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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Estrich: Young women speaking out about real rape

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As revelations of Bill Cosby’s disgusting behavior in the past four decades have finally trickled out, the question I keep getting asked, as someone who’s been fighting in the trenches against sexual assault for as long as Cosby has allegedly been committing such acts with impunity, is how and why so many women kept silent for so long. In a must-read cover story in this week’s New York Magazine, 35 of those women, many of them now in their 50s and older, give their own answers. While the details differ, the melody is the same.

You see, “no” didn’t used to really mean “no,” even if you could prove you said no (not easy, since rapes are rarely committed in front of witnesses), especially if you knew the man.

I’ll never forget one of my then-colleagues asking me about my “tenure piece” and its focus on sexual assaults by men the victims knew. This was 1983. “Real Rape,” I called it, because it was only after being informed that I was raped by a perfect stranger wielding an ice pick in my parking lot in broad daylight that most people would accept that I was “really raped.” That’s how I learned that 9 percent of all women are raped by men they know, and that often these women don’t report the crimes because they know they’ll just be victimized again by the system. That’s also how I learned what happens when you refuse to be silent. My mother told me no man would ever have me, to tell no one lest the “shame” somehow attach permanently to me. I was 20. I believed her.

We will not be silenced

After explaining that in the 1970s (and the ’80s and ’90s, I’m sorry to say) women who spoke out were liable to be attacked themselves (the “nuts and sluts” defense, I started calling it in the ’80s, i.e., she must be a nut or a slut and therefore it’s not “real rape”), the author goes on to describe the attitudes of a new generation of women: “But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape.”

When I wrote my tenure piece, the first line was: “A man held an ice pick to my throat and said, ‘Push over, shut up, or I’ll kill you.’ “

But the Harvard Law Review — of which I had been president, the first female to hold the title — rejected it because the tone was too personal. I left it in, Yale published the article, and Harvard Press published the book, and I started getting death threats.

Today’s younger women are right. I have been a woman claiming my own victimhood for the past 35 years. It has not made the pain go away, but the thought that all of our pain has finally begun to penetrate the fortresses of denial; that young women are being supported when they speak out and not told “no man will have you” or to “just drop the personal stuff”; that the usual shove-it-under-the-carpet investigation now at least triggers an investigation; all of it helps explain why, as one of Cosby’s alleged victims put it, “I’m no longer afraid.”

I wish I could say the same. I will spend the rest of my life afraid, as so many of us do, but we will not be silenced.

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