The Rape Culture Election

He’s not subtle about it and has never been. The ​“grab them by the pussy” tape failed to move the needle in 2016; more recently, the revelations about Donald Trump’s close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein didn’t even register. The impossible bravery of E. Jean Carroll, who stood alone against a monster and proved him a rapist, has been drowned under a red tide of those who either profess not to care or who actually like it — enough to vote for him in a landslide. 

This man has been accused of groping and raping his way through his entire adulthood and into his senescence, and this has largely been treated as a bonus — part of his machismo, something to fold into the kayfabe entertainment value of his candidacy, then his first presidency and now his second. In his first term, this man who has significant jurisdiction over the bodies of women, trans and nonbinary people, set up a court that stripped our bodily autonomy away; in his second term, he will continue to do so at a faster and faster pace. (Longstanding Christian Right ambitions to further erode that autonomy, from banning birth control to ending no-fault divorce, are in the pipeline.) 

In this election, a rapist pledged to ​“protect” women whether we ​“like it or not.” It was a referendum on our bodily autonomy — most evident in abortion bans — and our place in public life: whether women who open their mouths, who speak our truths and preferences, are to be respected or ignored. And the answer came back: women who say no are not welcome here. Women who say no are not to be listened to. Women who say no are not permitted.

It’s no coincidence that the same party stripping women’s ownership of our bodies supports a rapist; bodily autonomy includes the right to refuse sex just as much as it does the right to make health-care decisions about our own wombs. It’s part of the same struggle, and the refutation of that struggle is part of the same vile assertion of possession. You don’t own your body; they do; your body, their choice. This recrudescence of rape culture is, incidentally, an enormous caveat to the purported exceptions for rape in recent state-level abortion bans. Imagine proving your rape to a country and justice apparatus that just manifested, in neon red, white and blue, how much it approves of rape, how little it matters. It’s an impossible request, demanded of those least able to fulfill it; insult and injury in one.

At least 2024 isn’t 2016, when I was still capable of being shocked to the core by this fact of my country. Something broke inside me that terrible election night eight years ago, and scarred shut. It was a huge part of the reason that victory felt so devastating: I had been raped so recently, and then the nation elected a rapist, and his claque reveled in the tears they had caused. 

In her campaign, Kamala Harris repeatedly addressed Trump’s history of sexually abusing women and I felt that part of me — so long covered by a big cicatrice of anger and fear I couldn’t feel it anymore — start to open again, as my rage and pain were reflected and heard from those podiums all around the country.

And then it didn’t matter, at all. Again. If anything, being a rapist helped him win.

Women’s sovereignty over our bodies is a threat to those who wish to own us. Acknowledging sexual abuse is a threat to a patriarchal order. And many further trenchant sociological insights, I’m sure, that are currently buried under a tide of white-hot pain. 

The night of my rape, now long ago, keeps recurring to me at odd moments: when I watch those crowds and those speeches on TV, yes, but also when I’m sitting on my back steps watching the dead leaves chase each other around. It recurs and recurs because it feels like what that night represents has been enshrined as a national ethic. And I feel myself doing now what I did then: dissociating from my body, disappearing. Putting up a wall of inner glass so thick I don’t have to feel what was done to me anymore, and the overwhelming approval of tens of millions of my countrymen of what happened to me, and to Trump’s victims, and to countless millions more. There’s something uniquely dispiriting about your entire country declaring you are not worthy of consideration as a human being, and that violating your body is not just inconsequential, but even normative, even necessary. 

And then you have to wake up and go about your life as if nothing happened to you then and nothing’s reified it now; as if what’s happened to you isn’t a mark of ash on your forehead. And to do so, you have to cauterize part of yourself. Cut the blood off to it. Bell-jar away the parts of you that once hurt most. What else you may be cutting away in the process — what capacity for empathy, comity, innocence, what depth of anger you could otherwise access — matters less than surviving in a country that just told you, again, that you’re an inconvenience or worse.

All kinds of circular firing squad finger-pointing is happening right now. And sure, I agree that the Democratic Party could use a total overhaul, and there’s a lot to be done to put ourselves on war footing. But right now, I just feel devastation. 

Writing this piece was harder than I expected. I am rarely if ever at a loss for words, but to write it I had to rip open the scar and bare the wound again, strip off my protective carapace. I had to tell you what happened to me, even obliquely. I tell it now not for those who have already consigned such stories — which we are forced to publicly retell to prove we are human — to irrelevance. I tell it for other people who have experienced the same or similar things, and who now feel utterly alone. 

And so I have to, now, unseal that inner room where darkness lives, leave it to air out into my bloodstream. Let it fuel me with the anger and empathy I will need in order to ensure that not just I but others will survive the years that are coming. Because it has to matter: what happened to me, and so many others, and what I wish no other person would have to endure again. Even if only to me. Even if only to you. Even if only to one person who might, reading these small words, feel less alone in the drowning pool of this particular pain.