Speaking of ‘violence’: Figleaf use in sexualized violence contexts

Abstract

In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul's work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track those of Saul's figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analysing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character.

sexualized violence, figleaf, false belief, rapist identity, moral monster

I. Introduction

In ‘Fragments,’ an essay in R oxane Gay's (Hirsch 2018) edited collection of rape essays, Not That Bad, Aubrey Hirsch tells of her experience working as an adult creative writing instructor. Hirsch recalls receiving a rape story from a student as an assignment submission. The story, as Hirsch tells it, involves the sober ‘hero’ meeting a beautiful and intoxicated girl at a party. The girl becomes so drunk that she cannot walk, and so the ‘hero’ takes her to a nearby beach, undresses her, and has sex with her. Hirsch meets with the student about his story and highlights her concern that he is romanticizing a rape story. The student is surprised and horrified at it being described as a rape story, eventually revealing that his story recounts his first-time having sex with his girlfriend (Hirsch 2018: 5–6). Hirsch writes,

It hadn't occurred to you that the student might not have realized he was writing a rape story.

‘All I can say,’ you say, ‘is that a lot of people are going to read this as rape.’

‘But it isn't,’ he says, weakly, sounding more like he's trying to convince himself than you. ‘It wasn't.’ (2018: 6)

How is it that the nature of an instance of sexualized violence, like the one Hirsch discusses, can be so hotly contested? After all, it is not difficult to imagine a world in which not only the student author rejects the idea of his story as a rape narrative, but one where his peers, community, and even girlfriend also reject this narrative. And yet, having sex with someone too intoxicated to walk is clearly not freely consensual sex. Operating in the background of the student's (and others’) assumptions about his sexual relationship with his girlfriend are beliefs like he is a good guy, he cares about her, and she is still with him. These kinds of beliefs, I will argue, often get communicated through utterance, and play an important role in making the nature of sexually violent acts unclear.

The focus of this project is to develop Jennifer Saul's concept of the figleaf, my developed variant being what I call a ‘sexualized violence figleaf’. The sexualized violence figleaf offers a tool to make sense of the many instances of sexualized violence which are dismissed or characterized as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not assault, rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves promise to expand on the language and cognitive resources available to people in deciphering what, exactly, is going on when observations and moral judgements orthogonal to an instance of sexualized violence are treated as relevant to the violent act.

Section I of the paper highlights the widespread identity-essentializing of perpetrators of violence, who, like victims of violence, are often treated as sorts of caricatures. These unnuanced perpetrators are supposedly easy to spot and are straightforwardly abhorrent, though, I suggest, this becomes much messier in practice. The paper then turns to Saul's work on figleaves, highlighting how a figleaf works to disrupt interferences between racist/sexist utterances, and judgements about the racist/sexist nature of an agent (Section II). Once Saul's figleaf mechanic is established, I extend Saul's work to a new domain, sexualized violence discourse, and define sexualized violence figleaf (Section III). I analyse two case studies of sexualized violence figleaves: the letter that Brock Turner's father wrote to his son's rape-trial judge, and the story of the rape-story author in Aubrey Hirsch's essay, ‘Fragments’ (Section IV). These examples are used to demonstrate sexualized violence figleaves at work, and to show how figleaves can sometimes be implicit in the things said about an instance of sexualized violence. The final two sections of this paper address potential worries for my account of sexualized violence figleaves.

II. The socio-linguistic construction of the rapist

Understanding how perpetrators of sexualized violence are socially collapsed into oversimplified and often morally uncomplex ‘monsters’ is important in tracking modern discourse surrounding such violence. Part of understanding the nuance of this discourse is understanding why perpetrators of violence are so averse to being identified as such, and also why victims and their communities more generally can (and do) struggle to identify instances of sexualized violence as violence. While carceral and legal threats certainly disincentivize perpetrators of sexualized violence from identifying as such, I also take sexual subjectivity to play an important role in perpetrators of sexualized violence distancing themselves from labels of ‘rapist’, ‘perpetrator’, and ‘violent’.

Sexual subjectivity refers to the ‘sexual self’ that each person possesses and constantly develops. In her Rape and Resistance, Linda Martín Alcoff expands on Rebecca Plante's work on sexual subjectivities, who

defines sexual subjectivities as ‘a person's sense of herself as a sexual being’ …This involves more than our arousal patterns and our conduct or sexual choices. It also includes a complex constellation of beliefs, perceptions, and emotions (2018: 111).

In other words, one's experiences in the world, in sexual contexts and beyond, coalesce to create a sexual self which is unique. But, because people are all constantly interacting with the world around them, that sexual self is unfixed, and in a constant state of change. It is important to understand this ‘sexual self-making’ as an ongoing and changeable process. The touch of others, especially in the context of sexual violations, can have the effect of alienating one from oneself, by ‘reveal[ing] a structuring of the world beyond one's own self’ (Alcoff 2018: 71), highlighting a lack of control over one's own sexual experiences. It is interesting to also consider the alienating power of perpetrating sexual violations. Re-interpreting the self as someone who can (and does) sexually harm can be a part of this ‘sexual self-making’, but it is a part that individuals are strongly incentivized to reject, given the broader social understanding of what it means to be a rapist.

