This past weekend, in a happy coincidence for me, Columbia University hosted the first Take Back the Night National Conference. Since I’m the co-coordinator of Columbia and Barnard’s Take Back the Night (TBTN), I was pretty psyched about it.

The keynote speaker for the conference was Katie Koestner, the Board President of the TBTN Foundation and the first date rape survivor to speak out nationally about her experience (side note: this was just in the early ‘90s). Since hearing her speak, I’ve been thinking about the media depiction of victims and survivors of sexual assault and how that relates to Good Girl culture.

For starters, here are two images of Katie Koestner. On the left, what she looks like in real life. On the right, the way she looked on the cover of Time Magazine.

I know, right? It’s hard to believe that those two images depict the same person. As Katie told it, when she walked into her photo shoot, the first thing the photographer said was, “Oh no, you don’t look like a victim.” Katie’s a naturally smiley, blonde, petite woman—one might say, she’s the image of a Good Girl. So the wardrobe and make-up artists significantly shifted her appearance away from her Good Girl looks: in the photo, she is shrouded in the shadows and covered up by a dark grey sweater (though, as Katie noted, they of course asked her to twist her body in order to give her a nice waist-line). Interestingly, the Katie on the cover makes eye-contact the viewer—something Good Girls don’t typically do.

I’d bet that the Time Magazine photographers altered Katie’s appearance since Good Girls don’t get raped—especially not date raped. Because, according to the Good Girl rules, Good Girls don’t party and drink. Good Girls don’t wear low-cut shirts and tight-fitting skirts. Good Girls don’t invite their dates back to their dorm rooms. And Good Girls certainly don’t speak up about it afterwards. Time Magazine turned Katie into the image of a dark, brooding, and perhaps powerful activist because they couldn’t handle the fact that sexual assault occurs to women who look like Good Girls too.
Unfortunately, mainstream media depictions of sexual assault are often gruesome (think Law and Order: SVU) and create common myths about who gets raped and who does the raping. Combined with Good Girl culture, these myths make for a dangerous combo.

For example, according to Good Girl culture, girls and women are people pleasers who don’t ask for what they need. In a sexual situation, then, it follows that a Good Girls should focus on pleasing her partner. But when a woman is raped, oftentimes people immediately ask her, “why didn’t you say no?” and “what were you wearing?” It’s a Catch-22: women are encouraged to stay quiet and look sexually appealing but then are blamed for an assault when they don’t speak up (or don’t speak up “enough” or in the right way) or when they dress a certain way.

Additionally, survivors commonly feel shame after their assault, in part due to the fact that their survivor status keeps them from fitting into the Good Girl mold. So many survivors don’t talk about their experiences, which sometimes increases their personal suffering and certainly contributes to the national silence surrounding sexual assault.

Fortunately, more and more survivors are speaking up about sexual assault.  Take Rihanna, who in the past week has given interviews about her assault at the hands of ex-boyfriend Chris Brown. In interviews with Diane Sawyer, Rihanna coolly and calmly breaks down myths surrounding domestic violence through an honest discussion of her experiences. Rihanna, Katie Koestner, and all survivors who speak out help demonstrate that anyone can be sexually assaulted, regardless of gender, race, class, sexuality, or any other identity category.*  These stories help show that rape is never the fault of the survivor. These stories are breaking the silence. Perhaps these stories are breaking the curse of the Good Girl as well.

*Note: I do not mean to say that every survivor should become an anti-sexual assault activist, should tell their story on the national stage, or should do anything that makes them uncomfortable. Every survivor has his or her own unique healing process and deals with assault differently.  

Images courtesy of http://www.kakophone.com/kakorama/timebase/imagesSmall/j8cov1101910603.jpg and http://www.suu.edu/flightschool/images/content/katie_koestner.jpg