Posted under Gender & students & the body & women's history
Last night at the University of Northern Colorado, I attended a screening of The Line,a film by Nancy Schwartzman about rape and the line of consensual versus nonconsensual sex. In it, she tells the story of her rape several years ago by a man she had gone to bed with–a fact that attorneys and anti-rape advocates explain would have made her case very difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute. She had engaged in consensual sex–but she did not consent to anal rape, and she cried and screamed throughout the attack. The climax of the film is an interview with her rapist recorded via a hidden camera–his face is obscured, but it’s fascinating to watch him squirm and writhe and desperately trying to convince her that everything that happened that night was consensual, and that they had “hot sex.”
The part of the film I found most disturbing was when Schwartzman told her friends what happened–and her friends told her that it happens to everyone. What else did she expect? That’s just the way it is, and she really should get over it because that’s how it happens sometimes. After all, she consented to some sex acts. In other words, they told her that rape is clearly on the continuum of how heterosexuality operates. They read her actions as complicit with the rapist–whereas there was never any ambiguity for Schwartzman. As she related in the Q and A session after the movie, she cried and screamed and repeatedly begged the rapist to stop during the rape, and then went home and wrote in her journal “I was raped last night.” When even her friends told her that what had happened to her wasn’t rape, she bottled it up and tried to forget it. Continue Reading »





