Rape Education Videos: Presenting Mean Women Instead of Dangerous Men

This paper examines two ways to use visual images while teaching about sexual violence.We first present and critique the conventional approach, which employs images of men doing violence to women.We then discuss our approach, which employs images of women confronting and violently attacking men.We discuss our success in using these images in our rape prevention lectures over the past three years.Our analysis of students' reactions to the presentations reveals that showing images of aggressive women radically destabilizes men's sense of physical power over women.As University Instructors committed to education for rape prevention, we offer a critique of conventional approaches to this topic, which usually employ images of women as helpless victims of dangerous 1 men.We argue that these "dangerous men" videos inadvertently perpetuate the very myths that support rape culture because they fail to offer a fantasy of women's resistance.In doing so, they naturalize both men's physical power to rape and women's vulnerability.In effect, they scare women too much and men not enough.As an alternative to this approach, for the past three years, we 1 Both the analysis and the prevalence of male-on-female rape differ from those of male-onmale rape.Like conventional approaches to rape education, this concerns the former.Also like those conventional approaches, our approach rests on research which shows that in general, men are culturally and legally permitted to wreak havoc on women's bodies in ways that women either do not attempt or cannot do with impunity.We regard research which strips data on violent acts of their context and uses them to claim that women and men are equally dangerous (e.g., Strauss and Gelles1 990) as less credible than other research (see Bobash et al. 1992).