Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (2 page)

Read Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape Online

Authors: Susan Brownmiller

A Personal Statement

i.
The Mass Psychology of Rape: An Introduction

2.
In
the Beginning Was the Law

War
World War I World War II Bangladesh Vietnam
Riots, Pogroms and Revolutions The American Revolution Pogroms
The Mormon Persecutions
Mob Violence Against Blacks: The KKK Mob Violence Against Whites: The Congo
Two Studies in American History Indians
Slavery
Addendum: The Cliometricians
The Police-Blotter Rapist
Pairs, Groups and Gangs
"Gratuitous Acts, Extravagant Defilements" Rape-Murder
A Question of Race
Power: Institution and Authority

Prison Rape: The Homosexual Experience

114

115

121

124

126

132

140

153

170

174

187

194

197

210

256

257

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CONTENTS

Police Rape

The Sexual Abuse of Children

The Myth of the Heroic Rapist
20.
Victims: The Setting
The Conscious Rape Fantasy The Beautiful Victim
"Blonde Ex-Showgirl Slain in Hotel Suite" Confessions: "He Made Me Do
It!"
11.
Victims: The Crime
12.
Women Fight Back
Acknowledgments Source
N
ates Index
268
271
283
309
322
333
336
341
3
47
375
405
409
448
A PERSONAL STATEMENT
The question most of ten asked of me while I was writing this book was short, direct and irritating: HHave you ever been raped?"
My answer was equally direct: HNo."
This exchange, repeated many times in many places, seemed to satisfy neither the questioner nor me. When I thought about it, I decided that there were differing motivations on the part of my inter locutors. For some, I concluded, the question was a double-edged cre dentials challenge:
If
you're not a criminologist or a victim, then who are you? (Why wasn't it enough that I was a writer onto an interesting sub ject, I wonder.) For others, I suspected, a curious twist of logic lay be hind the question. A woman who chooses to write about rape probably has a dark personal reason, a lurid secret, a history of real or imagined abuse, a trauma back there somewhere, a fixation, a Bad Experience that has permanently warped her or instilled in her the compulsion to Tell the World.
I hate to disappoint, but the answer is still HNo." I may have been shortchanged here and there, but I have never been coerced. Yet there did come a time when I knew with certainty that I had to write a book about rape, and I proceeded to do it with more tenacity and grueling methodical effort than I have ever applied to any other project in my life. The matching up of author with subject matter is a mysterious process.
I could point with professional detachment to the fact that rape has been a theme of mine in print since i968 when I wrote a piece for a magazine about an interracial rape case with political ramifications. I could argue forcefully that years ago, before the current interest, I had staked out the territory. But this would be more than slightly disin-
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A PERSONAL STATEMENf
genuous. For when I wrote about rape for that magazine, a magazine that prides itself, incidentally, on being "the magazine for men," and one which at the time I was proud to be writing for, I wrote the story from the perspective of a woman who viewed a rape case with suspicion. And I would have to say today that this suspicion, this harsh "objectivity," was what made my story printable. Although I conducted scores of inter views for that article, I did not seek out nor did I attempt to speak with the victim. I felt no kinship with her, nor did I admit, publicly or pri vately, that what had happened to her could
on any level
happen to me. I have always considered myself a strong woman, although I under stand that the strength I possess is a matter of style and, secretly, of theat rical bravura. I am combative, wary and verbally aggressive. I like to think I know my own mind, and I like to think I act on my principles. This has led me, at times, to work harder at politics than at writing. Knowing my own mind, I also know that a good mind must be flexible and open to change. The older I get the more I realize that there are few absolutes
and many perspectives.
The views I used to hold about rape were compatible with the kinds of causes, people and ideas I identified with genera11y: the civil rights movement, defense lawyer heroics, and psychologic sympathy for the accused. I saw no need to re-examine my views since people I respected espoused them, and since they were sufficiently intricate and conspiratorial to appeal to my sense of radical drama. That these attitudes might be anti-female never occurred to me.
It
also did not occur to me that accep tance of these attitudes gave me a feeling of security I needed: it can't happen here.
And so, when a group of my women friends discussed rape one eve ning in the fall of
1970,
I fairly shrieked in dismay. I knew what rape was, and what it wasn't. Rape was a sex crime, a product of a diseased, deranged mind. Rape wasn't a feminist issue, rape was . . . well, what was it? At any rate, I certainly knew something about rape victims! The women's movement had nothing in common with rape victims. Victims of rape were . . . well, what were they? Who were they?
I learned that evening, and on many other evenings and long after noons, that victims of rape could be women I knew-women who, when their turn came to speak, quietly articulated their own experiences. Women who understood their victimization whereas I understood only that it had not happened to me-and resisted the idea that it could. I learned that in ways I preferred to deny the threat of rape had profoundly affected my life.
I didn't learn easily. I argued, confronted, scoffed and denied. To placate some of the others, I went along with the idea of a public rape
A PERSONAL STATEMENT
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speak-out. Will we really get women to stand up and testify, I wondered, and what will they come up with? (What they came up with blew my mind.) Out of a sense of "let's get on with it," I proposed a rape con ference. Conferences are not like personal speak-outs. Conferences re quire objective information, statistics, research and study. What will we be able to come up with, I wondered. The conference, which I had pro posed out of restlessness and participated in only marginally, as a sort of senior planning consultant, proved to be my moment of revelation. There, in a high school auditorium, I finally confronted my own fears, my own past, my own intellectual defenses. Something important and frightening to contemplate had been left out of my educationa way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength, and at power. Never one to acknowledge my vulnerability, I found myself forced by my sisters in feminism to look it squarely in the eye.
I wrote this book because I am a woman who changed her mind about rape.
New York City February i975

