When I heard about Ceelo Green’s fall from grace, long after the incident that caused it, I began to wonder about rapists who prefer the corpse-like lack of resistance from their victims. Bill Cosby was another with a long list of roofied victims. It made me think, how socially inept do you have to be to incapacitate someone to the point where they can’t refuse your advances?
I’m wrong of course. These are powerful men, they’re socially suave, and loved for their work and contribution to their fields, so the thing they have in common with their less famous counterparts is their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and their need for dominance. It’s a tale as old as time.
Sleeping Beauty, or the Disney version as we know it, was awakened from her coma by the kiss of a stranger. In the original story by Giambattista Basile (1634), Sun, Moon and Talia, the prince “beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins” after which “He lifted her in his arms, and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love” and gets her pregnant while she’s lies in an enchanted sleep.
Somnophilia is defined as “the urge or desire to have a sexual encounter with someone who is asleep” and is classified as a “predatory paraphilia”. Considering its history in various romances, it’s been around for as long as romance has preferred passive or vulnerable victims, so much so that it’s also known as the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome.
It’s also more common than one would think. With the birth of modern pharmaceutical tranquilizers in the sixties, roofies, a colloquial term for drugs like Rohypnol (flunitrazepam), gained notoriety for their ability to induce sedation and memory loss, making them a potent tool for perpetrators of casual rape crimes. Difficult to prove, its use has only grown as much as the innumerable variations of “sleeping beauty” rape stories and over 200 variations of the drug itself, which doesn’t often turn up in the victim’s blood test. One of Cosby’s first reported victims did swallow the drugs voluntarily, after all, and this is where the crime becomes difficult to prove: for if indeed, she took the drugs voluntarily, did she not consent to the consequences? In other cases, if the victim did not take the drug voluntarily and does not remember who gave it to her, how can she point fingers at someone she does not remember?
The apparent ease and frequency with which this occurs set the standard for the cautionary date rape tale. It became so frequent that someone added to an ever-growing list of rape prevention solutions a nail polish that can detect drugs like Xanax, GHB and Rohypnol. Rape prevention advocates cried foul, reiterating the ineffectual feminist chant: why can’t men just not rape instead?
Also, what if the damned thing doesn’t work?
Sleep, that restful nightmare
I’m an advocate for sleep as a panacea for most ills. It’s about the most vulnerable state one’s body can be in, a semi-death state, one’s sensory perception reduced to the bare minimum, one’s cells in desperate need of rejuvenation, the shutting down of a tired brain. It’s also a state that requires complete trust in one’s environment, the letting down of one’s guard.
In that state, you’re also leaving your body behind to be taken undue advantage of.
The most well-known case of roofie abusers is a serial rapist in the UK who abused more than 200 men and got caught only because one of his victims woke up in the middle of the assault. Take the recent case of a 60-year-old rapist who chloroformed his kid’s nanny several times, blaming her sleeping habits as an easy lure for his ‘chloroform fetish’. Or, in another recent case, a doctor who filmed himself raping hundreds of women while they were under anaesthesia. Funnily enough, I couldn’t find this video at the top of my search list. However, I did find case after case of male doctors raping sedated female patients. It was like opening a can of worms. And, to provide further proof, has come the story of a Frenchman who facilitated the gangrape of his sexagenarian wife by recruiting over seventy men via a now-defunct site called “Without Her Knowledge”, and filming it.
Yes, the horrors don’t seem to cease. He says he still loves her though.
Criminal sexual fetishes aren’t common, but somnophilia comes across as common sexual behaviour. Any chance of verbal non-consent is reduced to zero.
Borderline Necrophilia
“The wives of men of rank when they die are not given at once to be embalmed, nor such women as are very beautiful or of greater regard than others, but on the third or fourth day after their death (and not before) they are delivered to the embalmers. They do so about this matter in order that the embalmers may not abuse their women, for they say that one of them was taken once doing so to the corpse of a woman lately dead, and his fellow craftsman gave information.”
