When I hear of rape, I am overwhelmed with emotion: sadness, anger, and compassion. I find it difficult to direct those emotions to an engaging and fruitful conversation about the vicious reality of rape and its consequences. On one hand, I want to keep it simple – just to react out of impulse - but I also do not want to water-down something that needs serious addressing.
I love my mom. She’s so loving and motherly, but my favorite quality about my mom is her vulnerability. Even when I was just a preteen, she was open about the time her step-brother raped her. She would discuss the lessons she learned and how she grew from this tragedy. Nevertheless, to this day when she talks about her step-brother, she expresses how powerful he is.
Power. Our culture encourages us to have many thoughts and feelings about sex, but most of them won’t be about sex, but about status and power. One of the biggest pressures in college is the desire to improve your social status and to feel powerful. As a society, we are so eager to talk about sex, but we are broken and dysfunctional when it comes to status and power. Of course the “media” is partially to blame, but this problem is deeply-rooted in everyday life, particularly our speech. Rape jokes, the words we use to talk about sex (I want to BANG her. I’m going to HAVE her tonight. Etc.), and phrases like “man up” are synonymous for dominance and aggression. Dominance and possession are activities that confer superior status, and rape is a manifestation of and means for ensuring that status.
With these issues so integrated into our society, how do we stop rape then? Is the ethic of consent sufficient enough to stop rape? While I wish it was enough, rape is still with us. Although this issue is way too huge for one article to solve, modern scholarship discovered and the Bible teaches ways to bring us closer to a rape-free society.
Peggy Reeves Sanday, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied 90 human societies and divided them into rape-prone and rape-free categories. First, she discovered that in societies where women have high status and are held in high esteem and are valuable members to society, such as government or religious leaders, rape is very low. Moreover, Peggy discovered that rape-free cultures are taught to respect women.
The Bible declares that women are to be men’s equals (Galatians 3:28). But it doesn’t stop there: the Bible commands men to lay down their life for their wife (Ephesians 5:23). Since the Bible doesn’t speak of dating, marriage is the example. Additionally, the Bible gives a command to men to not take their wife for granted, and to treat them with honor and as their equal; not to assert dominance over them (1 Peter 3:7).
If we are holding women in high esteem by electing them to office, following them as they lead businesses, respecting them in our daily lives, and teaching and holding each other accountable for this, actual intimacy won’t be about status and power. We are a people of all different faiths, and we are all in this together. We are all trying to figure out what’s right, and to act accordingly. But I can tell you what Jesus teaches: He commands us to love one another. Under campus and state laws, you must have the other person’s consent to be intimate with them. But if we’re truly trying to be good to one other, consent and/or legality just is not enough. If we’re really trying to love one another, maybe it’s best to not hook up with that person who has deep feelings for you that you can’t reciprocate; deception is unloving. If we really love each other, probably don’t pressure your friends into having sex or to cave to gain status among the bros.
I’m not pretending that we will all get the same answers to intimacy, let alone answers I believe God states, but I do hope that you’ll keep your hearts open to the possibility. Amazing things will happen- on campus, our communities, our nation, this world - if we respected and valued women. If we love each other truly, there will be less rape. Women like our mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends deserving nothing less. Are you willing to lay down your lives for them? That’s what it means to “man up.”
