A Man and His Red-Letter Campaign Against Rape

What Charles Hall wanted to do after a good friend was nearly raped by a man she met at Hall’s 30th birthday party was find the guy and smash his head in.

What Charles Hall actually did, however, is something for which he can feel a lot more pride: He created, on his own time with his own cash, a hip, in-your-face anti-rape campaign that he hopes to unleash on the streets of Los Angeles.

People strolling around the city may soon encounter small black stickers with messages in red. The stickers, many of which are too graphic for this space, will offer thoughts such as:

Rape. The crime of forcibly having sexual intercourse with a person who has not consented.

Or:

Rape . What is it about having the strength the power and the muscle to force yourself into a woman against her will that makes you feel good?

And:

Rape. Just because she was afraid to kick scream bite fight cry scr a tch doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped.

Last year, before his work brought him from New York to California, Hall and his friends managed to post some 30,000 of the stickers around Manhattan and Brooklyn. In taxi cabs, in bathrooms, on bus stops and signs, they slapped up the provocative lines. Hall’s most potent sticker was one he saved for sexually explicit fashion ads:

This is not an invitation to rape me.

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I met Hall at Chiat/Day’s dauntingly cool Venice office, where fabulously attractive advertising people walk around with cell phones sprouting from their ears, and the woman who answers the phones is not a receptionist, but a “concierge.”

It’s clearly a place where fine art and crass commerce converge, not the sort of environment that puts one in mind of life’s more brutal aspects.

It is where Hall works as a creative director, assigned to a car account, and it is home base for his anti-rape campaign. The agency, he says, has been supportive and found a vendor to print 15,000 of the stickers.

Besides the stickers, Hall has created posters out of typical fashion ad images: the backside of a woman in a very short dress, a close-up of cleavage, a bare midriff. Where the eye lingers--top of thighs, V of breasts, belly button--Hall’s signature phrase appears again:

This is not an invitation to rape me.

Although Hall doesn’t consider himself “political,” his friend’s near-rape, he said, was a moment of truth.

“It made me confront my feelings about rape,” Hall said. “I had never been this close. What if it happened to my girlfriend, my cousin, my mother?

“The more I thought about it, I realized the perception is that when a woman is raped, she deserves it, she wants it, she is asking for it. And that sexy clothing is like an invitation.”

He’s dead right.

I recall the case of a Florida man who was acquitted of rape several years ago because his victim wore a short skirt and no underpants. So what if she said no, said the jurors, her clothes screamed do me .

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A few days after Hall and I spoke, I happened to pick up the August issue of YM, a magazine aimed at teen girls. (At least that is the demographic I infer from articles such as “My Parents Would Kill Me If They Knew . . . “ and “Will You Be a Back-to-School Babe?” and “What Is It About Surfers That Girls Dig So Much?”)

YM’s new issue contains the latest print campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans. It is a new low in fashion advertising. One of the photos is--incredibly--a pullout centerfold.

Calvin’s Miss August, who looks about 16, sprawls with an arched back and a mess of blond hair across a plum carpet. She wears a denim mini skirt and a ribbed white undershirt. Her midriff is bare. Her skirt is hiked so far up and her legs are splayed so far apart that the crotch of her white panties is displayed.

I guarantee you that if this young woman were raped while wearing this outfit, prosecutors would be hard-pressed to find a jury willing to convict.

The double cultural messages reign supreme: If you want to be considered attractive, you must dress like a fashion ad. But God help you if you are raped in that slutty garb.

I have to hope that people like Hall can make a difference, and I give him credit for instinctively targeting the part of the rape equation that is often overlooked in our rush to figure out what the victim did wrong. His efforts are aimed squarely at men.

Rape, says the sticker. If a man can’t understand the horror of being violated perhaps he should experience the feeling of being penetrated. * Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.