Everything We Know About Rape Is Wrong

“There is no single anecdote,” Jen Percy writes in the opening sentence of Girls Play Dead , her riveting, heartrending analysis of what sexual assault does to women. “What I’m talking about is an accumulation.” She lists a few of her own encounters with harassment and rape culture: the man who rubbed his crotch while staring at Percy and her friend; the man working a cash register who asked to touch her breasts; the man who asked to photograph her when she was 16, showing her an album of naked women. The point isn’t to interrogate the men who supposedly did these things, or whether they happened. (With regard to veracity, I have my own accumulation of similar anecdotes; I’m guessing most women do.) More useful is to consider what Percy did in response, what so many do when faced with sexually threatening behavior: nothing. Girls are socialized to be pleasant. To be passive. To neutralize conflict rather than spark it. They learn to prioritize others’ feelings over their own. In 1988, the feminist legal scholar Robin West argued that these habits and behaviors help foster intimacy and community, but that they also diminish women’s protection under the law. If someone’s instinct is to preserve relationships and stability as a matter of survival, what do they do when they’re violently or sexually threatened? Not always something that might be construed as logical, or that might convince a jury that they have been gravely violated. The majority of women who are sexually assaulted don’t fight back, Percy notes. (In addition to “fight or flight” responses to danger, advocacy groups indicate that other common responses to rape include “freeze,” “flop,” and “friend,” or trying to placate one’s attacker.) She compiles a list of accounts from her reporting of things women have done after they were raped. “I made him chicken soup,” one woman tells her. “I comforted him because he was crying,” another says. Still another: “I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again.” Girls Play Dead - Acts Of Self-Preservation By Jen Percy Buy Book Girls Play Dead began as a feature Percy wrote in The New York Times Magazine about the phenomenon of “tonic immobility,” a self-preservation mechanism that leads people to freeze or become paralyzed when under attack. In the animal kingdom, mammals play dead so that a predator will lose interest in them; some female dragonflies do it to avoid mating. Percy encounters so many women who describe freezing as their response to sexual assault that she pronounces it a kind of “lingua franca.” (Men freeze too, she notes; her focus is largely but not exclusively on women.) “I just froze,” Lady Gaga said in an episode of the series The Me You Can’t See , while recalling the time she was raped at 19. “I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said of her own rape in the documentary Pretty Baby . While I was reading Girls Play Dead , I watched a BBC documentary in...

Preview: ~500 words