Strauss-Kahn trial and sex inequality

Ex-International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn returned to France Sunday after a months-long, headline-making trial.

Sexual assault charges against Strauss-Kahn, who was the leading presidential candidate for the French Socialist Party, were dropped last week. He was accused of raping hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo at a New York hotel early this summer.

The press, as usual, asked the wrong questions and drew the wrong conclusions about the trial. While I’m hardly qualified to comment on the judge’s decision (though this does reek of yet another instance of a powerful man getting away with sexual violence), I am upset with the media’s presentation of the case.

As tidbits about Diallo’s past were slowly revealed and speculated upon, including connections to prostitution and inaccuracies in her political asylum papers, so too were doubts raised about her credibility.

Because we all know only the most upstanding citizens, and especially not prostitutes, can be raped.Also troubling is that underlying these accusations, many articles label her as a Guinean, Muslim woman, as if these identities would inform the public of her motivations or experiences.

I don’t remember any articles prefacing Strauss-Kahn with the description, “white, Jewish.”

The intersection of Diallo’s race, religious affiliation and class can, however, inform of certain ills of the media and judicial system. I don’t think I’m shocking anyone when I say this country’s laws seem to favor and were largely written by privileged white men. That a privileged white man prevailed in this case against a working-class woman of color is, as a friend of mine wrote, “the opposite of unbelievable.”

This seems to me yet another missed opportunity to take an important stand against the way the law configures and the media portray sexual violence.

Why is no one bothered that it seems incredibly difficult to prosecute sexual assault charges? That the responsibility lies with the victim to prove the guilt of the attacker? That existing laws do so little to prevent sexual assault?

It would seem violence against women is an assumed part of our culture, let alone our Constitution, which fails time and time again to promote sex equality.

Many of my feelings about this issue are informed by and indebted to feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon. In her book “Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws,” MacKinnon writes, “Awareness of social hierarchy is absent in the criminal law of rape’s treatment of force.”

In other words, the law doesn’t take into account existing sex inequality as a constitutive influence on sexual assault.

In this case, where a powerful male politician was charged with raping a working-class female, the court and the press appeared to deny that these inequalities could figure into Strauss-Kahn’s coercive force.

On the contrary, many articles I’ve read have established a narrative of inequality disadvantaging Strauss-Kahn.

It has been said that his political clout made him vulnerable to the “con artist” Diallo, or that these allegations were some sort of conspiracy against the French Socialist Party. He was the victim, not her.

Who is wondering how Strauss-Kahn’s political clout may have actually empowered him to commit sexual violence? Again, this sort of language is not at all unbelievable, even if it is despairing.The Strauss-Kahn case is destined to be another political “sex scandal” and not an opportunity to challenge popular dialogues about sex inequality and the epidemic of rape.

And unless he decides to run for office, and polls show half of French Socialists wouldn’t object, I imagine this story will be forgotten in just a few news cycles. This trial begs the question — what is important to us?

At last week’s Video Music Awards, Chris Brown sang, danced (and flew?) while the audience pretended he hadn’t assaulted Rihanna two years ago. Tyler, The Creator, took home the Best New Artist award, in spite of, or because of, his brutal, misogynistic lyrics.

Ours is the sort of culture that forgives, forgets and rewards men for using women. Now is the time to question and protest language that promotes sexual violence and sex inequality.

Rape and violence against women are more than scandal. They are the result of real sex inequality that we constantly and unconsciously reproduce.

It’s time to refuse the inevitability of sex inequality and assert the possibility of a world where sex equality is manifest and defensible in our law and embraced and lived in our culture.

­— ptbeane@indiana.edu