The Rape Is The Point

On the divine right of kings

The Rape of the Sabine Women (1639-1640) by Peter Paul Rubens

In her recent book The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, the British journalist Angela Saini takes her readers on an in-depth tour of centuries of debate among historians, anthropologists, genealogists, and archeologists looking for the genesis of men’s domination over women. Often colored by the gender politics of their time, these debates seek an origin point for the oldest hierarchy we as humans continue to enforce, hoping to either justify that hierarchy’s existence in the present-day or find the key to its abolition. Saini’s goal is not to find a final answer to this debate (should such a thing even be possible) nor replace the apparent inevitability of male dominance with mythologies about matriarchal societies and the “divine feminine.” Instead, she urges us to embrace a more complex and nuanced reality that confronts how these inequalities are justified in the most circular of logic.

As Saini writes:

“When violence against women is widespread, when hard-won rights look so precarious, when the grip of male power seems intractable, it may well feel as though it has been this way forever. Political leaders routinely invoke “tradition” and “nature” when clamping down on women’s rights. This is how it’s always been, they claim. But history tells a different story…the norms that a society follows must be built.”

From the ancient bedrock of the Neolithic settlement Çatalhöyük to the gender politics governing household life in Ancient Greece, from the violent domination of khans, kings, and emperors to the matriarchal cultures of India and North America erased by colonizers, the historical origins of the patriarchy are a vastly-complex narrative often forced into clean, neat fairytales meant to mystify and justify male dominance. This instinct is widespread across our current politics where MRA influencers appeal to grade-school portrayals of ancient Classical cultures to demonize modern-day feminism or right-wing politicians rail against transgender identities as abominations of nature, God, or both. But as Saini details, these appeals to the historical record obscure the complexity of that record while wrongly painting efforts to write a different story as futile in the face of history’s momentum. “Women’s rights and freedoms weren’t missing in deep time,” she writes. “Just like in the present, they had to have been destroyed.”

It’s Saini’s book I was thinking about while watching former President Donald Trump take questions on CNN just 24 hours after a New York jury found him liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll, one of 26 women who have accused Trump of harassing, assaulting, or raping them—a pattern of alleged behavior that appears to have continued during his White House tenure.

In his deposition for the trial brought by Carroll, Trump was asked about his infamous comments made during a taping of Access Hollywood where he confesses to routine sexual assault and says “when they’re a star, they let you do it.” Asked by Carroll’s lawyers to elaborate, Trump doubled-down:

Attorney: "That's what you said, correct?"

Trump: "Well, historically, that's true with stars"

Attorney: "It's true with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?”

Trump: "Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that's been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately, or fortunately."

Attorney: "And you consider yourself to be a star?"

Trump: "I think you can say that, yeah”

He continued on CNN:

“People that are rich, people that are powerful, they tend to do pretty well in a lot of different ways, okay?

And you would like me to take that back. I can’t take it back because it happens to be true. I’ve said it’s been true for one million years, approximately a million years, perhaps a little bit longer than that.”

The notion that being a “star”—which Trump’s branding and public persona might lead us to define as anyone with sufficient wealth and influence—entitles you to rape and assault people at will “for one million years” invokes legends of emperors, kings, and conquerors laying waste to the women of a foreign land, but is more often found in myths than the historical record. Consider the Epic of Gilgamesh, Poseidon descending to earth to lay siege to Medusa, or the Roman rape of the Sabine. It’s a notion often shoehorned into popular understanding of patriarchies passed—consider the myth of prima nota, the supposed right of Medieval English kings and lords to rape any woman under their liege.

What Trump is doing with this line of messaging is obscuring his own decision-making as a moral actor behind the same self-justifying veneer of inevitability that Saini dismantles in her book. It’s a historical determinism meant to justify not just Trump’s actions as an individual but the status quo that enables, promotes, and justifies rape across our culture while simultaneously discrediting efforts to change that status quo. Such “logic” is often trotted out to explain the gender binary itself, characterizing narratives that fall outside of the script written by patriarchal rulers as not just errant but futile in the face of the totalizing momentum of history.

Trump’s reliance on this archaic and old lie nonetheless reveals an important truth. Trump’s self-aggrandizement, combined with his illiberalism and apparent infallibility in the eyes of his most ardent followers, has often been compared to that of a brutish king, a strongman meant to bring masculine law and order over the femininized chaos besieging our culture and families. And, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Kristin Du Mez, and others have shown, it’s Trump’s role as a patriarch that inspires the sworn loyalty of many of his followers—from the gentry who stormed the Capitol to the right-wing religious leaders who supported both his efforts to win the 2016 election and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In Trump, they see a chance to return to the mythical past invoked by him in his deposition and CNN town hall, where brutish violence is not greeted as a societal ill but instead as just desserts for acquiring, through birthright or otherwise, enough power to protect those who enact it.

As Du Mez writes in her book Jesus and John Wayne, this is particularly true of Trump’s support among Evangelicals. Trump’s sexual violence, combined with his multiple marriages and infidelities, is often portrayed by pundits as a contradiction of his support among political Christians who, at least on Sundays, swear off such sins. But the Christianity backing Trump is not the Christianity of humble country pastors aiding the poor and calling on the power of grace. As Du Mez writes of the 2016 election:

Evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals' embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad…Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it's no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals' apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.

