“The trouble with myth is that it shirks blame.” With these words we’re thrust into Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word, a nineties campus novel intent on doing the opposite of shirking blame: raising the curtain on the 21st-century mythology surrounding sex, women and relationships that informs our social and cultural conscience. Myths were created to explain human nature. But they were also created to justify it. The rape culture of Grecian mythology—crimes committed against gods, goddesses, mortals and immortals, and used to explain aspects of civilization—is rebirthed in Henstra’s fictional American campus, where the rape “myth,” the myth that shirks the ultimate blame unto the victim, remains as supreme as it did 2500 years ago.
Karen Huls, the novel’s pseudo-Helen of Troy and protagonist, drifts between two dominant (and problematic) ideological campus groups—the radical feminists of Raghurst, and the brotherhood culture of Gamma Beta Chi, colloquially known as Gang Bang Central. Despite their obvious differences, the mob mentality of each group, so ubiquitous in university and college settings, prompts both to commit unspeakable crimes. This parallelism, of course, is Henstra’s goal—to highlight the violence in the ideological extremes we’re oft first exposed to in post-secondary settings. What are we to make of it? As a professor of English Literature at Ryerson University, this is where Henstra’s pedagogical temperament kicks in. She asks us to think critically about the ethics imbued in us at birth and honed in college and university classes.
The Red Word is messy and uncomfortable, but so is the normalized rape culture students, children, adults and elders experience in school, at home, and in professional settings. Henstra asks us to say the red word—rape—that word that draws blood and incites war of mythic proportions. The nineties’ setting of the novel embellishes the still-present cultural anxiety around a word that means forced, non-consenting sexual activity, and is (supposed to be) punishable by law. Twenty years ago, we didn’t possess the language to talk about sexual violence—minor and major—and we’re only now starting to see that the conversations we have around sex, consent, and power relations remain inadequate. Henstra’s novel is one among several necessary works—including Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion, Rachel Giese’s Boys: What It Means to Become a Man and Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad—that is nuancing our cultural vocabulary on sexual harassment. The White Wall Review took the opportunity to speak with Henstra on these issues, touching on everything from #MeToo and female desire to fraternity culture.
White Wall Review: You mentioned in your interview with Aspen Public Radio that back in the nineties, we didn’t have the language to talk about sexual assault, consent culture or double standards. Karen struggles with this as she drifts between the frat-boy mentality of Gamma Beta Chi, or “Gang Bang Central,” and the feminist extremism of the women of Raghurst. How has the dialogue on sex and consent shifted since you were a student on campus?
Sarah Henstra: The use of the word “consent” itself in this context is a great innovation. On university campuses in the 1990s, the setting and era in which The Red Word takes place, there were student-health campaigns around birth control and safe sex, and sometimes pamphlets floating around warning students about the use of “date-rape drugs” by “sexual predators” in bars and clubs. There was also the student-driven “No Means No” campaign, designed to educate male students on the issue of date rape (or “acquaintance rape,” as they’d started calling it at the time). So the terminology was already there, but it was more limited—mostly focused on how to say “no” to dangerous or unwanted sex (women), and how to listen to the word “no” (men). “Consent” is a more positive and specific discourse, in that it spells out for people of all genders how to ask for what you want and make sure your partners want it, too.
Another positive change since the 1990s is that consent is taught to much younger kids now (my son learned about it in health class in Grade 6). This is a very good thing, since research shows that people’s attitudes toward sexual relationships and sexual conduct, including consent, are more or less fully formed by the time they reach first-year university.
WWR: The Red Word was released in the wake of #MeToo, a social media movement that has been applauded for calling attention to sexual harassment and assault, but also critiqued for its status as a bra-burning witch hunt of sorts. How would the presence of social media have transformed Karen’s story?
SH: The novel offers some historical perspective on the current movements in that it puts a pin in the timeline one generation ago, when these issues were coming up for discussion, but the terms of the discussion weren’t agreed upon at all. Social media today helps set the terms more effectively and more universally, so that for the first time, rather than isolated groups of women attempting to define sexual violence or consent, we’re all able to participate in the same conversation. At the same time, online platforms allow for mutiple, varied stories from people—including survivors—which helps overcome stigma and binary reasoning in our discussions.
There’s a big gap between conversation and political change, though. In The Red Word the Raghurst women try forcibly to bridge this gap between talk (in the classroom, at the potluck parties) and action (against the fraternity). Without the groundwork for change properly in place, such efforts are doomed. Ideally, today’s hashtag campaigns will generate enough pressure on institutions and legislators that real change happens. I’m hopeful that the movement today will find the necessary momentum and traction that earlier efforts, like anti date-rape campaigns in the 1990s, couldn’t quite muster.
