Anti-rape nail polish is a step forward — so let’s stop criticising it
Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock (or without the internet) for the past week, you’ll be aware by now of the US students who have created a nail varnish that promises to warn women if their drink is showing traces of Rohypnol.
Aimed at students (“All of us have been close to someone who has been through the terrible experience (of date rape)”, says North Caroline University inventor Ankesh Madan), the ‘Undercover Colours’ nail varnish changes colour when stirred in a drink that has been spiked with date rape drugs.
A lot has been said this week about the ethics of a nail varnish that might, depending on who you are and how likely you are to come across it, a) not factor in your night out in anyway whatsoever b) increase the scourge of victim blaming post-sexual assault or c) make you, your sister or your best friend realise that someone has slipped something nasty into your/their drink, and allow you to chuck it away /tell a bouncer/call the police/do whatever you see fit in that moment.
The last possibility, of course, is the only one that really matters, because if it allows just one person to realise that they’ve been spiked and get away from a potentially dangerous situation, then it has fully succeeded in its job.
Writing in Think Progress, Tara Culp-Ressler makes the victim blaming argument, worrying that “Any college students who don’t use the special polish could open themselves up to criticism for failing to do everything in their power to prevent rape.” Feministing dismisses the nail varnish because date rape drugs “are not used to facilitate sexual assault all that often”; alcohol is a more prevalent cause.
These points don’t sit too well with me, because I very much doubt that the first question post-rape would be whether the victim was wearing a particular brand of nail varnish, and it’s not really fair to focus on what a product doesn’t do, rather than what it does — which it has been very clear about.
This is not to say that victim blaming is not a very real and extremely dangerous social issue. The fact that the rape conviction rate in this country remains stubbornly low, and that victims are still routinely questioned about their clothing and how much they’d drunk, is something that our society, and those in the US and across the world, should be extremely ashamed of. Societal attitudes, above all else, need to change, and dramatically.
It’s the polemic nature of the conversation, though, that needs to alter in order for this to happen. Victim blaming in the context of rape and sexual assault is a heated issue, debate of which leads to some of the strongest and most unshakeable opinions that we’re likely to see voiced on blogs and social media platforms that are run by students.
Rape, victim blaming and general inequality are such vast and mind-blogglingly complex problems that the sheer scale of them means that small, potentially effective, practical solutions are always going to seem ineffectual and like they don’t go far enough. Such intensity of feeling means it can be difficult, with so much polemic flying around re feminism, sexual assault, date rape, consent, blurred lines, and so on, to see situations in the clear, context-free way in which they should be seen.
In this case, of course a nail varnish is not claiming to be the cure to a society that is still at war with sexual objectification, where lines between yes and no are often blurred and where large swathes of the population still gawk at Page 3 and think UniLad has a worthwhile content strategy.
What its makers have created, instead of a huge catch-all solution (we’ll be waiting in suspense for one of those) is a practical solution to a potential problem that many females (and males) are likely to face at some point. Because if you’ve left your drink with a friend whilst you wait for 10 minutes in a toilet queue, only to return to find them dancing metres away and paying no attention to your forlorn rum and coke, wouldn’t you like to check that no one has slipped you something you’d definitely rather not ingest? If you discovered that a date rape drug was in fact lurking in your drink, wouldn’t you be grateful that this nail varnish existed? Wouldn’t you be happy if a potential sexual assailant was caught because of it, and punished, and others heard about how he was caught and were deterred from slipping a roofie too?
Yes, of course you would. And if we’re willing to cut through the bullshit, this should really be all the matters.
This invention is practical and is likely to be useful in the occasional real life situation, and those enraged by the suggestion of it are thinking much longer term and in a much more theoretical way than is required for this particular product.
‘Stop rape’ is a mammoth, theoretical demand, with no clear solution. And mammoth, theoretical issues are often solved by small groups of individuals (suffragettes, suffragists, No More Page 3 campaigners, students armed with anti-rape devices) who through their actions stir up public anger, which in turn catches the media’s attention, drives debate forward, places important issues in the spotlight, deters predators and eventually works to drive forward change.
That, obviously, is what we all want — so let’s stop squabbling right now, and remind ourselves once again that we are all on the same side.
Originally published at https://www.thenationalstudent.com.