In their paper, ‘Credibility Excess and the Social Imaginary in Cases of Sexual Assault,’ Audrey Yap highlights the cognitive dissonance that many experience when trying to understand a person they perceive as deeply ‘decent’ as having perpetrated sexual assault. Yap roots this tension in the internalized and widespread social belief that ‘our friends, relatives, and even acquaintances, are not monsters… [and] sexual assault is something only committed by moral monsters’ (2017: 16). In other words, it is widely understood that certain kinds of offence, like rape and abuse, are only perpetrated by rapists and abusers, and these people are subsets of a general type of ‘moral monster’. This stereotype of perpetrators of sexualized violence is problematized, though, when one reviews the empirical data regarding who actually perpetrates such violence. Men that perpetrate sexual violence are often portrayed as ‘perverts’ and ‘monsters’ by media (O'Hara 2012: 248). Moreover, ‘high sexual needs, uncontrolled sexual urges, an external locus of control, depression, emotional instability’ are all often attributed to rapists (Lev-Wiesel 2004: 203). By obfuscating the diverse roles and traits of perpetrators, and by implying a broader moral failure on their part, perpetrators of sexualized violence are ‘imagined to be someone very different’ from other, ‘normal’ men (Yap 2017: 12).

Given this oversimplified and widespread conception of perpetrators of sexualized violence as abnormal and monster, it is unsurprising that notions of ‘ideal’ victims and perpetrators gain traction in sexualized violence discourse. Ideal victims, as described in Trudy Govier's Victims and Victimhood, are victims who are ‘ideal’ insofar as they are morally uncomplex, and therefore easy to make judgements about in cases of moral wrongdoing (2015: 19–20). Such a victim embodies the two key elements of victimhood: innocence and harm (Govier 2015: 19). Govier notes that cases of wrongdoing are often treated as ‘clear…contrasts [from which] we readily infer moral distinctions’ (2015: 20). The perpetrator is guilty, bad, and the ‘harmer’. The victim is ‘the passive and innocent object of a harmful action’ and is therefore not morally responsible for their victimhood (ibid).

Unfortunately, Govier argues, many cases of victimhood are not like this. In many instances of wrongdoing, the victim is not clearly an ‘innocent object’, and appraising the wrongdoing means weighing past wrongdoings and moral blights against current ones. Govier offers the example of the victim of sexual violence who has previously lied to gain entry into the United States; she is perceived by the lawyers trying the case as blameworthy in some respects, though a victim of violence and wrongdoing in others (2015: 20–21). Though it is easier to make moral and legal evaluations about one-dimensional victims, Govier highlights an important feature of victims of violence: ‘People who lie can, after all, be victims of sexual assault’ (2015: 21).

In her Time article and her book, Aftermath, Susan Brison explores the ways in which her own status as an ideal/non-ideal victim shifted between her two experiences of rape. Brison recalls being raped at age 20 by a young male acquaintance who knocked on her college dorm room door late at night, was let in by Brison, and proceeded to rape her (Time  2014). Brison notes that her rape caused her to stop attending college classes, worry that she may be pregnant, and ultimately become suicidal (ibid). Importantly, Brison never chose to report the rape. Then, at age 35, Brison was raped a second time, this time by a stranger along a country road in France. This rape was extremely violent. Brison describes the assault, saying ‘[he] jumped me from behind, beat, raped, repeatedly choked me into unconsciousness, hit me with a rock, and left me for dead at the bottom of a ravine’ (ibid). Brison had been out on a peaceful walk in the middle of the day, picking wild strawberries, when she was attacked (2003: 2). In this second case of rape, Brison highlights that she did report the rape and attempted murder, though her assailant would have been prosecuted regardless of whether she pressed charges, given the obviousness of violence when Brison was discovered (dying) and brought to the nearby hospital (Brison 2003; Time  2014). The physical evidence available to medical examiners that Brison had been violently and sexually violated made the prosecution of the offender a public safety concern, and as such, Brison's testimony did not have to stand alone in the prosecution of her attacker.

Brison can be understood as highlighting the features of her second rape which made her an ideal victim. Brison was out for a midday walk and was partaking in a wholesome activity when attacked. She couldn't possibly have ‘asked for it’ because she had absolutely no relationship with the offender. She was not even aware of his presence when he jumped her. Brison was discovered so promptly after the violent attack that she was literally covered in physical evidence; Brison recalls twigs being taken from her hair for evidence, and undergoing a series of oral swabs, fingernail scrapings, gynaecological examinations, and X-rays in the hours following her admittance to Grenoble hospital's emergency room (2003: 2). This experience contrasts with Brison's first rape, where she knew her assailant, willingly let him into her room late at night, was a young female student, and had little (if any) way of proving that she was raped. In other words, Brison was a non-ideal victim in her first rape, and an ideal victim in her second rape.

In discussing why she felt compelled to stay silent about her first rape, and even about her second rape with those unaware of the attack, Brison highlights how being a victim of sexualized violence can diminish one's sense of control over one's own life. After all, ‘[n]o one wants to accept that we live in a world where even though you did nothing wrong you can be brutally violated, whether by a trusted friend or a total stranger’ (Time  2014, original emphasis).

Brison notes that it is scary for victims of sexualized violence to believe that the people they trust, those they love or at least consider good people, can (and do) brutally violate them. How can one find peace or comfort when ‘you live in a world where you can be attacked at any time, in any place, simply because you are a woman’ (Brison 2003: 13), and especially when there is no obvious way of predicting who will violate you? I take this point, though, to also extend to the experience of perpetrators of violence (and those evaluating them). It is disorienting, I imagine, to believe that even good people can perpetrate rape; that rape can happen accidentally or unknowingly or be perpetrated by someone we think has other very good qualities. In ‘Justice and gender-based violence’, Brison notes that while sexual harms by intimate partners are rarely treated as crimes at all, those which are recognized as sexual violations are seen as the actions of ‘a psychopath, a monster, “not one of us”’ (2013: 263). In the interests of preserving a sense of control over one's own life (and world), it is difficult for people to identify with the perpetrator of violence. After all, if one accepts that the perpetrator is ‘a normal guy like me’, then one must also reconceptualize what it means to be a ‘normal guy like me’ and the sorts of wrongs that one might oneself perpetrate. This, it seems, is a scary and significant self-conceptual undertaking.

