Of Red Spots and Rape Narratives

[Trigger warning for sexual assault.]

Yes, this is a brilliant tool and we should definitely use it to determine if someone is a rapist or not (that was sarcasm):

An acupuncturist who claims she can detect a man's virginity based on a small dot on the ear has become a minor celebrity in Vietnam, where she is credited with helping to free three convicted rapists from prison.

Traditional medicine practitioner Pham Thi Hong started lobbying for the men's release, pleading their case all the way to the president, because she believes all three men are virgins and therefore could not be guilty of rape.

"They all had small red spots on the back of their ears," said Hong, 54. "The spots should have disappeared if they had had sex. My many years of experience told me that these men did not have sex before."

...She says she was first taught how to determine if a man has ever had sex by feeling their pulse. She later developed the ear-spot method on her own. She says the spot will only disappear after heterosexual intercourse and is not affected by gay sex or masturbation.

..."I have never heard of this method before," said Nguyen Van Hao, 60, an acupuncturist who has practiced for 14 years. "From the medical point of view, it's impossible to determine whether a man has had sex or not by feeling the pulse or examining the red spot on their ears."

Hong, however, said she's convinced her method works after years of testing it on her students.

Oh, well, as long as she's convinced, then that's all that matters.

Listen, I don't want to get into a big debate about whether this could actually be a viable test for determining a man's "heterosexual virginity" or not (and that will be considered off-topic in comments), because, the truth is, it doesn't fucking matter. Even if it were a legitimate way of assessing whether a man had ever "had sex with" a woman before, that is not synonymous with assessing whether he is a rapist.

Penetrative rape can be committed with hands/fingers/tongue and it can be committed with a foreign object. The entire premise that a man who didn't penetrate a woman with his penis couldn't possibly have raped her is bullshit, so any "virginity test" is thoroughly irrelevant.

And if we are to imagine, for a moment, that it is possible to assess whether a man has lost his "heterosexual virginity" by examining his ear, why is it, I wonder, that are we to understand that rape is not one of the exceptions, along with homosexual sex and masturbation, which supposedly render the telltale spot unaffected.

The concept seems to be that only heterosexual intercourse changes that spot, but rape is, of course, not heterosexual intercourse—and diverges more widely and certainly from consensual heterosexual sex than consensual homosexual sex does.

To accept the premise that it is the nature of the sexual activity which changes that spot, one must accept a false equivalence between consensual sexual activity and rape.

An equivalence that necessarily suggests that both gay sex and masturbation are more deviant from consensual hetero sex than is rape.

If we are to believe that our bodies can reveal truths, my body has revealed to me the truth that consensual homosexual sexual activity is not fundamentally different from consensual heterosexual activity, that masturbation is different in both superficial and meaningful but obvious ways, and that rape doesn't even belong on the same goddamn page with any of the above.

This observation ought to be self-evident. But that's why this story is a perfect example of why challenging the myths and narratives of the rape culture is so important: Only in a culture where it is believed that demonstrable virginity is axiomatic proof of innocence of rape, and only in a culture where consensual sex can be viewed as not materially different from rape, could anyone believe for a moment in the value of examining the red spot behind a man's ear for evidence of his virginity, in relation to the commission of a rape.

[H/T to Shaker Brian G.]