SUSAN BROWNMILLER
1
The Mass Psychology of Rape: An Introduction
Kraff t-Ebing, who pioneered in the study of sexual dis orders, had little to say about rape. His famous Psychopathia Sex
ualis
gives amazingly short shrif t to the act and its doers. He had it on good authority, he informed his readers, that most rapists were degenerate, imbecilic men. Having made that sweeping general ization, Krafft-Ebing washed his hands of the whole affair and turned with relish to the frotteurs and fetishists of normal intelli gence who tickled his fancy.
Sigmund Freud, whose major works followed Krafft-Ebing's by twenty to forty years, was also struck dumb by the subject of rape. We can search his writings in vain for a quotable quote, an analysis, a perception. The father of psychoanalysis, who invented the concept of the primacy of the penis, was never motivated, as far as we know, to explore the real-life deployment of the penis as weapon. What the master ignored, the disciples tended to ignore as well. Alfred Adler does not mention rape, despite his full awareness of the historic power struggle between men and women. Jung refers to rape only in the most obscure manner, a glancing refer ence in some of his mythological interpretations. Helene Deutsch and Karen Horney, each from a differing perspective, grasped at the female fear of rape, and at the feminine fantasy, but as women who did not dare to presume, they turned a blind eye to the male and female reality.
And the great socialist theoreticians Marx and Engels and
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AGAINST OUR WILL
their many confreres and disciples who developed the theory of class oppression and put words like "exploitation" into the every day vocabulary, they, too, were strangely silent about rape, unable to fit it into their economic constructs. Among them only August Behel tried to grasp' at its historic importance, its role in the very formulation of class, private property and the means of production. In Woman Under Socialism Behel used his imagination to specu late briefly about the prehistoric tribal fights for land, cattle and labor power within an acceptable Marxist analysis: "There arose the need of labor power to cultivate the ground. The more numerous these powers, all the greater was the wealth in products and herds. These struggles led first to the rape of women, later to the enslaving of conquered men. The women became laborers and objects of pleasure for the conqueror; their males became slaves." He didn't get it quite right, making the rape of women secondary to man's search for labor, but it was a flash of revelation and one that Engels did not achieve in his Origin of the Family. But Behel was more at ease researching the wages and conditions of working women in German factories, and that is where his energies went.
It
was the half-crazed genius Wilhelm Reich, consumed with rage in equal parts toward Hitler, Marx and Freud, who briefly entertained the vision of a "masculine ideology of rape." The phrase hangs there in the opening chapter of
The
Sexual
Revolu
tion, begging for further interpretation. But it was not forthcom ing. The anguished mind was in too great a state of disarray. A political analysis of rape would have required more treachery toward his own immutable gender than even Wilhelm Reich could muster.
And so it remained for the latter-day feminists, free at last from the strictures that forbade us to look at male sexuality, to discover the truth and meaning in our own victimization. Critical to our study is the recognition that rape has a history, and tha t through the tools of historical analysis we may learn what we need to know about our current condition.
No zoologist, as far as I know, has ever observed that animals rape in their natural habitat, the wild. Sex in the animal world, including those species that are our closest relations, the primates, is more properly called "mating," and it is cyclical activity set off by biologic signals the female puts out. Mating is initiated and "con-
THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF RAPE: AN INTRODUCTION
