When writing about women victimization, it is easy to slide into reproof. The society attitude, media, and the women self-attitude makes the pressure on women and can easily be overblamed for issues related to gender inequality. However, the fact that it is little or nothing is done with respect to violence done to women still remains acute because their situation is more than serious: the scopes of woman being neglected and infanticide and undergoing sexual harassment are tremendous, especially in the Third World Countries. Thus, this paper is to deal with the issues of women involvement into sexual harassment and assaults. This paper is to identify the detail of why women are so easy victims of the sexual assault and why things remain the same for years despite the fact that various studies and programs were implemented to solve this problem.
Relatively recently, 40 years ago, it was believed that women are taking the role of eternal victim, perceive it to be quite comfortable, and even try using this role. There is another opinion going a little further: women like to be victims, and there is no such notion as rape or sexual assault since females are meant to be used for sex. These views were biased clearance of the fact that women in the sexual violence (as part of gender-based violence) are really adapted to the role of victim; they rationalize it rejecting even the idea of ??resistance. Thus, from the very beginning, the idea of formation of female subjectivity in terms of fear for their lives and safety, that is under the influence of a constant unspoken threat of sexual violence – for physical and verbal violence against girls and women, is always sexualized are formed.
The brightest example of what effect sexual violence has on a woman is rape. For example, as a student, Alice Sebold aged eighteen was beaten and raped. She remembers every tiny detail about her changing world. Her life was divided into before and after, but she handled it. She was able to get out of this state, to learn to live again. However, despite this all finished well, the mental trauma remains. Alice describes every single minute of her rape in the book called Lucky.
Alice Sebold is a famous writer known by her bestseller The Lovely Bones. However, her first book was the memoirs of her being raped at the age of eighteen. Lucky is not simply a story of a sexual abuse but the story of the further life. As Alice says in the book, the rape is simply a beginning; the rest of troubles begins after. This story is one of the best examples of how women are treated in the society and how women are victimized. In addition, it is the story of recovery and self-acceptance, which is very important for women in the modern society.
Alice passed through all steps of the society denial as a rape victim: the denial of her father who thought it was her fault, the denial of the justice system, which failed to find the rapist, with the great jury who claimed that she should have known about the danger of being alone in the park. This proves that rape is not perceived as a serious crime and to find justice in such cases, the victim herself should investigate the case and be fully involved in the process. Only Alices perseverance and insistence of seeing Gregory (the rapist) in jail helped her.
In the book Lucky, Alice states that she bears in mind and retains the instants leading up to her rape, the actual rape, and the moments and occurrences afterwards distinctly. In fact, she is notified that the rapist will murder her if she cries out, but she does this thing at any rate. However, her rapist beats her down and explains her he has a knife with himself. He utilizes her long hair in order to hold on her. The rapist slams her and knocks her head onto the ground, and she shortly faints. Alice acknowledges that she awakes gazing into the eyes of the rapist who has the possibility and actual power to murder her and bequests herself to him understanding that she is about to die. She does anything the rapist orders her to do despite the fact that she proceeds to assure him that she is a maiden and to beseech for both her existence and her chastity.
During the following months, Alice will have to advocate herself against her father who considers she should never have permit this situation to occur, against members of a grand jury who inquire whether she did not understand that she had no right to be in the park alone at night, and against a legal system, which after all detects and acknowledges her rapist culpable as demanded.
