men occupy the highest positions of power and wealth, while women, and gender nonconforming people usually occupy subordinate positions. One effect of patriarchy is something feminist scholars identify as rape culture. A rape culture is not necessarily one in which rape is legal, or even one in which there aren't widely accepted social norms opposed to sexual assault.

Rather, a rape culture is one in which there is a widespread failure to hold perpetrators of sexual violence accountable and/or protect victims and potential victims of that violence. Especially after the successes of the women's movement in western societies there are widespread norms and legal prohibitions against sexual assault. The same goes for non-western societies. Yet in both spheres of the world most sexual violence goes unreported, most perpetrators of sexual violence are never held accountable, most victims suffer in silence, and there are pervasive sexual assault myths that protect perpetrators.

So despite the fact that most of us the world over likely find rape morally objectionable and live in societies where there are legal prescriptions against it, our culture enables it at the systematic level. Rape culture is an effect of patriarchy in view of the fact that perpetrators tend to be men and most victims are women, but even in cases involving female perpetrators and male victims (which the stats should not make us turn a blind eye to) the social gender expectations and privileges of men visa vi non-men play a role in facilitating the violence. Rape myths tend to be rooted in assigning responsibility for rape to women and thereby giving men excuses for sexually aggressive behavior. Familiar canards about women being obligated to cover up, to avoid spaces stereotyped as dangerous, avoid drugs and alcohol, and always bear the burden of proof to show that their testimonies of sexual violence shouldn't just be dismissed as false allegations.

The issue of rape culture has been brought to the fore in recent years by the #MeToo movement gaining momentum at the end of the 2010s where women and non-women victims of sexual assault called out many powerful and famous men for sexually abusive behavior. While #MeToo forced the issue into the spotlight in way that was unprecedented, rape culture continued on because patriarchy continued on. Just recently a 2024 case in which a women, identified as Jane Doe, accused 7 male Cornell University students of forcefully drugging and gangraping her at a frat house caused widespread anger in the United States. Two were expelled, two were suspended, two were cleared by the University of any wrongdoing, and one graduated before sanctions could be imposed. Prosecutors have reopened the investigation.

Students have taken to demonstrating at Cornell and calling for the resignation of University officials as well as taking back the degrees earned by members of the 7. Similarly women in India have taken to demonstrations against and criticisms of the Indian government's measures closing off women from social spaces with the purported purpose of decreasing their risk of sexual assault (Rape culture in India is one of the its most concerning problems due the persistence of heavily patriarchal social norms and practices like doweries.). One of the facts relevant to the Cornell case is the contrast in how Cornell handled pro-Palestinian students and cases of sexual violence. While repercussions for the Cornell 7 varied and Cornell victims testify to the University often dropping the ball in terms of accountability for sexual abuse Cornell has consistently persecuted students who voice their opposition to Israel's genocide against the Palestinians with suspensions and bans from campus, often for nonviolent 'offenses' related to the exorcise of 1st amendment free speech rights.

Patriarchy and its corollary in rape culture are not the mere products of morally corrupt societies. Its simply not plausible that most societies for thousands of years have all just happened to be morally corrupt in the same way. Patriarchy originated as a mechanism of class domination. With the rise of agriculture the marginalization of women to domestic work, away from centers of community leadership and political power, and the expectation on men to perform manual labor to provide for their families, made it easier to organize human communities into hierarchies of power and privilege that sustained and in turn were sustained by wealth inequalities. Capitalism pioneered the nuclear family as an atomic reproductive unit consisting of a male head of the household, a subordinate female partner, and further subordinate children.

The household, childrearing work that reproduces the next generation of workers was thereby outsourced to women as unpaid labor supporting the ability of the man to go to work for capitalists, themselves being paid less than what the commodities they produce fetch on the market for capitalists. Even now that the women's movement has allowed women to enter the workforce, they are still largely responsible for house work. The capitalist world-economy and the wage/salaried labor that supports it is thus reproduced in large part due to the labor performed in households as units of economic support and enculturation for the working class; labor usually characterized by the subordination of women and children. When conservatives speak of defending 'family values' this really means the defense of patriarchal mechanisms of class domination which subordinate children to parents, women to men, and workers to capitalists.

Despite 'family values' being touted by conservatives as constituting the protection of women and children, the family, as a mechanism of class domination, has a record of violence that matches that of governments and militaries. Most sexual violence is perpetrated by someone known to the victim. This means that women are often abused by their husbands and relatives, and that children are often abused by siblings and parents. It took the rise of the women's movement in the last two centuries to even achieve legal protections for Children and women against physical abuse by male heads of the family.

The family is thus an incubator of rape culture, as is the capitalist world-system and class society which reproduces it and is reproduced by it. The point made by Anarcha-Feminism and Marxist-Feminism is that patriarchy and thereby rape culture are the product of a world in which social domination in general and class domination in particular persist and characterize social life. Liberal feminists will insist that the solution to rape culture and patriarchy is more women in positions of power and more criminal prosecution of sexual predators. This ignores the reality of what patriarchy is and pretends that overthrowing patriarchy and building a culture of consent (the opposite of rape culture) is simply a matter of making capitalist power structures more friendly to women.

The fact is that this way of doing feminism has been the experiment of the last century. Women, through social movements, have achieved positions of power, entry into the workforce, and more legal protections against abuse by men. While women and gender-nonconforming people have made significant gains as a result, patriarchy and rape culture have not come even close to being fully dislodged, even in the parts of the world where the mainstream women's movement had most success. This is because the capitalist world-economy, the state, and the family continue to perpetuate them for their own vitality. The women's movement and the movement for a culture of consent must then take on an Anarchist praxis of critiquing and resisting structures of social domination to bring about a new classless human community of free association.

Sources
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7LC8BrEtHc
https://youtube.com/shorts/TWmbPL4sPVw?si=Ei-wq-RyKMvjgcex
https://youtube.com/shorts/Soi56Tlsze8?si=ZaOJI4WskZMR1Oez
https://youtube.com/shorts/e4x4_WSnedk?si=LZqsHNAz5EMlnTTm
Sexual Consent, Popova
Violence: A Very Short Introduction, Dwyer
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/
Gender: What Everyone Needs to Know, Erickson-Schroth and Davis
World-Systems Analysis: An introduction, Wallerstein