Necrophilia is of course universally considered one of the foulest of crimes. It also leaves no witnesses. Once this historical titbit got out on the internet, women began to complain about how “women are not safe even in death”.
Several versions of necrophilia exist in that enormous treasury of human ‘sexuality’ i.e., porn. Unconscious women who have been subjected to sextortion come with the porn package. Hitting, choking, slurs and defilement seem the norm. If it weren’t, why would every form of pornography involve some degree of coercion, and why would minors throng towards it as some sort of training ground of male sexuality? The majority of it seems to include, for women and children, more pain and humiliation than pleasure.
If disorder, not my fault? If common, then not crime?
Why do we need somnophilia, despite being a common weapon of choice for the rapist, and probably the easiest to dispense, to continue to be labeled a crime and not a disorder? The answer lies in the judicial system’s ability to be manipulated in favour of the rapist. A ‘disorder’ would let the rapist off on a technicality. As for the commonness of the modus operandi, it can be compared to historically acceptable forms of romantic coercion: kidnapping, stalking, harassment, acid attacks, and blackmail. In court, all of these were, at some point and are even now, an integral component of ‘normal’ male sexuality. Therefore, considering the commonness of the crime and of the advice to guard one’s drink, is not somnophilia, it can be argued in a judicial setting, also be a part of male sexuality?
All we have to do to defend our position is to stop defending the liberal stance of sexuality that mostly benefits rapists: that as long as one likes it, no matter how invasive or morally reprehensible it is, one’s personal sexuality is sacred.
No, it is not. Especially if anyone other than oneself is involved.
The Movie
The movie, quite literally Sleeping Beauty, follows the uncertain journey of Lucy (Emily Browning) as she tries to make her way through college, pay rent, love a worn-out alcoholic, and struggle with an undependable source of income. The movie is artsy and restrained, beginning with penetrative symbolism: Lucy gagging as a medic inserts a camera down her throat. As a viewer, you get that this is meant to provoke some sort of dialogue about vulnerability, erotica and acquiescence, a transition into the cruder imagery to follow, but Sleeping Beauty is anything but erotic. The actress, childlike to begin with, is manhandled in several scenarios where rich old men pay to sleep with but not penetrate (according to the rules) the bodies of young women. The story is primarily about Lucy, but there is a long, tight-framed monologue from an old man, one of the gentler ones, about how it’s time for him to die. And….I just don’t get it. Imagine the somnophile looking over his victim with either tender lust or lascivious animosity. It’s a wonder why this film is considered erotica at all.
Poisoning, not roofieing.
The logic behind roofieing would have long passed the reasoning of sexual access or mild terms like ‘date rape’ which imply that the victim was a volunteer in her assault if we weren’t so fond of blaming women. The idea was floated around after several cases of women dying after being slipped GHB in their alcohol. The person who is administering the dose does it without the knowledge or care of dosage, and the after-effects of what is prescription medication can amount not only to amnesia, but seizures, impaired breathing, a slowed down heartbeat, and also coma. It should be treated as attempted murder by poisoning… but it isn’t. Any other deterrent just doesn’t work, because women’s health and lives are just not that important.
Why, though?
Roofieing is done by big strong men who have the capacity of overpowering their victims while they’re awake. If indeed, predators are stronger than women, why do they feel the need to anaesthetize them at all? What are they afraid of?
There are three things are taken from the victim when they’re tranquilized: their speech, their sight and their movement. Historical patriarchy required the silence of women and allowed them to speak only when they were furthering its cause. Domestication symbolized the lack of movement. Sight, the precious awareness that life could be any different.
Now, there are women and girls with movement, voices and vision. As the patriarchy fights its loss of power, its most ancient beneficiaries feel it the most.
To silence, to blind, to imprison women in their bodies, is to enact patriarchal principles within one’s cosy domain, safe from scrutiny. It is the inability to perceive woman as a whole being. Roofieing is an act of opportunistic cowardice, an offshoot of a dying patriarchy. It’s how men fight back.
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