Documentary shows media’s responsibility
Fifty Shades of Grey aside, the biggest gender-related film in the news this week was The Hunting Ground, the 2014 Sundance documentary that hit theaters in Los Angeles and New York City this past Friday. The Hunting Ground, which provides firsthand accounts of campus sexual assaults and their mishandlings at universities across the nation, has already been screened at the nation’s capitol and will premiere in Washington, Boston and Berkeley theaters on March 13.
Not only is this film important overall as a cinematic culmination of recent efforts to combat campus sexual assault, but The Hunting Ground is also important in of itself. It is a tangible form of resistance produced by independent filmmakers, launched into the public eye after its premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. In other words, this is not some low-budget project produced by an activist organization — this is a professional film garnering serious critical attention. The widespread success of this documentary so far marks The Hunting Ground as a major turning point in the war on sexual assault. It is a full-fledged attack on rape culture at its most pervasive source — the media.
By “rape culture,” I mean that we live in a society that implicitly enables unbridled hyper-masculinity and degrades everyone who doesn’t satisfy that requirement. This isn’t to say that America openly promotes sexual assault; as Shannon Ridgway of Everyday Feminism explains, “We’re talking about cultural practices … that excuse or otherwise tolerate sexual violence.” Ridgway goes on to list 25 examples of rape culture in today’s society, including misogynistic song lyrics, sexist chants, rape jokes, offensive memes and several unjust court rulings for cases of sexual assault. The “cultural practices,” however, responsible for promoting rape culture well exceed 25 recent incidents. Major industries such as advertising, film, television and publishing are key in perpetuating the normativity of sexual assault in the U.S.
If you’re still skeptical as to how much cultural products can affect a population’s outlook on sex, take a look at the hype surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. Real-life BDSM communities advocate safety, communication and trust above all else. The book and cinematic adaptations of Fifty Shades, however, paint a much different picture of kink, raising questions of what happens to a society when it cannot discern between unorthodox consensual intercourse and sexual assault.
Author Emma Green confronts this issue in The Atlantic. Green opens with a meditation on fantasy, asserting that “[i]n culture, fantasy works like a mirror: It reflects who we are, but it also shapes what we become.” Bearing this in mind, the national obsession with Fifty Shades of Grey is disconcerting; the main character’s narration reveals frequent discomfort with the violent sexual behaviors practiced by her partner, but she plummets into a cesspool of miscommunication and forced sexual submission. In spite of the harrowing undertones of Fifty Shades of Grey, American audiences have widely embraced the novel and the disturbing image it paints of romance. In the words of Green, “This is a troubling fantasy in American culture, where one in five women will be raped within their lifetime … and where troubling evidence of casual attitudes toward rape … is not uncommon.” It’s especially disturbing that the same nation claiming to embrace the movement against campus sexual assault is consuming this story so voraciously. In other words, a powerful cultural product is drowning out the harrowing testimonies of victims and the hard work of activists.
Of course, if cultural products promote rape culture, they can also be an answer to combating that same culture . An article for The Nation asserts that “[r]ape culture exists because we don’t believe it does.” Not only does The Hunting Ground shatter this foundation of “rape culture,” but its message is packaged in a familiar, consumable format. The Washington Post cited the words of Annie E. Clark, a rape survivor featured in the film:
“We hope it breaks that fourth wall, so it’s not kept within the echo chamber of survivors and higher education and feminist blogs … While those are all great, we just hope the public sees this. You know, your average person sitting down to eat dinner at six o’clock in Kansas.”
Hopefully, Clark’s wishes will come to fruition, and The Hunting Ground’s effect will be far more immediate than the slow, subliminal embedding of misogyny. One thing is for certain — given its success, The Hunting Ground is a major step in bringing this issue to the mainstream light, and that’s a step in the right direction.
Jennifer Frazin is a sophomore majoring in English and theatre. Her column, “Not That Kind of Girl,” runs Wednesdays.