Like Govier's notion of the ideal victim, there are also ‘ideal rapists’ (or ‘ideal perpetrators’). Again, these character-types are imagined to be morally uncomplicated; the ideal rapist is cruel, perverted, deviant. It is easy to hold the ideal rapist accountable for his act of violence because he is morally blameworthy in every domain of his life. It is, however, the social reality that few perpetrators of sexualized violence are as easy to judge as the ideal rapist being depicted. People who perpetrate sexual assault also donate to charities; they pick their mothers up at the airport; they love and raise children. Amanda Aguilar Shank discusses her experiences of harassment by the leader of a prominent immigrant rights coalition in the United States (2020: 27–29). Even organizers of progressive, liberatory projects perpetrate sexualized violence. In the wake of her second, brutally violent rape, Brison recalls being told to ‘think of [her attacker] as a wild beast—a lion. But he was someone's son, someone's neighbour. Every stranger who rapes is’ (Time  2014).

III. Figleaf mechanics and audiences

The remaining sections of this paper develop the concept of sexualized violence figleaf (or SVF). I unpack what it is that Jennifer Saul calls a ‘figleaf’ and discuss why the concept is a useful tool for analyzing sexualized violence utterances. Saul's recent work on figleaves explores their use in racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech (Saul 2024), but was developed originally with an emphasis on racist speech. To outline how figleaves work, then, I will begin by explaining Saul's concept of a racial figleaf, and will then turn to their brief work on gender figleaves before elaborating on my concept of the SVF.

Articulated simply, a figleaf is something which ‘just barely covers a thing that you're not supposed to show in public’ (Saul 2021: 161). On a statue, for example, the figleaf covers genitalia that are considered inappropriate for public display. In the linguistic context, a figleaf covers equally undesirable or inappropriate content. This covering is done through an attempt to disrupt the inference that because person X says U (where U is unacceptable in some way), that X is the kind of person to think and say similarly unacceptable things. Jennifer Saul, in her paper, ‘Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump,’ gives an account of this utterance mechanism. Saul explains figleaves in the context of racist speech, though, as I will highlight shortly, Saul then expands her account of figleaves to instances of sexist speech (for more on Saul's development of figleaves, and for discussion of their use in conspiracist speech, see Saul 2024).

In her paper, Saul divides figleaves into two kinds: synchronic and diachronic, which are paired with the questionable utterance at the same time as the utterance, and significantly after the questionable utterance, respectively (Saul 2017: 103–7). An example of a synchronic racial figleaf is the (infamous) preface to a seemingly racist utterance, ‘I'm not racist, but…’. A diachronic figleaf might look like the person who responds to accusations that a previous utterance was racist by saying, ‘I was being ironic!’ In both of these cases, a racist utterance is coupled with a figleaf (either at the same time as the racist utterance or afterwards) and communicates that there is reason to interpret the utterance as not racist. So, a figleaf is an utterance that is given with another (in this context, racially charged) utterance to cast doubt upon the nature of the other utterance.

In her 2019 paper, ‘What is Happening to our Norms Against Racist Speech?,’ Saul adds context figleaves and collections of utterances figleaves to her framework (2019: 11). Saul argues that contexts can be leveraged in cases of figleaf use, since ‘convincing an audience that a context is not one in which normal inferences hold can provide a very effective figleaf’ (ibid). Take, for example, the person that makes a racist utterance as part of a role in a play. In this case, the utterer might respond to concerns about racism by saying, ‘It was in a theatrical script! I didn't really mean it!’. The idea behind a context figleaf is that there are certain contexts and social environments in which it does not make sense to look for a person's real views and values.

As Saul argues in her account of racial figleaves, the success of figleaves can be generally attributed to two factors:

(1) The Norm of Racial Equality—don't be racist—is thin and subject to individual interpretation.

(2) Widespread understandings of racism among white people are such that it is very easy to dodge worries about racism (Hill 2008). (2019: 9)

The first of these factors involves what Tali Mendelberg calls the Norm of Racial Equality (2001). Saul summarizes Mendelberg's Norm as the ‘[forbidding of] explicit claims of racial genetic inferiority, explicit support for legal discrimination or segregation, and explicit endorsement of white supremacy. It also made most white Americans dislike people whom they saw as racist’ (2019: 2). Despite endorsing the Norm of Racial Equality, which problematizes explicit racism, many White Americans still ‘harboured high levels of what psychologists call “racial resentment”’ (ibid), expressing racist attitudes in ways that (at least often) avoid violating the Norm of Racial Equality by carefully navigating the Norm's emphasis on ‘explicit’ racist claims and endorsements. The selective disapproval of explicit racist utterances and acts helps to explain how a White American could simultaneously be disgusted by the person who suggests that Black people as a social group are inherently lazy and poorly suited to positions of power and authority, but still endorses a more couched statement like ‘[i]t's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites’ (Tesler and Sears 2010: 19). So, Saul argues, the Norm of Racial Equality is overly thin and permissive, since racism appears compatible with the endorsement of the Norm, so long as the racism is not overly explicit (Saul 2019: 2).

The second factor contributing to figleaf success, and the factor which is especially important for my account of sexualized violence figleaves, is that it is easy for White people to dodge or otherwise evade concerns about racism (2019: 9). This is because widespread beliefs hold that

(a) only people—not utterances—can be racist; (b) one is only racist if one consciously endorses negative views based in biology about all members of a racial group; and (c) non-racist people often say things that sound very racist because their head leads them astray, but the truth about them is to be found in their non-racist hearts (ibid, emphasis mine).

