Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes.

• Author: Sanday, Peggy Reeves

In Virgin or Vamp, Helen Benedict(1) uses the lens of press coverage of sex crimes to examine public attitudes toward women, sex, and violence. Her explanation for why the press clothes the character of complaining witnesses in the garb of sexual innocence or neurotic obsession illuminates a social rhetoric that feeds American conventional wisdom about the nature of sexuality and its relation to charges of rape. I highly recommend the book because it makes accessible to a broad reading audience the pervasiveness of rape myths in the print press, where popular opinion is both reflected and shaped.

Benedict's argument rests primarily on an analysis of the coverage of four high-profile rape cases. The cases cover several types of sexual assault: marital rape (the 1979 Rideout case), peer gang rape (the 1983 New Bedford case), sex-related killing (the 1986 Chambers case), and jump-from-the-bushes stranger gang rape (the 1989 Central Park jogger case). Technically, the Chambers case does not belong in the book because rape was never established in the manslaughter conviction of Robert Chambers for the killing of Jennifer Levin. Benedict includes the case because the press treated it like a rape trial; they focused more on the victim's reputation than on the murder allegations.

Three of the four cases ended in convictions, which skews Benedict's sample because most rape cases, especially when the parties know one another, end in acquittals. However, one could also argue that the pervasiveness of rape myths displayed in the press coverage of these cases, despite the evidence against the defendants, strengthens Benedict's central point:

As the result of the rape myths, a sex crime victim tends to be squeezed into one of two images - she is either pure and innocent, a true victim attacked by monsters - the "virgin" of my title - or she is a wanton female who provoked the assailant with her sexuality - the "vamp." These two puritanical images are at least as ancient as the Bible. They can be found in the story of Eve as temptress and corruptor (the "vamp"), and in the later Victorian ideal of woman as pure and uninterested in sex (the "virgin"). Indeed, rape is often seen as a punishment for women who dare to be sexual at all. [pp. 18-19]

Benedict opens with an important chapter on rape myths, language, and the portrayal of women in the media. She explains rape myths by describing ten attitudes commonly associated with reactions to rape scenarios. One could argue with the fact that Benedict does not actually define the concept rape myth,- however, she should not be faulted here because the concept has never been adequately defined in the literature.

The term rape myth is problematic because it implies a disconnected, unreal, ancient attitude. However, Benedict's analysis leaves no doubt that rape myths dominate press reporting of sex crimes, which suggests that outmoded attitudes play a key role in American popular culture.

I prefer to substitute the term rape discourse for rape myth. The concept of discourse is useful for several reasons. First, discourse refers to a common sense way of talking, thinking, and representing a given subject. Second, discourse is not a single attitude, but a coherent system of thought represented in common sense notions and expressed through speech, standardized symbols, and rituals. Defining discourse in this fashion, Bruce Lincoln, Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, notes that discourse is one of "the chief means whereby social borders, hierarchies, institutional formations, and habituated patterns of behavior are both maintained and modified."(2)

This approach to the concept of discourse is similar to Roland Barthes' concept of mythologies.(3) Barthes defines mythologies as stories that transform half-truths and speculation into full-truths with the status of the natural, eternal, and universal. Like discourse, mythologies constitute a system of symbols supporting a political agenda that guarantees certain social relationships by reference to the eternal.

Because the rape myths listed by Benedict form a coherent system of thought that reinforces male dominance in the American sexual culture, the term...