[Content Note: Rape culture; sexual violence; revictimization.]
"People have been telling these stories for a long time—what is it that decades of them have not been sufficient to 'reveal'? ...The many detailed rape accounts in [Jon Krakauer's book Missoula]—accounts that are sometimes repeated, as if from different camera angles, retold through police reports, trial transcripts, and interviews—leave no doubt about what rape is and what rape does. They produce a seasick, anxious feeling: that no one story can turn this system around. The most ill-making narrative here is not that of rape itself, but of a system set up to extract stories from victims and survivors without offering any reasonable hope that such a painful display will result in anything of value for them. ...To have faith, as Krakauer does, that telling stories of rape will help transform the situation is to assume that the system's own interests and those of victims and survivors are more or less aligned, and that until now it hasn't been working well enough. But if you understand that protecting people is not its primary aim, you can see that, in fact, the system has been working just fine."—Melissa Gira Grant, in a must-read piece about two new books on rape, the rape culture, and the limitations of institutional solutions: Krakauer's Missoula and Jennifer Doyle's Campus Sex, Campus Security.
[H/T to Jess.]
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