Saul draws (a)–(c) from Jane Hill's ‘white folk theory of race and racism’ (2008: 6). On the folk theory sketched by Hill, the problem is that many perceive racism as ‘entirely a matter of individual beliefs, intentions, and actions’ (ibid). If this is true, then an utterance's standing as racist cannot be found in the content of the utterance; whether racism is afoot is a question of the utterer's heart, which can be misrepresented by a confused or misguided mind. The function of a racial figleaf is to block the inference that person S is a racist because S has said some apparently racist thing R. This is done by creating doubt about whether R reflects some deeply-rooted racist nature of S’s (Saul 2019: 9). When these figleaves succeed, utterances that would otherwise be perceived as racist become seen as acceptable, as they are taken to be the sort of thing that a non-racist might say (Saul 2019: 18).

Implicit in Hill's white folk theory of racism, which Saul roots her theory of racial figleaves in, is an understanding that people have essential qualities such as racist or not racist. On an account of the kind that Hill is concerned with, it does not make sense to say that a person is, for example, committed to anti-racist work though guilty of occasional racist transgressions. Is the person truly committed to anti-racist work? If so, it reflects that they possess a ‘non-racist heart’. Is the person truly guilty of occasional racist transgressions? If so, they cannot really have a non-racist heart; a ‘good’ heart is incompatible with racism. Hill suggests that those operating under the white folk theory of racism understand people to either be racist or not racist in their hearts, and it is this essentialist feature of the person that is relevant in a perceived instance of racist speech. This argument can be extended to the realm of sexualized violence. People are either rapists (or violent) in their hearts or they are not. This essential fact about a person dictates what kinds of actions they are able to perform. A non-rapist cannot rape; they might do something that appears to the untrained eye as rape, but this is a mistake. I will say more about the role that essentialist understandings of perpetrators play in the use of SVF in the following sections.

In her paper, ‘Racist and Sexist Figleaves,’ Jennifer Saul expands her account of figleaves from racist figleaves to what she calls ‘gender figleaves’. Gender figleaves, according to Saul, work by severing the inference that because person X said something sexist, that X is sexist (2021). More formally, Saul defines a gender figleaf as ‘an utterance which (for some portion of the audience) blocks the conclusion that (a) some other utterance, R, is sexist; or (b) the person who uttered R is sexist’ (2021: 163). Like how racist figleaves trade on the Norm of Racial Equality, which Saul summarizes as being ‘don't be racist’ (2019: 9), gender figleaves rely on a Norm of Gender Equality, which translates into ‘don't be sexist’ (Saul 2021: 163). Again, this norm appears overly abstract—what one individual takes to be ‘sexist’ may differ drastically from others’ evaluations. Figleaves, then, seemingly have the potential to operate in a diversity of utterance contexts.¹

IV. Defining ‘sexualized violence figleaf’

Following the mechanics that I have highlighted for racial (and, more briefly, gender) figleaves, it is unsurprising that what I will call sexualized violence figleaves (SVFs) work to cast doubt on the sexually violent nature of an act by pairing the act with an utterance which makes the intention behind the act unclear. SVFs find traction in gendered stereotypes of both perpetrators and victims. To cast doubt on the violent nature of an act, one might offer an utterance (or a series of utterances) that undermines the victim's ability to be trusted or to even be victimized. One might, alternatively, offer an utterance which undermines the perpetrator's ability to be understood or believed as violent. Sometimes, SVFs may trade on both the social believability of the victim qua victim and on the intelligibility of the perpetrator as violent. In casting doubt on the victim's status, one might say ‘She has always been dramatic’, or else point out that ‘She is still with him’. In casting doubt on the perpetrator's status, one might say ‘He is a good guy’, or ‘He is a feminist’, or ‘He loves her’ (these example figleaves are nowhere near exhaustive, but rather represent commonly used sexualized violence figleaves). In each case, regardless of whether the utterance is attaching to some feature of the victim or some feature of the perpetrator, the utterance (figleaf) is being used to disrupt the inference that because A performed some seemingly violent action X, that A is violent (or a ‘rapist’). So, modelling on Saul's definition of racial figleaves (2019: 11),

a sexualized violence figleaf is an utterance or a collection of utterances which serves to block the inference from an otherwise clear act of sexualized violence X to the conclusion that the actor and act are sexually violent.

Reflecting on conceptions of ideal victims and ideal perpetrators (as outlined in Section I) helps to make sense of utterances which foster false belief(s) in contexts of sexualized violence. SVFs, though about an instance of sexualized violence, rely on essentialized caricatures of victims and perpetrators to function. Given the intuitive pull to understand oneself and those close to oneself as decent (or at least, not monstrous), and the widespread connotation of terms like ‘rapist’ and ‘violent offender’ as monstrous, perverted, bad people (O'Hara 2012: 248; Yap 2017: 16), it is clear that SVFs supervene on understandings of agents as either fitting or unfitting perpetrators of violence.

So, part of what facilitates the use of SVFs is the carving up of the world and of people into simplified ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types. The good men do not rape. If they are accused of rape, there has been a mistake. The bad men can rape. If you highlight their positive attributes, you are deluded—possibly even a rapist-sympathizer. SVFs capitalize on these unnuanced conceptualizations of the socio-political world; if the moral world is really as cut-and-dry as many appear to believe, then a single utterance (or a series of several utterances) which challenge the nature of an act as sexually violent cannot simply leave the action, nor the perpetrator, in some middle moral grey-zone; if the figleaf gains uptake, then the moral standing of the accused goes from one extreme to another (from ‘monstrous’ to ‘good guy’). In some sense, then, deploying a SVF is a challenge to the utterance's audience: choose which depiction of the agent in question is the real one, the figleaf version (‘He's a good guy! He's a feminist!’) or the accused version (‘He didn't get consent; he raped me.’). Given the widespread understanding of what it means to be ‘a rapist’ or ‘a sexual violator’, both cannot be true.

