if sexually deviant, they are always ready to have sex, and therefore cannot say no. They are impossible to rape in this argument because they are always willing to have sex.
There are many problems with this line of argument and all of them require conflation and avoidance to build a seemingly logical argument. In the minds of many, prostitution is about excessive, deviant sex, not a paid service. Consequently, patriarchal ideas about women who have uncontained sex spill over into readings of women sex workers. This disapproval of women who have ‘deviant’ sex also occludes the difficult and sometimes coercive routes to prostitution. Failure to see sex work/prostitution as work means that it is denied the basic assumptions we accord to all other paid services: choice over whom to transact with, thereby conflating sex for money/pleasure and rape. Sex workers/prostitutes are deemed impossible to rape because they are constructed as always willing to have sex with anybody. They cannot say no. Furthermore, because they are deviant and criminalised, they are not reliable witnesses.
In many societies in the world, religion and law insist that a man is entitled to sex with his wife, and that even when this is forced sex, it cannot be rape. This entitlement, often called ‘conjugal rights’ is also loaded with assumptions about women’s sexual appetites, control of their own bodies and the proper place for heterosexual sex. Just as women with sexual appetites that do not conform to ideal patriarchal femininity are policed and sometimes stigmatised, women who will not have sex in marriage are faulted. If men are entitled to ‘conjugal rights’, then women owe their husbands sex. Fortunately, South African law recognises marital rape, but it is not free from the difficulties that haunt all other categories of rape.
Credibility is therefore already in question when a sex worker/prostitute or wife reports rape.
Credibility also relies very heavily on the believability of who she says raped her. The accused has to fall into a category of potential rapist; strangers, poor men, Black men, socially inept men are seen as potential rapists. Powerful, popular, successful men are often excluded from the category of potential rapist.
This is why when women accuse powerful, famous and popular men of rape, so many people find this unbelievable even if they have no personal relationship with either accused rapist or the woman laying the charge. This was certainly the case with the Jacob Zuma trial, since people who admired Zuma often could not reconcile the idea of the political figure that they had in their heads with what Khwezi was accusing him of. Before this, the same was evident in some public responses to Makhaya Ntini and after this to Zwelinzima Vavi.
When South African cricketer Makhaya Ntini was convicted of raping twenty-two-year-old Nomangezi Matokazi, and later freed on appeal, she was accused of being part of a plot to bring him down. He was powerful and at the top of his cricketing game, a hero, and therefore assumed to have access to any number of women sex partners. She was his opposite: a student who worked as a domestic worker. In a world where various idioms declare that the more affluent the man, the higher his capacity to attract women, her narrative did not make sense. Women ‘like her’ are supposed to find ‘men like him’ irresistible.
In “The agony of a hero’s victim” – her interview published in City Press, where she wanted to be named and photographed, hence my decision to name her here – Ms Matokazi demonstrated keen awareness of what determined whether strangers believed her or not, when she said:
I want those who do not believe me to hear my whole story. My story is that Ntini raped me. Some people think I was sent by Boers to accuse Ntini of rape so he could be left out of the cricket team. That is not true. I don’t want any of his money. All I want is for justice to be done and for him to be sent to jail for what he has done to me. I have lost my job and am no longer studying. My mother is on a farm in Idutywa with no one to support her. The way things are going with things getting lost [the investigating officers lost her notebooks], it looks like Ntini will win the case. There is nothing I can do. I don’t trust men any longer. One can never tell what their intentions are. I trusted Ntini and look what he did to me. I never thought he would do this.
Contrary to the accusations that she has manufactured a rape tale for money, Matokazi declares her disinterest in his money; she has not been paid by any others for her testimony. Rather than enrichment, her life has been disrupted. She is interested only in a form of justice as acknowledgement of the harm inflicted on her.
Ntini is an over-achiever, arguably one of South Africa’s greatest cricketers ever. He is easy to admire and often appears charming in interviews. In the same interview, Matokazi speaks of how he would often be seen playing with children, had always been nice and so she was not taken aback when he offered to drive her to the shops in the rain. It was an act of kindness that was consistent with her experience of him.
Fast bowler extraordinaire, Ntini is a Black cricketer in the highly racialised South African sports scene, one of the pioneers who exceeded our expectations. He is the young man we were rooting for and who was making us proud, but also a young man we had grown protective of because of the usual racist narrative that trivialises Black achievement.
It was therefore ‘easy’ for many to immediately jump to his defence, and to accuse Matokazi of being for sale. It was equally easy for racists who wanted Ntini left out of the cricket team because they are opposed to transformation in South African sport to believe Ntini capable of rape. Interestingly, although these two positions seem at odds, they also have something very significant in common: neither one is interested in Matokazi’s experience. Her charge simply confirms pre-existing stances. For the pro-Ntini camp, her testimony offers another barrier for him to be supported and one that he has to overcome. For the racists, it confirms pre-existing stereotypes of Black men’s bestiality which can be brought out to deligitimise his sporting prowess.
Both these narratives are directly confronted in her interview. Bennett shows that while what makes a story plausible often relies on stereotypes about the accused rapist, stereotypes about the group to which a survivor belongs very often work against her believability (credibility). In the examples above, and because people continue to think about rape as inappropriate sex, rather than as violence, powerful, popular men are not potential rapists because they have a large pool of willing, available, obligation-free sex. Gender talk is often peppered with assertions that members of this group do not need to rape; they do not need to force anyone to have sex with them when they have so many more options. For racists, the stereotype of the Black man as rapist makes Matokazi’s story plausible.
Yet, there is another way to understand the relationships of powerful men to rape. If all men already possess patriarchal power, and can therefore choose to rape, then powerful men assume the position of supermen. Supermen’s unfettered access to many anonymous women sexual partners can enhance the sense of entitlement to women’s bodies and therefore resorting to violence to forcibly access it. Supermen know that many will come to their defence against any such allegations, and that their supporters will compare the woman’s social standing with the man’s and, finding her wanting, will ask “if he can have anyone he likes, why would he force you of all people?” This is an impossible question to answer.
Nobody wins against a hero.
Indeed, even in cases where various women emerge to accuse the same popular man of rape, many will prefer to pontificate over possible conspiracies than pay attention to the mounting evidence.
Credibility, then, continues to be a difficult issue for rape complainants. Conventional gender talk seeks to either hold a survivor responsible for her own rape or requires that she can tell a story that shows her total innocence. Innocence is almost impossible to prove, especially for adults. To be innocent, she needs to not be an adult woman. Bennett argues a woman narrating her rape has to create her own social credibility in ways that are oxymoronic: presenting a story that harmonises with notions of the ‘typical’ rape in her society and demonstrating levels of steadiness in her narrative that
