Details:
On March 2nd, 2011, the artist arrived in front of the MoMA in New York City during the Opening Night Benefit for the Armory Show. Dressed in red cellophane and dancing to the blaring music of Kanye West and Lady Gaga’s songs, ‘Monster,’ she shifted over a mirror that revealed her underwear. Her body was covered with the expressions “Asking for it,” “No means yes,” and “Please rape me” in black ink. She had a sidewalk sign that was covered in nightclub flyers juxtaposed with her own poster promoting the piece. In front of her there was a rape evidence box containing her artist’s statement (see below).
Statement:
Soon after I graduated from Yale in 2009, I was drugged, cut up, and violently raped by my ex-boyfriend, but at the time I didn’t realize it was rape. I called my sister from the hotel room in which the incident had taken place: I told her that I had the worst headache of my entire life; that I had no idea how blood got all over the bathroom door; that there were black-and-blues on my arms and cuts crisscrossed up my back. I dismissed it as just a little S&M sex that had gotten out of hand. My sister had to say, “This is rape,” for me to understand that something serious had happened to me. I went to the Rape Crisis Center at Beth Israel Hospital where they examined me to make sure that I didn’t have any internal damage or a concussion. They made a rape evidence box that they would keep on file in case I decided to press charges.
There is nothing unique about my experience with sexual assault. My feeling of shame followed by denial followed by a desire to resist taking action is a typical progression of thoughts for those who have experienced some form of sexual violation. Whether it be a stranger rubbing up against them inappropriately in a subway train or a first-date watching as they get drunk, taking them home, and then having sex with them even after they say, “No, I don’t want to have sex,” women have a hard time recognizing when something is inappropriate and standing up against their aggressors. After discussing this issue with my female friends, it became evident that most of them have had an experience where they felt forced into sex against their will and didn’t struggle physically because they wanted to avoid making the situation more traumatic. Moreover, my friends with past histories of sexual violence frequently considered the situations fundamentally harmless. It’s important to note that all of these girls are well educated and come from stable families.
There are many explanations for this mental disconnect between experience and realization. The one I want to focus on is the fact that we live in a rape culture that not only anesthetizes us against sexual violation toward women but also holds women responsible for and glamorizes rape. This rape culture, and more specifically, the songs of Lady Gaga and Kanye West, both entitled “Monster,” is the inspiration for my performance art piece, “Please Rape Me,” in front of the MoMA during the opening night benefit for the Armory Show 2011.
I’ll be standing next to a sign that is covered in generic nightclub party flyers, all of which display the promise of semi-naked women and alcohol to lure men. Mixed in with the nightclub posters are my own posters advertising the performance, with the words “Please Rape Me” across them and my legs splayed out in a provocative pose and my face in a hysterical scream of drunken excitement. I will be wearing a skimpy tube top and mini skirt made out of translucent red cellophane and clear duct tape, along with high heels, to emphasize the message that I am “asking for it” by wearing a revealing outfit. I’ll be standing directly over a mirror with my legs spread, thereby showing off the area between my legs to any onlookers who come close enough to peer into the mirror. This sensationalism of my own sexuality is yet another part of the “Please Rape Me” ploy, along with the writing across my body with expressions like “Asking for it” and “No means yes.”
The Lady Gaga and Kanye West songs, “Monster,” will be playing on loop in the background, representing the glamorization and popularization of rape and violence against women. While Lady Gaga’s “Monster” plays like an upbeat trance soundtrack for a dance club and the words are hard to discern unless you pay close attention, the song is about a girl who is at a nightclub and just wants to keep dancing. But she sees a guy who’s like “a wolf in disguise” and even though she wants to just dance, the guy takes her home instead and “Uh oh! There was a monster in [her] bed…He tore [her] clothes right off/He ate [her] heart and then he ate [her] brain.”
The music accompanying these lyrics is monotonous, trance inducing, and de-sensitizing, as though Lady Gaga wants to conceal the meaning of the lyrics or thinks that they are negligible, in spite of their disturbing and violent nature. This is a song about date rape: girl is intrigued by boy, boy “licked his lips” and said to girl, “you look good enough to eat,” boy “put his arms around [girl],” and girl said, “Boy now get your paws right off me,” but boy ends up taking girl home against her will and “eating her brain” anyway.
