Everything We Know About Rape Is Wrong

“There is no single anecdote,” Jen Percy writes in the opening sentence of Girls Play Dead, her riveting, heartrending analysis of what sexual assault does to women. “What I’m talking about is an accumulation.” She lists a few of her own encounters with harassment and rape culture: the man who rubbed his crotch while staring at Percy and her friend; the man working a cash register who asked to touch her breasts; the man who asked to photograph her when she was 16, showing her an album of naked women. The point isn’t to interrogate the men who supposedly did these things, or whether they happened. (With regard to veracity, I have my own accumulation of similar anecdotes; I’m guessing most women do.) More useful is to consider what Percy did in response, what so many do when faced with sexually threatening behavior: nothing.

Girls are socialized to be pleasant. To be passive. To neutralize conflict rather than spark it. They learn to prioritize others’ feelings over their own. In 1988, the feminist legal scholar Robin West argued that these habits and behaviors help foster intimacy and community, but that they also diminish women’s protection under the law. If someone’s instinct is to preserve relationships and stability as a matter of survival, what do they do when they’re violently or sexually threatened? Not always something that might be construed as logical, or that might convince a jury that they have been gravely violated. The majority of women who are sexually assaulted don’t fight back, Percy notes. (In addition to “fight or flight” responses to danger, advocacy groups indicate that other common responses to rape include “freeze,” “flop,” and “friend,” or trying to placate one’s attacker.) She compiles a list of accounts from her reporting of things women have done after they were raped. “I made him chicken soup,” one woman tells her. “I comforted him because he was crying,” another says. Still another: “I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again.”

Girls Play Dead began as a feature Percy wrote in The New York Times Magazine about the phenomenon of “tonic immobility,” a self-preservation mechanism that leads people to freeze or become paralyzed when under attack. In the animal kingdom, mammals play dead so that a predator will lose interest in them; some female dragonflies do it to avoid mating. Percy encounters so many women who describe freezing as their response to sexual assault that she pronounces it a kind of “lingua franca.” (Men freeze too, she notes; her focus is largely but not exclusively on women.) “I just froze,” Lady Gaga said in an episode of the series The Me You Can’t See, while recalling the time she was raped at 19. “I just absolutely froze,” Brooke Shields said of her own rape in the documentary Pretty Baby. While I was reading Girls Play Dead, I watched a BBC documentary in which a woman, recounting being raped by her own boyfriend, said, “The fact that I froze—it’s a feeling that absolutely takes over your body. You can’t move.” Tonic immobility, Percy writes, is an “extreme response to a threat” that “renders victims unable to scream or move their limbs.” Its evolutionary benefit, she notes, is that by simultaneously numbing the body, it might—in the animal world at least—“alleviate the agony and horror of being eaten alive.”

Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical. Her mother, a naturalist, raised her partly in the wilderness, where hills “were painted with belts of ochre, orange, brick-red sand.” Sometimes the pair slept in a trailer, “with its stale formaldehyde smell, lacquer table, and tiny fridge that gasped as if afraid.” She has a miniaturist’s eye for detail and a raw compassion in her analysis. Girls Play Dead isn’t a manifesto, or a call to action. It’s more like a scientist’s collection of samples from a field trip, arranged by genus. Percy observes and bears witness. She interviews women in prison for murdering their abusers, after describing their biographies at harrowing, hard-to-read length. She interviews self-professed sex and love addicts who experienced childhood abuse and whose understanding of emotional connection got distorted. (“Abuse, neglect, or drama—it was all mistaken for intimacy,” Percy writes.)

On first reading, some of Percy’s stories seemed strange or incongruous, like the man she profiles who’s utterly obsessed with a woman he broke up with a decade ago. But I came to understand that woven into her line of inquiry are the nature and significance of storytelling itself. Police investigations and criminal trials demand clear narratives: They tend to expect evidence to be neat, behavior to be logical, and stories to be linear. The questions that rape victims tend to face don’t allow for the kind of messiness that accompanies violation. Often survivors themselves try to make sense of what has happened by reinterpreting it. “Self-preservation doesn’t always look like what we imagine it does,” Percy notes. She describes once going home with a man while studying abroad in Spain, and all of the times she said no, until she finally stopped, because “I was tired and I didn’t want to be rude.” Later, she went to Paris with him. Illogical, maybe, but commonplace all the same, because occasionally our coping mechanisms require transforming an abuse into something wanted, or at least something not so bad.

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In a court of law, though, irrational reactions—such as a sustained relationship with an abuser—can fatally undermine a victim’s credibility. Defense lawyers, Percy writes, have a pronounced tendency “to portray the normal behavior of women, both during and after their experiences, as ‘unusual’ or ‘inconsistent.’” During the trial of Harvey Weinstein, his defense lawyers put significant emphasis on the fact that two of his accusers had continued friendly communication with him after their alleged attacks, and had even gone on to have consensual sex with him. “Many individuals may not understand why I had hoped that attempting human connection with the man who was sexually abusing me, humiliating me, using me, and pumping me into his world where he always controlled the script—was a long exhausting form of survival,” one accuser, Jessica Mann, read in a statement to the court during Weinstein’s sentencing hearing, by way of response. We are, as a culture, deeply uncomfortable with the idea of victimhood. (Consider the idiom “playing the victim.”) “Claiming victimhood,” Kate Manne writes in her book Down Girl, “effectively involves placing oneself at the center of the story.” And women who foreground themselves in any capacity are often perceived to be self-important drama queens, or narcissists.

Perhaps sensing this, Percy turns victims into a collective instead. Her stories, woven together, become something like a fabric, a totality. Messiness is the defining feature, in a way that becomes clarifying. Chronic stress damages the prefrontal cortex, she writes in one chapter, explaining how trauma can impair the brain so that her later accounts of women found guilty for acts of self-defense seem even more profoundly unjust. Girls Play Dead illuminates how stories can trap people, how the impulse to rewrite a violation or rescue an abuser leads us away from the truth. But Percy also seems to feel that showing us the texture and shared features of human experience might be the crucial thing that can make a difference. The law often renders women unprotected, maligned, and misunderstood. The only countermechanism, as Robin West wrote in 1988, “is to tell true stories of women’s lives,” in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring. Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of this effort.