SVFs operate primarily by pairing utterances with a particular event/act whose nature is in question, rather than with another questionable utterance (for further discussion of figleaves for action, see Saul's ‘Racist and Sexist Figleaves’). Actions are sensitive to description, which we use intention to determine. This is partly because actions can be described (and redescribed) in multiple ways, and these descriptions often differ in the intention(s) prescribed to them. In Donald Davidson's paper, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, Davidson explores the nature of intentionality of action, asking about the relation between a reason and an action in instances where the reason explains the action (1963: 685). Davidson ultimately argues that rationalizations are ‘causal explanations’, and makes this argument by way of two basic theses:

• 1. For us to understand how a reason of any kind rationalizes an action it is necessary and sufficient that we see, at least in essential outline, how to construct a primary reason.

• 2. The primary reason for an action is its cause. (1963: 686)

A ‘primary reason’, on Davidson's account, is either/both the (i) pro attitude or (ii) the related belief which explains why the agent did the action in question (ibid).

Davidson offers the example of the person who (1) flips the light switch, (2) turns on the light, (3) illuminates the room, and in doing so, (4) unknowingly alerts a prowler that they are home (ibid). Though described in these four different ways, Davidson argues that only one action is performed. In this same vein, an act of sexual violence may be described and redescribed in a diversity of ways. An act of rape might be described as rape, but also possibly also as ‘consecrating a marriage’, ‘drunken sex’, ‘a misunderstanding’, among many other possible redescriptions. Important to which description is presented is which feature(s) of the action is taken to be most significant in explaining the action. So, for example, if I describe the action as ‘rape’, I am drawing attention to the fact that what defines the action is its non-consensual nature. However, if I describe the same action as ‘consecrating a marriage’, I am treating the primary reason for acting as participating in part of the institution of (establishing a) marriage. And again, ‘drunken sex’ signals that more significant in explaining the cause of the act of sex than non-consensual force/pressure or desire to establish a marriage is the effect of drunkenness on the agent(s) acting. In each case, the same act is being described, but with different emphasis of features, reflecting different priorities of intention.

Davidson explains the motivation behind obtaining reason(s) for others’ actions. In some sense, asking someone why they acted as they did is an attempt to locate the action within one's broader understanding of that person (1963: 691). It seems odd to ask, for example, why my friend, who drinks coffee every morning, is drinking coffee on a particular morning; I take it as an unremarkable event, and probing for their reason(s) for drinking coffee seems unreasonable. However, if my friend is extremely caffeine-adverse, and never drinks coffee, and I spot them drinking a cup of coffee one morning, it seems quite understandable for me to ask, ‘Why are you drinking coffee?’

What about when the person we consider good, decent, kind, is accused of rape (or is positioned as a perpetrator of sexualized violence)? How does one make sense of such a thing; after all, if rape is an evil thing to do, and only moral monsters rape (see Section I), then the person is either not actually decent, or did not actually rape. In such an instance, one might be disposed to provide a reason for action which redescribes the agent's action—he actually did obtain consent, and she is retroactively changing the story.

In the case of figleaves for actions, which I argue is largely the nature of SVFs, the action being manipulated by the utterance is especially vulnerable to figleaf use. This is because of the close relationship between actions and intentions that I have just highlighted. Because the ‘primary reason’ which explains an action is related to the agent's subjective motivational set (for more on what this set involves and how it relates to action, see Williams 1979), the intention behind an action, and therefore the optimal description of the action, is often obscured to anyone besides the agent. It is often believed that people have a sort of ‘privileged access’ to, or superior knowledge of, their own mental states and activity, including their desires, beliefs, and intentions (Davidson 1987; Heil 1988). Though unconscious bias complicates strong versions of this position, such as René Descartes's view that one's access to one's own mental states is ‘immediate’, ‘infallible’, and ‘incorrigible’ (Heil 1988; Bettcher 2009: 238: 99), it seems generally unobjectionable to think that I know what I think, feel, and intend in a way that is distinct from and more meaningful than knowledge that others have of my thoughts, feelings, and intentions.

If intentions are the kind of thing which one has (albeit defeasible) self-knowledge about, then SVFs, which are figleaves for actions, are especially closely related to first-person testimony about one's own actions, since actions are largely sensitive to description, descriptions of actions tend to centre on intention for action, and people have privileged access to their own mental states, like intentions. If, in keeping with Saul's previous discussion of racist speech (2019), the nature of an instance of what seems like sexual violation is widely considered a matter of what's in one's heart, then the intentions of the perpetrator seem of central importance. Proving that someone intended an act as sexually violent (or as an exercise of power, or a threat) is, of course, sometimes possible to do through appeals to external evidence, but it is extremely difficult. This concern will be explored in more detail shortly.

V. Sexualized violence figleaves in action

Having now explained the conceptual framework for SVFs, in this section, I analyse two instances of figleaf use, and treat these examples as case studies. The first of these cases is the letter that the father of the convicted Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, wrote and read to the judge presiding over his son's high-profile trial. The second case is the short story author from Aubrey Hirsch's essay, also included in the introduction of this paper. This second case, I will argue, suggests that SVFs are sometimes implicit in other utterances, which adds an additional layer of complexity to unpacking sexualized violence discourse.

• (i) Dan Turner's letter to Judge Aaron Persky

SVFs can be found in the letter written by Dan Turner, and read aloud to Judge Aaron Persky, in the sexual assault trial of Dan's son, Brock Turner. In January of 2015, Brock Turner, a student and competitive swimmer at Stanford University, was found having sex with an unconscious woman behind a dumpster (Koren 2016). The woman, Chanel Miller, and Brock were later determined to have blood alcohol levels over twice the legal limit, explaining Miller's unresponsive state (ibid). Brock Turner subsequently claimed that Miller had consented to the sexual contact (ibid).