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trolled," it would seem, by the female estrous cycle. When the female of the species periodically goes into heat, giving off obvious physical signs, she is ready and eager for copulation and the male becomes interested. At other times there is simply no interest, and no mating.
Jane Goodall, studying her wild chimpanzees at the Combe Stream reserve, noted that the chimps, male and female, were "very promiscuous, but this does not mean that every female will accept every male that courts her." She recorded her observations of one female in heat, who showed the telltale pink swelling of her genital area, who nevertheless displayed an aversion to one particular male who pursued her. "Though he once shook her out of the tree in which she had sought refuge, we never saw him actually 'rape' her," Goodall wrote, adding, however, "Nonetheless, quite of ten he managed to get hi way through dogged persistence." Another student of animal behavior, Leonard Williams, has stated categori cally, "The male monkey cannot in fact mate with the female without her invitation and willingness to cooperate. In monkey society there is no such thing as rape, prostitution, or even passive consent."
Zoologists for the most part have been reticent on the subject of rape. It has not been, for them, an important scientific question. But we do know that human beings are different. Copulation in our species can occur 365 days of the year; it is not controlled by the female estrous cycle. We females of the human species do not "go pink." The call of estrus and the telltale signs, both visual and olfactory, are absent from our mating procedures, lost perhaps in the evolutionary shuffle. In their place, as a mark of our civilization, we have evolved a complex system of psychological signs and urges, and a complex structure of pleasure. Our call to sex occurs in the head, and the act is not necessarily linked, as it is with animals, to Mother Nature's pattern
of
procreation. Without a biologically determined mating season,
a
human male can evince sexual inter est in a human female at any time he pleases, and his psychologic urge is not dependent in the slightest on her biologic readiness or receptivity. What it
all
boils down to is that the human male can rape.
Man's structural capacity to rape and woman's corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our
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AGAINST OUR WILL
sexes as the primal act of sex itself . Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking to gether of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation
.
nor rape as we know it. Anatomically one might want to improve on the design of nature, but such speculation appears to my mind as unrealistic. The human sex act accomplishes its historic purpose of generation of the species and it also affords some intimacy and pleasure. I have no basic quarrel with the pro cedure. But, nevertheless, we cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it. Later, much later, under certain circumstances they even came to con sider rape a crime.
In the violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man, some woman somewhere had a prescient vision of her right to her own physical integrity, and in my mind's eye I can picture her fighting like hell to preserve it. Af ter a thunderbolt of recognition that this particular incarnation of hairy, two-legged hominid was not the Homo sapiens with whom she would like to freely join parts, it might have been she, and not some man, who picked up the first stone and hurled it. How surprised he must have been, and what an unexpected battle must have taken place. Fleet of foot and spirited, she would have kicked, bitten, pushed and run,
but
she
could
not retaliate in kind.
The dim perception that had entered prehistoric woman's consciousness must have had an equal but opposite reaction in the mind of her male assailant. For if the first rape was an unexpected battle founded on the first woman's ref usal, the second rape was indubitably planned. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men. This accomplished, rape became not only a male prerogative, but man's basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.