The documentary movie by Jean Kilbourne explains a lot of issues concerning the above-mentioned situation. The video starts with the analysis of advertising and particularly, with the image of women in various types of advertisements. In fact, the major purpose of advertisement as a source of media is to sell. However, together with selling all kinds of products, it sells values, it sells images, it sells concepts of love and sexuality, and the most important, of normalcy. In fact, advertising tells people who they are and who they actually should be. The most important thing the advertising tells about women currently has not seriously changed since past twenty-thirty years. The most crucial thing goes about the way women look. In addition, womens bodies are used for the advertisements of various objects and it has serious consequences. This, in fact, creates a special climate of violence concerning women. It actually creates the reality where women are seen as things and objects, and it definitely turns humans into objects, which is the first step to create violence against these individuals. Actually, people are able to see such processes with racism and homophobia, and it is always the same process. The video demonstrates that this item has been clearly acknowledged by the Advertising Age editorial that published the following message: Clearly, its time to wipe out sexism in beer ads; for the brewers and their agencies to wake up and join the rest of America in realizing that sexism, sexual harassment, and the cultural portrayal of women in advertising are inextricably linked. In addition, it is even more insulting that women are not only utilized as objects but as a demonstration of some particular parts of women, which are used for the advertisements, meaning that a woman is not an individual but only a separate part of the body. American culture is certainly obsessed with breasts. They are used to sell absolutely everything in the world. Everything has started with workless lotions and creams and turned into plastic surgery, which makes breasts bigger but deprives from sensations. It literally makes women objects of someone elses pleasures turning females from subjects into objects. There is a serious difference between depicting men and women in advertisements. Men actually do not live in the world where their bodies are routinely scrutinized, criticized, and judged, whereas women do. However, this is not the end with advertisements. In many ads, women are depicted with their mouth covered by their hand, neck of golf, having their lips sewn, etc. All of these messages depict that women have to keep silent. Moreover, the body language in the ads is typically passive, vulnerable, get used, and very different from the body language of boys and men. It starts from the depiction of children where boys usually look tough; they are taller, always looking down on the girl, with the girl typically smiling. However, it ends with children of different race, and then a white girl dominates over a black boy. Therefore, these advertisements are definitely about power. Nevertheless, men do not live in the world where they can be raped, harassed or beaten by women. Boys grow up in a culture where the image of masculinity is closely linked with violence and brutality. Moreover, some of the advertisements demonstrate the shadows of men behind women, with the concept of possible romance and the explanation of a following kind: Let the adventure begin. However, when a woman is walking alone seeing the shadow of a man, romance is the last idea on her mind. American culture suffers from the trivial of pornographic attitude towards sex and advertisements. In fact, pornography has become a mainstream. Advertisements demonstrated that women want to be forced to have sex.
Therefore, a situation that happened with Alice being demonstrated in the book Lucky shows that the desire to dominate and demonstrate power is cultivated among boys since early childhood. They are explained with the help of mass media, which actually has exceptional influence on youth; it depicts women as passive and willing to be forced to have sexual relationships. Moreover, advertisements depict that even when a girl or a woman refuses from such intercourse, these are only words, and not genuine desires.
The video Rape is… demonstrates that it takes much time to recover from a rape and it has serious consequences of the very act of rape. Women are supposed to spend all their life recovering or surviving from that one act. Women constantly say that they are unable to wash them clean enough, taking five or even more showers a day as if they want to wash their soul. Rape is a center of both act and metaphor of violence against women. Rape is a crime against humanity. It is a crime that controls, dominates, degrades and physiologically kills when it happens. In fact, it is practically impossible for the victims to explain how they feel; girls and women want to scream, to tell somebody, but they are unable to find the proper and exact words, which can explain it. Rape became a mainstream due to the fact that people live in the culture of advertising, music, movies, entrainment where men feel that they are entitled to have sex with whoever they want and wherever they want. The video demonstrated that on one trial, a judge said in a case of the eleven years old girl, who has been raped by the twenty-three years old man that it takes two to tango. Therefore, there is not wonder, why that rape victims experience trials as the second rape. The similar attitude can be found in the book Lucky. In fact, Alice was afraid of going to the trial. Therefore, the prosecutors have known that the majority of the rape victims are unable to encounter the tension of a trial, but Alice does not hesitate in her fight to observe her rapist Gregory being jailed. He is actually condemned in a court case grounded mainly on Alice’s testimony and evidence together with a match to a hair found on Alice the night of the rape. The girl has actually lived in a constant anticipation of the trial. The worst thing about the trial has been a permanent pushing back of the trial itself. It actually lead to a nervous tension constantly felt day after day having no support and understanding. It is very hard to recover after the rape itself, but it becomes even harder when the justice, which is sought by the person, does not occur. Moreover, Alice did not actually have the support from her father in such a horrible situation, and her father actually fretted that the longer the trial was postponed, the greater the chance it would ruin his annual trip to Europe. The girl has been practically raped through a trial itself and in the papers. At the time when the woman requires recovering from the situation, she is not able to do it due to the circumstances and the suspicious views of other people together with the prolonged and postponed trial.
Girls and women have to dedicate a very long period of time just to recover from the rape act. They cannot sleep, they have a depression, they have a very low self-esteem practically hating their bodies and themselves. They are practically not able to be occupied by anything else meaning that they drop out of life having no possibility to build their reality and relationships to become educated, to create, to work or to rule the country. We live in a world where almost everything demonstrates mens dominance over women. The mass media and advertisements are the brightest examples, but it is important to remember that they are created by women themselves, and females take part in this process ruining the lives of innocent girls and women. The book Lucky depicted that raping is not the end. It is only the beginning of the hardest work to survive and continue the life as a typical person.