Prior to the making of Judge Aaron Persky's sentencing decision, Brock Turner, Chanel Miller, and Brock's father, Dan Turner, each read statements to the court (Xu 2016). These statements have since been published online for the public to read. In his statement to Judge Persky and the court, Dan Turner highlights the damage that the sexual contact between Miller and his son as well as the trial (which received widespread media coverage) had done to Brock. Dan Turner tells of his son's character, both as a child and as an adult. Turner describes his son as ‘humble’, non-judgemental, ‘easygoing’, possessing an incredible ‘inner strength and fortitude’, naturally talented in both athletics and academics, ‘dedicated’ to his work and friends, a ‘contributor to society’, a ‘pleasure to be around’, respectful (ibid). The list goes on. Turner also discusses his son's interests in detail: Brock loves (and is talented at) baseball, basketball, and swimming (especially swimming). He enjoys good food (a ‘big ribeye steak to grill’) and cooking (ibid). Brock Turner, as his father depicts him in his letter, is a deeply good, admirable, and multidimensional young man.

What, one might wonder, do these facts have to do with whether or not Brock Turner raped Chanel Miller? Brock's interest and talent in sports and activities, his favourite foods, his participation in Cub Scouts as a child, his social demeanour in school growing up, are all discussed in Dan's letter. Never, though, does Dan Turner explicitly make an assertion about his son's guilt in the matter of the rape allegation. Turner closes his letter by saying that

Brock can do so many positive things as a contributor to society and is totally committed to educating other college age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity. By having people like Brock educate others on college campuses is how society can begin to break the cycle of binge drinking and its unfortunate results. Probation is the best answer for Brock in this situation and allows him to give back to society in a net positive way. (ibid)

It is true that Dan Turner ultimately recommends that his son be given probation. This, however, should not be taken as an acknowledgement of Brock's actions as ‘rape’. Rather, given the events of the assault and the trial, it seems significantly more likely that Dan realized that his son would not receive zero punishment, and so called for the most lenient form. Acknowledging that an outcome is likely is not the same thing as believing that the outcome is fair, nor that it tracks the truth. This tightrope walk of simultaneously attempting to reduce likely carceral harm (in this case, by advocating for reduced punishment) without acknowledging the guilt of the party in question is just one of many ways in which sexualized violence discourse is complicated by judicial and carceral contexts. Dan Turner cannot coherently claim both that his son is not guilty of any wrongdoing, and also that he ought not be treated as fully culpable for the rape, as the latter claim implies some (albeit reduced) degree of guilt. Notice how Dan Turner shifts the problem at issue from rape to drinking culture and promiscuity in the final section of the letter. It is alcohol consumption and irresponsible sexual looseness that resulted in the harm experienced by Miller, not some fact about his son. The sexual contact between Brock Turner and Chanel Miller was simply the ‘unfortunate result’ of binge drinking culture on campus. The outcomes of the trial which are made possible and likely by the actual judicial and carceral context within which it occurs clearly shapes the kinds of stories—including SVFs—that are used to evaluate an instance of sexualized violence.

Dan Turner offers an extraordinary collection of SVFs in an attempt to cast doubt on his son's standing as a rapist, and his behaviour as ‘rape’. Dan begins by highlighting the (many) wonderful qualities that his son possesses. At work is the essentialist understanding that rapists are ‘moral monsters’; they are bad people. But, could a bad person be described as ‘humble’, non-judgemental, ‘easygoing’, possessing an incredible ‘inner strength and fortitude’, naturally talented in both athletics and academics, ‘dedicated’ to his work and friends, a ‘contributor to society’, a ‘pleasure to be around’, and respectful (Xu 2016)? No. If Brock was really all of these things, he would not be a ‘bad person’, and so if these facts about Brock are true, then he cannot really be a rapist.

On top of this emphasis of Brock's positive character, however, there is also another vein of the SVF at work; Dan wants to portray his son as not only good, but as multidimensional. Sections of Dan's letter are dedicated to describing Brock's lonely and challenging adjustment to Stanford University. Brock was too far from his home, his family, and his entire support system (ibid). Dan recounts Brock's visit home for Christmas break, when he

broke down and told us how much he was struggling to fit in socially and the fact that he did not like being so far from home. Brock was nearly distraught knowing that he had to return early from Christmas break for swimming training camp. (ibid)

Recall that in earlier sections of this paper, I highlighted that rapists and violent offenders are taken to be simple characters. The ‘ideal perpetrator’ that I discussed is a convenient concept for many to apply to cases of sexualized violence because it eliminates the unpleasantness of navigating moral grey-zones. A perpetrator, on this ideal account, is morally and characteristically uncomplex; he is cruel, perverted, and unkind. But Dan suggests that Brock is morally complex. Brock is not only multifaceted in terms of his interests (an athlete! A scholar! A ribeye steak enthusiast!) but he is also morally complicated. Dan tells the story of a young man who struggles with mental wellness, acclimatization to a new community, and ultimately, substance abuse (which Dan is quick to mention was learned from Brock's upperclassmen at Stanford) (ibid). This is not the story of an unnuanced, cruel, perverted man. And the fact that Brock is morally and characteristically multidimensional, Dan implies, means that he does not fit the bill of ‘rapist’.

• (ii) Aubrey Hirsch's ‘accidental rape story’

My second case study of sexualized violence figleaf use is Aubrey Hirsch's creative writing student, also included in the introduction of this paper. Recall that in ‘Fragments’, Hirsch outlines her experience working as an adult creative writing instructor. Hirsch recalls reading an assignment submission from one of her students, in which the main character meets a beautiful and intoxicated girl at a party. The girl becomes so drunk that she cannot walk, and so the protagonist takes her to a nearby beach, undresses her, and has sex with her (Hirsch 2018: 5).

