I think what she is saying is not that rape isn’t violent, but that probably most women are carrying experiences which were rape, but which do not get talked about, or reported, because they were not violent in the obvious sense, they were not traumatic, don’t cause long term harm. These crimes don’t get discussed because there is a narrative that says that rape is traumatic and awful, which silences the women for whom the experience was not. These women therefore don’t report the crime, the men get to continue acting this way with other women and are never challenged, never stopped. So rape continues.
It’s happened to me twice, and GG is right, it felt more like bad sex than the violent thing that I had been taught to recognise as rape. So I did nothing about it. And no doubt the men have continued to act in that way towards the women they date and meet in bars, since no one called them on it. I’m fairly sure neither of them would have thought they were raping me, because they too have heard the narrative of rape as a necessarily violent thing. What they did was have sex with their girlfriend when she was asleep, or cross the line from persuading to overruling. And that needs to stop, as it will be traumatic for some of the women it happens to. But our current discourse and law doesn’t provide a space for dealing with this.
I’ve thought it for a long time, but been too scared to voice it, as other women will shout me down for minimising rape, or their experiences. Which is not my intent. All I want is to talk about my experiences and feelings, which I’m sure are not rare. This is why I love Germaine Greer. I may not always agree with her but she is the bravest woman. She says what she thinks, without worrying about consequences, and as a result makes us all think, and causes real change in the world.