“American Rape Culture: The Circulation of Affect, Victim-Blaming, and Cyborg Vaginas” in Rape Culture 10: Programming Change, eds. Geraldine Cannon Becker and Angel Dionne (Ontario: Demeter Press, 2020).

“Have you ever been out walking at night alone wishing you could feel safer? […] We want to provide a product that will make women and girls feel safer when out on a first date, or a night of clubbing, taking an evening run, travelling in another country, or other potentially risky situations. Our product line provides a layer of protection in case of assault. It is, in fact, anti-rape-wear” (IndieGoGo 2013). Thus begins the fundraising video for the new bionic undies of AR-Wear, a company, which believes that fitting women and girls with their products will “provide a substantial barrier to sexual assault.”

This chapter uses AR-Wear’s “Chastity Belt” to ground a discussion of American culture’s commodified, inscribed, omnipresent rape-fear; its role in the production of affect, and self-regulation; and the countless, myths about rape, rapists, and sexual violence. Through the works on affect of Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed, I will probe how rape-fear is promulgated through affective means, and trace the way in which fear-of-rape can cause rape; and the debilitating effect this has on women. 

The present fear of future violence created by this not-yet-extant, but all too present terror produces a climate in which women are incapable of moving though the world uninhibited. For Sara Ahmed “the object of fear is not simply before us, or in front of us, but impresses upon us in the present, as an anticipated pain in the future” (Ahmed 2004, 65).  Essentially, the fear of future pain exists as present terror.