Hirsch discusses the story with her student during a teacher-student conference and highlights her concern that he is romanticizing a rape story. Hirsch notes that the tone of the story is confusing, asking the student, ‘Are we supposed to feel sympathy for this character, even as he's raping her?’ (ibid). The student is initially surprised by Hirsch's reading of the story, and responds that she has misunderstood, the hero is ‘not raping her. They're having sex’ (ibid). His surprise at his story being described as a rape story turns to upset, though, as he eventually reveals that his story is autobiographical, and it recounts his first time having sex with his current girlfriend (Hirsch 2018: 6). Hirsch writes,

It hadn't occurred to you that the student might not have realized he was writing a rape story.

“All I can say,” you say, “is that a lot of people are going to read this as rape.”

“But it isn't,” he says, weakly, sounding more like he's trying to convince himself than you. “It wasn't.” (ibid)

This example offers an interesting insight into the practice of using sexualized violence figleaves: that figleaves, which already couch the violent nature of an act and/or agent in some seemingly violence-neutral utterance, can be further couched. Reading Hirsch's account, it is clear that her student is attempting to refute Hirsch's claim that his story describes a rape. The central feature of the narrative which motivates the student's belief that his sexual encounter with his girlfriend is not a rape story and his defence against Hirsch's accusation that the encounter was rape is the fact that the victim is his current girlfriend. One way of interpreting the student's emphasis of this point is that he does not believe one can rape their partner (marital rape, for reference, was not legally recognized as a sexual offense in all 50 states of the United States until July, 1993 (Bergen and Barnhill 2006: 2)). However, given that this essay was published in 2018, nearly three decades after American law recognized marital rape as a real form of assault in all states, it seems far more likely that the student's highlighting of his victim's relationship with him is intended to communicate claims like ‘She is still with me’ and ‘I love her’.

Utterances like ‘She is still with me’ and ‘I love her’, in this context, would function as SVFs; after all, given what I have highlighted as being central to the widely accepted essentialized rapist identity, a real rapist is not a good candidate for a loving romantic relationship, especially with the victim of their rape. The rapist is supposed to be cruel, perverted, violent, and generally ‘monstrous’; how could such a person love and care for the woman he raped. Moreover, how could the victim of his rape love him back and remain committed to him (as the student implies in his noting that his victim is his girlfriend). The student's use of ‘first time’ (ibid) to describe the sexual encounter is also meaningful—it suggests that there has been more sex since the event in the story. Overall, statements like ‘I love her’ and ‘She is still with me’ appear incompatible with ‘I raped her’ (read: ‘I'm a rapist’) under the current concept of ‘rapist’.

But interestingly, the student never explicitly uses these SVFs. All that the student says is that the story is about his first time ‘hooking up’ with his girlfriend (ibid). This utterance manages to carry these other figleaves (among possible others) into the conversation, communicating their messages without ever actually saying ‘She is still with me’ (‘so it wasn't rape’), or ‘I love her’ (‘so it wasn't rape’). This suggests that SVFs are able to be couched in even more apparently neutral utterances. These cases of bootstrapped SVFs are an important site for further research, as they present an additionally ambiguous and difficult-to-discern type of utterance in sexualized violence contexts.

VI. Why care about sexualized violence figleaves?

Having offered my account of sexualized violence figleaves and provided real-life applications of the concept, I will now turn to addressing two key potential concerns for a critic of my project. The first worry is, bluntly put, ‘why care about sexualized violence figleaves?’ Fleshing out this objection, it is worth considering whether the phenomenon of utterances which foster false belief(s) in sexualized violence contexts that I am highlighting, and the conceptual tool of figleaf which I offer to make sense of these utterances, adds anything meaningful to the already significant scholarship on sexualized violence. In other words, what does the developing of sexualized violence figleaves as a concept accomplish?

My response to this kind of worry is, broadly, that SVFs draw attention to the political consequences of certain utterances in contexts of sexualized violence. To see why this is, recall the letter that Dan Turner read to Judge Aaron Persky in his son's rape trial. The letter, I argued, is riddled with SVFs which act to cast doubt on the sexually violent nature of the rape that Brock Turner committed in 2015. These figleaves involve seemingly irrelevant information about Brock's childhood demeanour, athletic ability, and general interests (Xu 2016). A feature of the Brock Turner case which I did not discuss in Section IV is the outcome of the trial. Turner was ultimately convicted of multiple felonies, and was sentenced to 6 months in county jail and 3 years’ probation (Levin 2016). This ruling drew serious backlash, as it is extremely light for the charges on which Turner was convicted. Given his convictions, Turner faced a maximum sentencing of 14 years in prison, and even the prosecution's significantly more lenient request for a 6-year sentence was ten times the length of sentence which Turner was handed (and twenty times the length which Turner actually served in county jail) (Chappell 2016; Levin 2016).

It is worth considering why it is that Brock Turner received so little jail time for convictions which usually carry much heftier sentences. It has already been widely discussed in media and in academic literature the role that Turner's race played in his sentencing; it is very unlikely that a non-White man would have been so lightly sentenced with a conviction of assault with intent to rape. However, I want to suggest that the SVFs employed by Dan Turner and other character witnesses of Brock Turner's were also potentially contributing factors to Turner's light sentence. This is not to suggest that there is no connection between SVF use/uptake and racial identity. This connection is real and concerning, and will be revisited in the following section of this paper.

