The role of popular media in shaping our behaviors and whether it directly contributes to violence elicits a strong debate from various quarters of society. In her book, Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media, Nickie D. Phillips discusses how the idea of rape culture has permeated people’s collective imagination to create a cultural environment where violence against women has been normalized by being ignored, condoned albeit implicitly, or explicitly encouraged. Phillips highlights the various ways through which sexual violence is collectively processed, contextualized, mediated, negotiated, and contended by looking at how the public has normally reacted to different high-profile cases and rape narratives in popular culture using a cultural criminology framework. This paper is a thorough overview of Phillips’s book to highlight what I have learned from the text. The violence surrounding rape is far more widespread than I thought.
In Chapter 1, Phillips traces the origins of rape culture by focusing on its evolution from being a topic mainly in academic discourse to becoming a relevant issue in popular culture. Rape culture emerged from the revolutionary feminist movement in the 1970s with pioneer works by scholars, such as Cassandra Wilson, Noreen Connell, and Susan Brownmiller among others. Phillips then presents how the concept permeated what she terms as “low culture” spaces with casual misogyny being the guiding principle. The author reveals how contentious the issue of rape culture is by giving offensive definitions of the term, its history in feminist campaigns, and the micro-aggressions that women have to contend with in their day-to-day living.
In the second chapter, Phillips gives contemporary examples that underscore the concept of popular culture to show how this notion has pervaded mainstream media coverage. One good example is the gang rape and ultimate murder of Jyoti Singh in New Delhi, India, in 2012. Phillips is quick to prove that rape culture is not just an Indian problem by comparing this incident with other cases in the US. Some of the cases that she uses to place rape culture in the American context include the widely publicized juvenile trial of two high school boys who raped Jane Doe in Ohio, allegations surrounding Bill Cosby’s sexual assault cases, and Robin Thicke’s song, Blurred Lines.
The third chapter focuses on how the popular media, specifically television, depicts rape and sexual violence against women. Phillips raises a thought-provoking issue here by noting media content consumers are concerned with how rape and sexual violence make them feel instead of interrogating how such portrayals make them think. For instance, Phillips wonders why we continue watching television programs such as Game of Thrones, Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, and The Walking Dead among other related programs when they are riddled with disturbing scenes of rape and sexual violence against women. She concludes that our reactions and responses to these scenes are not intellectual but sensational.
In the next two chapters, Phillips details how pervasive misogyny and sexual harassment have infiltrated the gaming industry and comic book communities. The author notes that while the mainstream media acknowledges the existence of gendered problems within the online gaming industry, the perpetrators of these doxxing attacks have successfully reframed the sensitivity of rape culture as a politically correct tool of promoting free speech. Similarly, in comic books, women characters are normally hypersexualized with sexual violence and harassment being used to further their storylines.
In the last chapter, Phillips reintroduces the concept of rape culture to academia, but this time she focuses on how this culture has pervaded college campuses. According to the author, discussions on rape culture keep on shifting but the enforcement of Title IX has helped reduce sexual violence on campuses. However, despite the concerted efforts from the relevant authorities, understanding rape culture from a sociological perspective is lacking in the literature. While this assertion appears controversial because there is plenty of literature on this topic, Phillips is quick to point that popular culture nowadays plays a more significant role in shaping our sociological understanding of rape culture as compared to college campuses and the academic community at large.
Phillips concludes her book on a grim note by arguing that the widespread policy failure to address rape culture is a clear reflection of our society’s cultural ambivalence around what amounts to sexual violence. However, Phillips (2017) is optimistic about the future by noting that the concept of rape culture has moved from academic halls and it “is now ubiquitous in popular discourse, showing up in news reports, social media outlets, and television crime dramas” (p. 185). As such, she is confident that there is no going back; “There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle; there’s no erasing the concept” (p. 185), and thus as people continue to talk about the topic, it will raise the awareness needed to address this problem that has affected women since the civilization of humankind.
Generally, the book is an easy read and I enjoyed reading it. By focusing on recent examples starting from 2012 onwards, she allows the reader to contextualize the issue of rape culture through low-culture analysis, which is a departure from monotonic materials on the topic found in most academic halls. The author does an impressive work by dissecting the concept of rape culture in the context of popular media because rape culture cannot be understood in its entirety without involving these prime areas that inform our collective thinking, which ultimately informs our perceptions of sexual violence.
However, the book has few weaknesses. For instance, while Phillips provided her methodology in the appendix, she could have given more details about her data collection process. Instead of mentioning newspapers in general, she could indicate whether she gathered data from blogs, social media accounts, and other websites drawn from the said newspapers in line with best practices in qualitative research. Additionally, more tables, figures, and other visuals throughout the book would have helped significantly in understanding the content better. Finally, Phillips mentions that she uses a cultural criminological framework in her work and thus she could have included a chapter to explain the underlying principles of this conceptual framework for deeper theoretical analysis.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding rape culture in popular media. I have learned that gender violence against women is far more widespread than I thought. I never considered the various micro-aggressions that women have to face every day of their lives as part of sexual harassment. Additionally, I was oblivious of the intricacies surrounding the concept of rape culture and how political correctness has silenced this important topic and deluded the public from having constructive and objective debates on the violence that is insidiously meted against women in our society.
Reference
Phillips, N. D. (2017). Beyond blurred lines: Rape culture in popular media. Rowman & Littlefield.