WWR: Your novel addresses female sexual desire in a way that is still rarely represented in films and literature, even in 2018. In the years that you’ve been present on university campuses—as a student and a professor, how have you seen the conversation on sex-positive feminism shift, and in what direction would you like to see it continue to evolve?
SH: The female students in The Red Word cross a line and go way too far in their campaign to expose the sexual misbehaviour of the fraternity. But the novel asks readers to consider what it means to go “way too far” in a context where female sexual identity and desire is so tightly policed and constrained. For example, the women are already going “too far” by entering the frat house in the first place, because there is no place—ever—for a “dyke” at a frat party.
Traditionally, men are allowed a much wider spectrum of sexual desires and behaviours before they are perceived as socially transgressive and “going too far.” Think of the gendered “stud” vs.“slut” label for promiscuity, or “silver fox” vs.“cougar” for dating younger people. This is not to say that men enjoy unlimited sexual freedom in a heterosexist society, however. Feminism has done a lot in the last half-century to widen the discourse on both female and male desire, but I think that queer and trans movements have really begun to transform the way we understand sexuality and its expression/performance in social contexts. We’re still a long way from achieving safety for, and tolerance of, people of all sexual identities. But even beyond that, I’d like to see us continue to evolve toward the embrace and celebration of sexual diversity.
WWR: In the novel, the protagonist-narrator Karen chooses not to report her assault. Do you think that in order to enact change, that the burden must be placed on women to report all instances of sexual assault? When a woman chooses to remain silent, to not utter “the red word,” is she doing a disservice to other women?
SH: In The Red Word I am exploring two things at once: the costs of sexual abuse and the costs of accusations of abuse (especially false accusations) on both men and women. These are confusing issues, but I don’t want readers to be confused about my stance on disclosure/reporting, so thank you for asking this important question! No, I absolutely don’t believe that the burden should be on women always to report their assaults. Perhaps the most traumatizing aspect of abuse is the way it robs the abused person of personal agency. To impel women to disclose/report their assaults would perpetuate this cycle of trauma by continuing to take away their choice. The real problem isn’t that women aren’t reporting harassment and abuse, but that they feel they can’t report it, because it isn’t safe, or the cost (social, familial, psychological) is too high. In the novel, “rape” is referred to as a word that cuts in both directions, in that it can cause harm to the accused but also—in a culture that often defaults to victim blaming, slut shaming, and other misogynistic attitudes—to the accuser, too. As these attitudes change, hopefully the disclosure and reporting of abuse will become less fraught.
WWR: The Red Word highlights the many similarities between fraternity and feminist culture, specifically, the mob mentality that is oft so hard to resist in university when you are defined by your social circle and the ideologies it seems to represent. And yet, sexual assault changes the dynamic between the women of Raghurst in such a way that does not occur over at GBC, where there is no discernable change. In fact, women, to quote from the novel, “cement the bonds among the brothers.” Do you think that men and women are inherently different in this way? Can a man ever cement the bond among sisters as women do for the fraternity brothers of GBC?
SH: It could be argued that the relationships among the key male characters in the book do change, somewhat, in that a beloved brother is lost and a “problem” brother, Alec, gets ejected from the fraternity. But the wider structure and ideology of GBC, and the privileged place frats in general enjoy on the campus, does not change. The idea that women are objectified and used to solidify the homosocial bonds among men comes from feminist theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her model, since women don’t enjoy equal status to men in a patriarchal society, it would not work the other way. In fact, in most literature and film, the presence of a man will typically disturb or break the bonds among women (as they become rivals for his attention, or the male-female romantic relationship is prioritized over female friendship). I don’t think this has anything to do with “inherent” differences between men and women; rather, it’s a socio-cultural set of conditions that determine how gendered relationships play out.
WWR: Finally, what were you trying to make visible in this novel that we overlook too often in everyday life?
SH: I wanted to explore our deep, human need for belonging, and the way this quest to belong feeds into and informs everything we do. The feminist principles Karen is learning in the classroom are tested against her (sometimes subconscious) desires, as well as her moral sense, and she struggles to make these different things add up to the “right” action or the “correct” behaviour. I hope that the experience of reading The Red Word mimics Karen’s struggle a little—that readers will find it a challenge to decide who’s right and who’s wrong in the story.
Sarah Henstra’s novel, The Red Word, was published by ECW in Canada and Grove Press in the United States in spring 2018.