To the white Christian nationalist, Trump is an eidolon of traditional masculinity, a patriarch in his personal and political life entitled to the violence and privileges afforded to “stars” past and present. To the Christian nationalist, violence and perversion are not defined by the harm done to their victims but by their violation of a gendered hierarchy. This is the logic that justifies both their paranoid fervor directed at queer people and their relative blind eye to the actual sexual abuses rife throughout the Catholic or Southern Baptist churches. Subservience and submission to patriarchal authority—up to and including sexual submission—is not baggage carried for Trump by a Christian right eager for Supreme Court seats but a gift unto itself, a reminder of a time when nothing as messy as ethics—fortunately or unfortunately—were brought in to question them.

Of course, Trump need not appeal to Bible thumpers to justify his violence—patriarchal power is far from exclusive to the religious. As surely as a previous generation obscured their doubt for evolutionary biology behind the pseudoscience of “intelligent design,” many on the right today attempt to justify patriarchal power and female submission through the appropriation of biology or, as Trump did himself, appeals to history. Consider the toxic influence of Costin Alamariu, better known as the Bronze Age Pervert. In his 2018 book Bronze Age Mindset, Alamariu appeals to the same naive sense of history dismantled by Angela Saini, warning a ruined elite has lain siege to traditional masculinity and produced “bug men” denied their right as masculine heirs and replaced by the legal and social equality of all people—a philosophy Alamariu derides as “equalism” but most might know as “humanism.”

Like Christopher Rufo and other right-wing hardheads have done, Alamariu points to the shallow hypocrisies of the liberal narrative of progress and accuses them of being excesses of the left. The Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton noted this appeal in his 2019 review of Bronze Age Mindset:

“The reason this book is important is because it speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, levelling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.”

Alamariu’s cure for this societal ailment is for people, and young men specifically, to give in to their supposedly-natural desire to own as much “space” as possible, i.e. accumulate wealth, power, and influence—a conclusion he reaches through a mix of historical revisionism, Nietzchean ubermensch theorizing, and biological racism designed to give an appeal to white masculine authority the veneer of serious thought. Put more succinctly by John Ganz:

I once ventured a toy theory that Fascism has two aspects whose ideal-types are expressed roughly in the duality between Italian Fascism and Nazism: Nazism has weird loser, creep vibes, while Italian Fascism has douchey, jock vibes. The BAP/Alamariu divide also maps onto this: in effect, he’s a synthesis of both, the nerd-bully, and thus in a way an ideal fascist.

It’s a masculine defense of grabbing whatever is in your space—be it property, wealth, power, influence, or pussy. What this line of thought demands is a largely-secular version of the patriarchal authority sought by Evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and other religious supporters of Trump and Trumpism, one where feminine submission and masculine domination are taken for granted.

When E. Jean Carroll first accused Trump of rape and assault, he dismissed the accusations by claiming Carroll “is not my type.” This is the naive conception of sexual assault as an act of desire or attraction, a rhetorical turn that pivots societal judgment away from the abuser and towards their target. It invites the bystander into the perspective of the abuser while denying the systems and cultures that enabled them, rendering sexual violence a matter of interpersonal conflict instead of a matter of power. Is she attractive enough to rape? Trump would prefer we ask rather than question a society that enables “stars” to rape.

But his appeal to the legends of lusty kings and the divine right of “stars” suggests he genuinely knows better. It suggests Trump is aware his own sexual violence is a reward society entitles him to for accumulating sufficient wealth and “space,” a product of a patriarchal power structure in need of constant vigilance and maintenance lest it be questioned by feminists, secularists, “equalists,” or the raped themselves.

It’s why, I suspect, his continued mockery of Carroll on CNN’s town hall was greeted with laughter and applause by the devoted fans CNN’s producers saw fit to surround him with (audience members were reportedly told they could applaud but not boo or show signs of disagreement with the former President). These are not the reactions of people weighing the costs or benefits of supporting a rapist for President, hesitatingly looking past such “indiscretions” as the cost of retaining political or cultural power. What we’ve seen this week is the celebration of sexual abuse by people who yearn for a return to the mythical, patriarchal past Trump explicitly invoked in his own defense.

It’s a shame that Adam Serwer’s famed thesis—“the cruelty is the point”—has been rendered into a thought-killing cliche, one put forward by hashtag-resistance liberals to characterize the awful consequences of illiberal politics as merely a matter of irrational bloodlust. But in Serwer’s original 2018 essay, he pointed to the exuberant joy seen at Trump rallies over the abuse of migrant families or the mocking of Christine Blasey Ford as a kind of collective identity formation, a group exercise in celebrating specific power structures and worldviews:

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump…It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.

For the most loyal of Trump’s followers—be they God-and-country Evangelicals, BAP-toting pseudointellectuals, or elected officials waging war on abortion and queer people—the rape, too, is the point. To them, Trump’s sexual violence represents the very patriarchal power they seek to enforce. His appeals to a history that never existed are both amoral justifications for his own actions and nostalgic yearnings for a time when consent, of the governed or the raped, was irrelevant. His inability to feel shame is a promise they, too, can be freed of psychic guilt or societal consequence for grabbing what they feel entitled to by birth or accumulated power. What Trump is selling is an absence of virtues or protections—a life where every man is a king free to reign among the stars.