In Charlotte Hilton Andersen’s article for the Huffington Post, “Lady Gaga and The Glamorous Rape,” she speaks to these issues, explaining, “thanks to examples ranging from the mostly innocuous Edward ‘Do I kiss you or kill you?’ Cullen in Twilight, to the twisted media coverage of the Chris Brown-Rihanna debacle to the galling rape-fantasy video game genre, the media is selling us an image of rape and domestic violence as being artistic, dramatic, the result of misguided love and — most terrifying – wanted.” Andersen also references Lady Gaga’s music video, “Paparazzi,” in which Lady Gaga gets thrown off a balcony by her boyfriend and is forced into a Louis Vuitton wheelchair with Chanel wheels. The most upsetting part of this video is the seemingly arbitrary incorporation of images of beautiful female corpses strewn about Gaga’s mansion. They have all been brutally murdered, but their images read more like casual quotations from a high-end fashion magazine than part of the story, and if they are part of the story, then they are merely casual references to Gaga’s rapist/killer boyfriend.
Cut to Kanye West. While many people give Lady Gaga some grossly undeserved “but she’s a feminist” free card and dismiss her violent and degrading images toward women as merely subverting stereotypes (saying ridiculous things like, “since she’s a woman, it doesn’t count”), Kanye West is a straight-up misogynistic man. He starts off his song, “Monster,” by addressing someone, “Bitch.” The song is directed at this “bitch” in his life, and some of the most telling phrases include his command for “Less talk more head right now,” and his question, “Have ever had sex with a pharaoh?/I put the pussy in a sarcophagus/Now she claiming I bruise her esophagus.” Kanye’s music video for “Monster” is a horrifying hodgepodge of images of dead women who have been violently murdered. At one point he holds a modelesque woman’s severed head in his hands while he raps. One recurring shot is of Kanye in a luxurious bed with two gorgeous women, who appear to be sleeping, but then he starts rearranging their limbs and it’s clear that Kanye raped and murdered them and is merely savoring the moment in a throwback to American Psycho.
But this is popular American culture. Rape is hot, and dead raped women are even hotter. If you start to look for them, the images are everywhere. The problem with this cultural phenomenon is that it’s a symptom and perhaps even an instigator of the actual social problem of sexual violence against women. I was appalled to hear about the DKE fraternity at Yale that forced their new pledges to march around the Freshman campus (where almost all the Freshman girls live) at night chanting the words “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women, and fill them with my semen.” If a throng of some of the best-educated male college students in the country accepted this mission, then maybe rape culture in America has reached a point of crisis. Even worse, almost one-third of the Yale population responded to a poll by saying that they weren’t offended by the rape chant.
Perhaps Lady Gaga and Kanye West have succeeded in anesthetizing us against rape, and it hasn’t just affected young teenagers in mediocre public school system who struggle to find valuable role models. It is affecting the so-called mature and intelligent future leaders of America. Of course, it’s not just Lady Gaga and Kanye West who are the problem. They are merely selling records and trying to give the American public what they want. So why do we want to look at mutilated and raped women and sing along to dance tracks about date rape? The scary result is that even I, a “Yale feminist,” didn’t realize when I had been violently raped.
In my piece, “Please Rape Me,” while I seem to be begging to be raped, by re-contextualizing these sexualized images that have come to seem second-nature to us, I am inviting the question, “Why do we accept the sexualization and degradation of women so easily and readily in our culture and personal lives?” Furthermore, I am implying that there is no such thing as “no means yes” (beyond the sheer linguistic absurdity of the phrase) and that no one is “asking for it.” The very phrase “Please rape me” is supposed to shock and disturb, because it cuts to the quick of so many images in popular music, fashion, advertising, and the media, but by distilling it to its essence (“Please rape me”), its sinister ideology is revealed.
Read a review of the performance here and read about the artist’s experience here.