Blame the Victim

If you haven’t heard by now, a pornstar named Christy Mack was brutally assaulted by her ex this summer. And I don’t mean she was just beaten up, I mean it was the kind of scene that you typically only hear about in extreme rape porn, except it happened in real life. I’ve written before that I happen to enjoy rape porn, but I’ve also written that I think there’s a line between fantasy and deviant perversion, and that some things are only enjoyable in porn and not in real life, and reading about Mack’s experience was gut wrenching.

The fact that Mack is a pornstar, and that her ex is an MMA fighter and also an ex-pornstar himself (though I get the impression he wasn’t a successful one) means that conversations about the whole event have probably been pretty weird. I say “probably” because most of the coverage I’ve seen was from porn-related sites, so of course they were sympathetic to Mack – as they should be – but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are lots of people saying things like, “ho hum, she’s a pornstar, she has sex for a living, so who cares?” (I think it would be hard to read the post I linked to above and think something so crass, but people are people.)

Because set’s face it, any woman who is in sex work is going to face a lack of empathy when it comes to sexual assault. If you’re a prostitute, an escort, a pornstar, a stripper, a cam girl, or in any way involved in sex work, and you get sexually assaulted, nobody is going to care. It’s a sad fact of life, one that I hope will change with time, but for now it’s something these women have to deal with. In Mack’s case I’m sure there were people out there thinking that having sex against her will was no big deal for her since she has sex for a living.

As Gram Ponante points out, there are also probably people out there wondering if this was all a publicity stunt. Since Mack is a pornstar and her ex is an MMA fighter, isn’t is possible that they might have staged this to get publicity? I think it’s a far way to go just for publicity, but people are people, and some will think that.

But Mr. Ponante and I disagree on one thing. In his post he says, “... no one assumes a non-famous battered wife must have done something to deserve the beating.” Actually, Gram, that’s exactly what people do: there is always a certain amount of blaming the victim, and when the assailant is a husband, a boyfriend, or even an ex, it’s even worse because there is always a feeling that it couldn’t be rape, because they have (or used to have) consensual sex with each other.

I’m sure Ponante is right that there are people out there thinking that Mack’s assault might have been a publicity stunt, but famous or not people who know about the situation (there would be fewer if she weren’t famous) would be talking about how Mack had it coming to her for dating such a violent man in the first place and saying that she wasn’t really assaulted it was “just” a domestic dispute because the man involved was her ex.

If anything good comes out of this, maybe it will be one more opportunity for people to start having real conversations about sexual assault, so we can take some baby steps toward changing attitudes in our society.