Judith Warner
The Legacy of ‘Thelma and Louise’
(New York Times, September 27, 2007)

                I was quite shocked this past week by the volume and vociferousness of the response to my last column on the passage into history of “Thelma and Louise.”
                What surprised me, in particular, was the overwhelming anger elicited by my mention of a United States Department of Justice statistic showing rape having declined by 75 percent since the early 1990s.
                Most respondents felt the number was suspect. Some felt that I was being duped; others that I was naïve about the impossibility of gathering meaningful hard data on what remains, for the most part, a “silent” crime. Yet others still, I sensed, felt something more: that my mere mention of the number, and the great progress for women that I read into it, was a slap in the face to rape victims, a denial of their suffering, a Katie Roiphe-like brush-off of the tragic reality of their experience.
                I want to say from the outset now that I intended no such insult. Neither did I mean to deny the very real and continued threat of gender crimes like sexual assault and harassment that continues in our country, where one in six women are victims of sexual assault and the EEOC still receives 12,000 claims of sexual harassment a year.
                In traditionally male sectors of society, where physical power is particularly prized, the situation for women is especially dire: as Sara Corbett reported for the Times last spring, nearly one third of female veterans returning from Iraq and seeking services from the Veterans Administration said they’d experienced rape or attempted rape at least once during their service. And the case of two women who say they were raped by a group of University of Colorado football players and recruits has blown the lid off the widespread problem of sex abuse by college athletes. (“Sexual abuse has become a fixture of athletic programs,” says Jocelyn Samuels, vice president for education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center, and one of the many advocates and academics who signed onto an amicus brief filed in support of the women in the case.)
                The real amount of the reduction in the incidence of rape may in fact be much less than the 75 percent number derived from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey. Data released this month by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program showed a decrease in incidence of 13 percent between 1991 and 2006, though the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the country, says on its website that “rape/sexual assault” has fallen by over 69 percent since 1993. The enormous variation in the numbers reflects, in part, the difficulty in obtaining hard statistics about rape, which, though better reported now than it was 15 years ago (reporting is up about 10 percent in that time period, according to RAINN), still goes unreported at least 60 percent of the time.
                Despite all this, there still is a consensus right now among people who track the statistics that rape and sexual assault are on the decline. Sexual harassment complaints to the EEOC spiked following the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which made it possible for plaintiffs bringing harassment suits to win compensatory and punitive damages in addition to back pay. Then the volume of claims flattened around the turn of the millennium and is now slightly in decline. Is this because of changed behavior, company crackdowns or fear of retaliation for complaining? The EEOC doesn’t have the data to say.
                But all of us who can remember what life was like in school, at work, at home and on the street in the 1970s and 1980s can, I think, attest to the fact that there’s been a major shift. What may have started with a fear of lawsuits has trickled down into everyday behavior. What’s sayable in polite company has changed.
                And, according to Casey Jordan, a professor of justice and law administration at Western Connecticut State University, what’s doable – in most of mainstream America, at least – has changed as well.
                 “I do think most young men have an appreciation for ‘no means no,’ says Jordan, who has spent the past twenty years studying rape statistics and changes in student attitudes and behaviors. “There is a new sense that women should be respected. You’ve got men responding to the idea that women do have more power and they have to respect them.”
                The reason, she says, is partly due to many women’s enhanced status in society, but also due to changes in men. Many of the young men she sees as students today, she says, were raised by women who struggled to establish themselves personally and professionally in the 1970s and 1980s, an era when sexual harassment and the ambient threat of sexual violence were more common. “A lot of these women were harassed in the workplace, married in their 30s because they couldn’t find a good man and really do believe the way to effect change is to raise their young men with respect for women,” she told me. “I think what you’re finally seeing is the legacy of Thelma and Louise.”
                I don’t want to overstate the rosiness of this picture. Sexual predators, Jordan says, in this time of greater awareness and lessened tolerance for the old “boys will be boys” ways of being, have in a certain sense become more selective and more savvy, victimizing women whom they know are most likely not to go to the police. “Sexual violence is becoming more subterranean,” she says. “It’s not happening to everyone but it is happening to women with no power in our society – they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, they have no self-esteem, they’re victims of domestic violence. The average girl who is not living a high-risk lifestyle – things are better for her. The average man in a bar understands that no means no. It also means that a predator will move on to someone more susceptible.”
                And many young women who are victims of acquaintance rape, she says, now subject themselves to an additional form of self-inflicted violence. “They don’t want to be labeled a victim. They don’t want to believe men have power over them and can hurt them,” she says. “As opposed to the ’80s and the early ’90s when you had Take Back the Night rallies, today’s young women are cynical. They say: it happens a lot. If it happens they’re not going to let it ruin their lives. They suppress it.”
                It’s such a quagmire, this business of victimhood and empowerment and identity — particularly for those of us who have not been directly touched by sexual assault or harassment. In the 1980s and early ’90s, I used to believe that we all suffered from sexual violence by proxy. Beyond simple empathy, I felt we were one, in our status, with the most violently sexually subjugated women.         Now I’m not so sure. I think we have a choice now between identifying with Thelma and Louise and with, well, Susan and Jane (Collins and Harman, the Senator and the Congresswoman, not to mention Hillary, Nancy, Condi and a whole long cast of others.) We can look forward, or we can look back. We can focus our awareness upon women’s victimization by men or hone in on what’s needed for women to thrive alongside men and achieve a level of power that can, at least partially, protect them from sexual violence. At the very least, we can inoculate our daughters with the best protection there is for reducing the risk of sexual victimization: positive self-esteem.
                So that – in greater and more reflective detail than last week, is where I’m coming from in suggesting that the time for over-identifying with Thelma and Louise has passed. At least for those of us fortunate enough to have other options.