A review by larryerick
Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It by Kate Harding

4.0

Much like Katha Pollitt's book, Pro, is nominally about abortion but is really about women's rights in America, this book is about rape, but is also really about women's rights here in the United States (despite the fact some rapes are not upon females.) While Pollitt takes a bit more formal debate club approach to presenting her case, this author is more of the center of attention at the social party, demanding your attention with great verve and style. Much of what is presented in this book reminded me of many years ago during my last semester of college, I presented a research paper intending to connect a particular communications theory to battered spouse syndrome. The concept of a battered wife was just taking hold in America and had just started to be introduced to law enforcement and in the courts as a viable defense. As I started to itemize the concept of battered spouses to the class, a female student sitting directly in front of me had her jaw drop and her eyes became the size of cannonball targets. At the time, I thought I must have been describing her relationship with her boyfriend. Later, it occurred to me that she may have just been extremely naive about such matters. (Would she have been equally naive about date rape?) I mention this only because many of the stories presented in this book about rape reminded me a great deal of the state of battered spouses back then. And yet, I would argue that both wife battering and rape culture in America are similar means of degrading women and are similarly not going away with any rapidity. You notice I said not going away while the author's book subtitle mentions the "rise" in rape culture. Rise? Anyone familiar with black civil rights figure, Fannie Lou Hamer? Hamer's grandmother had 23 children, 20 of which were the result of rape. Such was the lot of black southern women in her time. Is it possible to have a "rise" in rape culture from that point? And is spouse battering really so much better handled now than earlier? A woman was arrested, charged, and sentenced in such a case. What had she done? She had fired a gun into the ceiling to warn off her belligerent male partner. Nobody was killed or even injured. Just firing a gun to scare off her partner from hurting her. But she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And yet, the author ends her book on a rather optimistic note about how colleges are finally getting more serious about adjudicating rape complaints. Good, good. But what about the military? How much better is that rape culture in light of the "new improved" but watered down Department of Defense policy changes recently adopted. And lordy, how will non-college, non-military women get relief without a major institution managing their rape complaints appropriately? I found the author extremely engaging in what she had to say and her information valuable, especially to anyone faced directly with our rape culture, but I felt totally caught off guard by her book's excessively positive ending.