Do we live in a “rape culture”? What, in any case, is a “rape culture”? According to Roxane Gay, editor of the essay collection Not That Bad, the term refers to “a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence”. Indeed, many of the 30 pieces here – overwhelmingly personal accounts rather than analytic essays, and written by both men and women – discuss “rape culture” in this broad sense, depicting everything from bad relationships, street harassment, the fear of sexual assault to violent assault, rape and child sexual abuse. While the tone is overwhelmingly confessional, bar Michelle Chen’s essay which provides an overview of sexual violence committed against migrants and refugees, many of the writers understandably steer away from detailed accounts of traumatic events, preferring to focus on the act of telling a story, often after many years, and moving beyond the common rationalisations “well it wasn’t that bad” or “others had it worse”. As Stacey May Fowles puts it in “To Get Out from Under It”: “What I need is what most women need when they talk about the sexual violence they have endured. I need someone to listen. I need someone to believe me.”

Gay explicitly ties the collection to the current movements around #MeToo: “Powerful men are losing their jobs and their access to circumstances where they can exploit the vulnerable.” Yet for all the book’s timeliness, and though many of the accounts are moving, there is a sense of uncertainty that hangs over it. By treating “rape culture” in its broadest sense, perhaps something is lost. When Aubrey Hirsch writes that “if rape culture had a downtown, it would smell like Axe body spray and that perfume they put on tampons to make your vagina smell like laundry detergent”, it is not altogether clear where “rape culture” begins and ends and where consumer capitalism begins. But perhaps this is the point.

Germaine Greer is characteristically more precise: “The word ‘rape’ as used in this essay will apply only to penetration of the vagina of an unwilling human female by the penis of a human male” is the opening sentence of her short book. Greer has already been attacked for her comments at the Hay literary festival earlier this year where she claimed that most rape was not violent, but rather sex that was “lazy, careless and insensitive”, and that criminal penalties for rape should be lowered. She does indeed reiterate these points here, suggesting that the burden of proof – objective signs of non-consent, specifically – required to prove rape “can never be satisfied” and that if we rely only on victims’ statements regarding non-consent then “we will have to lighten the tariff”. The controversy rumbles on with Naomi Wolf writing a critique of Greer’s supposed errors and diminution of the act in the Sunday Times, arguing that “Every woman I know who has been raped thought she might have been about to die. What is damaging is the experience of being absolutely nothing in the presence of another human being. It is the closest we come to death in this lifetime.”

But On Rape is not necessarily as controversial as Greer’s earlier comments might have indicated. She supports secure and anonymous methods of informing authorities and communities of “real and present danger” while acknowledging that these extra-legal methods can be misused. She criticises the lack of anonymity and the ordeal of rape victims in the legal system. She defends the idea that resistance on the part of the victim is not necessary for rape to have occurred: “If a man punches you in the eye, you are not expected to have pleaded with him not to for the crime to be accepted as assault.”

Greer does, however, reiterate her claim that rape is usually not violent: “You can rape a sleeping woman without even waking her up.” Her overarching point is the banality of rape, its everydayness: “rape is part of the tissue of everyday life”. Yet she avoids painting society at large as a “rape culture”, preferring to focus on the limits of the legal system in addressing it, and linking the ubiquity of rape far more to “bad sex”, whose damaging qualities she does not downplay: “Diurnal rape stifles love and imposes loneliness and withdrawal”. Assuming that violent stranger rape lurks around every corner, she suggests, is to misunderstand reality.

“Why are women so afraid of rape?” she asks in a chapter entitled “Joystick or Weapon”? The “poor old penis” gets thoroughly deflated here: “An elbow, a thumb even, can do you more harm” she suggests, resurrecting the old question of whether rape is the worst thing that can happen to you. Placing her at odds with Susan Brownmiller and other feminists who suggest that rape by some men keeps all women in a constant state of intimidation, Greer argues that it “is a nonsense for our daughters to be more frightened of penises than our sons are of knives or guns”.

Arguing that current legislation around rape has created “contradiction and confusion” in many parts of the world, she writes that once upon a time “everyone knew what rape was; it was the stealing of a woman from the man or men who owned her”. Rather than pursuing this point – what does that make rape when women are no longer the property of men? – Greer leaps to a discussion of Julian Assange and the “ethics of heterosex”.

This is in fact one of the major problems of the essay, as interesting and convincing as it otherwise is: its inability to focus on the point at hand. Greer nevertheless has an unnerving ability to take a dagger to multiple received wisdoms at once: “At all points in the life career, males and females make a bad fit,” she offhandedly remarks. Men and women simply do not want the same thing when it comes to sex: “Women in search of romance are coming to grief at the hands of men who are after conquest.” “Heterosex may well be doomed,” she concludes. But what, we might ask, comes after? Separatism does not seem to be very achievable, for either men or women. We will instead, Greer suggests, “have to find a way out of the slough of bitterness and recrimination into which we seem to have fallen”.

Whatever this moment is – a long overdue accounting for “rape culture”, or just another chapter in an intractable war – these two quite different texts seem to point to the heart of the myriad problems concerning rape: what it is, how we talk about it and, ultimately, what exactly we all do about it.



• Not That Bad is published by HarperCollins. It is out in the UK from Allen & Unwin in November. On Rape is published by Bloomsbury. To buy a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.