Sex and Power

Regardless of whose side you believe in the Dominic Strauss-Khan rape case, one thing that everyone can be certain about is that a sexual encounter took place.  The sample of DSK’s DNA extracted from the woman’s shirt, along with the implicit admission by the defence team both confirm this fact.  Another hypothesis in which one can be fairly confident is that, whether or not the encounter was consensual, the grossly asymmetric power balance between the two parties played a crucial role in what transpired.

This alone was enough for some commentators to deem DSK’s actions unethical, even if the sex was totally consensual from a legal standpoint.  This topic gives rise to a lot of questions that aren’t easily answered.  When judging the ethics of sex between two ostensibly consenting adults of vastly disparate social, economic and political standing, how big is too big a gap?  At what point is the disparity so large as to render consent meaningless?  During slavery, white men from the slaveholding class experienced unfettered sexual access to black women, and sexual services were a de facto part of the job description for young female slaves.

Many of these transactions were forced, but often force wasn’t necessary.  To call this unethical behaviour on the part of the slaveholder would be considered a mainstream opinion by most present-day observers. However, at the more extreme end of the spectrum, we have thinkers like the late feminist Andrea Dworkin, who held that all heterosexual sex was coercive degrading to women.  Dworkin came to this conclusion partly because of the acquiescent posture the woman is made to assume by virtue of being the penetratee, and partly because of the power imbalance inherent in a patriarchal society.

I was reminded of this whole discourse of sex and power this week when I watched the 2010 documentary Secrets of the Tribe. The film chronicles several ideological, and sometimes personal, conflicts among anthropologists studying the Yanomami tribe of South America.  The conflicts arose because some researchers accused their colleagues of unethical research practices including racist, animalistic depictions of the indigenous group; fabrication of data; and, in one case, knowingly infecting indigenous populations with harmful contagions for experimental purposes.  But the most controversial allegations, and the ones treated most extensively in the film, are those involving sexual improprieties.  One of the anthropologists, Kenneth Good, who is interviewed at length in the film and appears to find no fault in his actions, actually married a Yanomami girl named Yarima when she was 9 and he was 34.  Following the Yanomami tradition, the couple consummated their union after her first menstruation, when she was likely around 14.

This was all done with the wholehearted consent, and even encouragement, of the tribe elders.  In fact, Good suspects that the tribe’s leader proposed the idea of the marriage so that the young anthropologist would have long term ties to the community since they relied on him to provide them with goods from the industrialized world.  Clearly they had no concept of our social constructs and the milieu of afflictions that accompanies them, such as racism, colonialism, fetishism, all of which were liable to have been operating throughout Good’s courtship of Yarima.  Furthermore, Yanomami society is incredibly patriarchal, with women often being viewed as little more than masturbatory aids and child factories.  Women are, by virtue of tradition, betrothed during childhood, and any post-pubescent women who isn’t spoken for is considered an acceptable target for rape.  So from the Yanomami perspective, there was nothing untoward about Good’s marriage to Yarima. 

Watching Good in interviews, you didn’t get the sense that he was the opportunistic predator that his choice in bride would have suggested.  He spoke very frankly about the racism and ethnocentrism of many anthropologists.  Also, he refrained from artificially romanticizing his relationship with Yarima, or from trying to exonerate himself with the clichéd love-is-blind narrative.  Still, you couldn’t help but feel like what Good did with Yarima was just creepy.

Still suffering from an ongoing fascination with the story, I would later read one journalist’s account of an interview he had conducted with Good and Yarima after Good had moved her to live with him in New Jersey.  At one point during the interview, Good spoke at length about how his wife, who never learned to speak English and so wasn’t privy to this exchange, kept reverting back to her jungle habits.  For example, she never got used to being clothed, and would remove her clothes in public if not closely supervised by her husband.  The interviewer said it felt as though he and Good were talking about a pet animal, even though Yarima was right there on the couch.  Also, at one point in the documentary, Good can be heard lamenting the hardships of trying to balance an academic career while caring for a wife who can only count to two.

Clearly this wasn’t a relationship between like individuals.  But does that preclude the possibility of them having a healthy and mutually beneficial sexual relationship?  If so, what does that say about our regard for the intelligence of the disenfranchised woman?  While these questions are important ones, for me they don’t override the inappropriateness of such asymmetric pairings, which the majority of people now recognize as problematic, and rightfully so.