Essentialist conceptions of rapists and violent offenders are widespread, I have argued already. Importantly, judges, politicians, and other types of authorities are not impervious to these beliefs and socio-political narratives. So, one reason to think that SVFs constitute a meaningful conceptual tool for gaining political insight in instances of sexualized violence discourse is that extremely powerful people can be audiences of such figleaves. Judge Aaron Persky, the authority in Brock Turner's rape trial, was read a series of utterances in Dan Turner's letter, utterances which capitalized on overly simplified and inaccurate social constructions of rapists. If contextually irrelevant and potentially manipulative utterances like those Dan Turner included in his letter are perceived as relevant and ingenuous, the prospect for just and responsible outcomes in sexualized violence contexts is bleak, since these utterances can take the form of evidence and testimony in legal and political contexts.

The general point, then, is that noticing SVFs is useful because it enables one to identify and articulate wrongdoings in important political discourse. When targeting the right audience, SVFs have the power to drastically alter social outcomes. But, having the knowledge and tools to call out speech which forwards false beliefs has the potential to change outcomes. As Sally Haslanger notes in her paper, ‘What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds’, ‘Justice requires that we undermine these systems, and in order to do so, we need conceptual categories that enable us to describe them and their effects’ (2005: 11). Maybe (optimistically), if Dan Turner's letter had been understood and explained as relying on figleaves, Judge Persky would not have treated it as relevant in his judgement. At the very least, the concept of ‘sexualized violence figleaves’ allows audiences to better understand, and makes better-informed judgements about, sexualized violence discourse.

VII. Privilege, identity, and figleaf uptake

Sexualized violence figleaves, I have argued, operate by casting doubt on the nature of an act and its agent as ‘violent’ (or ‘rape’, ‘assault’). I have also highlighted the relationship between intentions for action and how actions are described (see Section III). Depending on audience, why a person acts as they did may define the action that they performed, insofar as the primary reason for action is taken to offer the best description of the action. Recall that it often matters to us to know why a person acted as they did because it provides an interpretation of their behaviour (Davidson 1963: 691). Also consider the discussion in Section III of privileged access to one's own mental states that people are often thought to possess. Though not indefeasible, people are often taken to have a special kind of knowledge of their own beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings (Davidson 1987; Heil 1988).

The defeasibility condition in matters of privileged access is a condition on what it is reasonable to accept without external evidence given the context. If SVFs attach to acts of violence, and if actions are (at least largely) defined by their actors’ intentions, then it seems to matter for the success of a SVF whether an agent's self-knowledge authority is respected. In other words, is the agent trusted in their avowals of their intentions for acting as they did?

This is where the worry about one's identity-related privilege finds footing in my account of figleaves. People of colour, poor people, trans people, non-heterosexual people, fat people; the testimony of all of these social groups is systematically disbelieved, discredited, or simply denied uptake on the basis of their membership in their oppressed group(s) (Williams 2003; Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Fricker and Jenkins 2017). Moreover, stereotypes about members of these social groups have the potential to influence evaluations of behaviour which is, to borrow Davidson's language, ‘strange, alien, outré, pointless, out of character, disconnected’. Rape may be judged to be less ‘alien’ and more compatible with the ‘familiar picture’ (Davidson 1963: 691) of a Black man than a middle-class White man like Brock Turner. For this reason, the defeasibility condition for privileged access of different agents may be very different for reasons unrelated to the reliability of the agent making the avowal.

If this is right, then sexualized violence figleaves are far likelier to succeed for people of certain privileged identities (White, male, cis, het) than for others, as people of privileged group identities have more authority and control over how their violent actions are described and interpreted. The result of this difference in perceived self-knowledge is that figleaves in contexts of sexualized violence discourse where the perpetrator belongs to a marginalized social group will receive less uptake from their audiences when compared with more privileged (both literally and figuratively) knowers. SVFs like ‘He's a good person’, and ‘He's an upstanding member of his community’, might find more uptake when their subject is, say, White, than when he is Black, given racist stereotyping.

To some extent, my response to this general concern is that it is indeed very bad. However, I do not take this worry to undermine my own project. Rather, this kind of concern highlights a feature which must be discussed and developed in future works on sexualized violence figleaves and essentialist speech: sexualized violence figleaves are not treated nor experienced equally among their users and targets. Explaining how the function and uptake of sexualized violence figleaves track identity will help to create a more robust conceptual tool—one which can better identify utterances promoting false belief(s) in a diversity of sexualized violence contexts.

VIII. Conclusion

Sexualized violence figleaves, I have argued, are utterances which are deployed in sexualized violence discourses in order to cast doubt on the nature of an act, and make it easier to dismiss an instance of violence as some other kind of act. The use of these figleaves in the context of sexualized violence impact socio-political landscapes, and play into a deeply-rooted and worrisome caricature of rapists as more general ‘moral monsters’. Reinforcement of this caricature, I have suggested, does great harm to non-ideal perpetrators and victims of sexualized violence.

This paper does not constitute an exhaustive account of sexualized violence figleaves. Further work on the phenomenon, with an emphasis on how figleaf use and uptake tracks racial and class identities, is needed to fully understand how the utterances work and how to combat them in a wide array of cultures and communities. Moreover, a more robust account of sexualized violence figleaves will offer guidance on how to spot figleaves in action—a challenging prospect, given the extremely messy nature of much rape discourse. I understand this project as a meaningful starting point for future work on utterances and the false beliefs they inspire in contexts of sexualized violence.

Acknowledgments

Work on this paper was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the Canada Graduate Scholarships – Doctoral program. I am extremely grateful to Jennifer Saul, for her generous feedback on multiple versions of this paper, and for many fruitful conversations about this project. This paper also greatly benefitted from the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers at The Philosophical Quarterly.

Footnotes

1

It is worth briefly noting that figleaves are not always effective. Figleaf success is largely dependent on audience, and so ‘I'm not racist, but…’ might reassure some audiences and not others of the non-racist nature of an utterance. That said, these figleaves do succeed in many cases, and this requires investigation.