Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (3 page)

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of

THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF RAPE: AN INTRODUCTION
I
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prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function.
It
is nothing more or less than a con scious process of intimidation by which all men keep all
women
in a state of fear.

2

In the Beginning

Was
the
Law

From the humblest beginnings of the social order based on a primitive system of retaliatory force-the
lex
talionis: an eye for an eye-woman was unequal before the law. By anatomical fiat the inescapable construction of their genital organs-the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey. Not only might the female be subjected at will to a thoroughly detestable physical conquest from which there could be no retaliation in kind-a rape for a rape-but the consequences of such a brutal struggle might be death or injury, not to mention im pregnation and the birth of a dependent child.

One possibility, and one possibility alone, was available to woman. Those of her own sex whom she might call to her aid were more of ten than not smaller and weaker than her male attackers. More critical, they lacked the basic physical wherewithal for puni tive vengeance; at best they could maintain only a limited defensive action. But among those creatures who were her predators,
.
I

some might serve as her chosen protectors. Perhaps it was thus that
I

the risky bargain was struck. Female fear of an open season of rape, and not a natural inclination toward monogamy, motherhood or love, was probably the single causative factor in the original subjugation of woman by man, the most important key to her historic dependence, her domestication by protective mating.

Once the male took title to a specific female body, and surely for him this was a great sexual convenience as well as a testament

16

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LA
w
I
17

to his warring stature, he had to assume the burden of fighting off all other potential attackers, or scare them off by the retaliatory threat of raping
their
women. But the price of woman's protection
by
some
men
against an abuse
by
others was steep. Disappointed and disillusioned by the inherent female incapacity to protect, she became estranged in a very real sense from other females, a prob lem that haunts the social organization of women to this very day. And those who did assume the historic burden of her protecti
_
on later formalized as husband, father, brother, clan-extracted more than a pound of flesh. They reduced her status to that of chattel. The historic price of woman's protection by man against man was the imposition of chastity and monogamy. A crime committed against her body became a crime against the male estate.

The earliest form of permanent, protective conjugal relation ship, the accommodation called mating that we now know as mar riage, appears to have been institutionalized by the male's forcible abduction and rape of the female. No quaint formality, bride cap ture, as it came to be known, was a very real struggle: a male took title to a female, staked a claim to her body, as it were, by an act of violence. Forcible seizure was a perfectly acceptable way-to men-of acquiring women, and it existed in England as late as the fif teenth century. Eleanor of Aquitaine, according to a biographer, lived her early life in terror of being "rapt" by a vassal who might through appropriation of her body gain title to her considerable property. Bride capture exists to this day in the rain forests of the Philippines, where the Tasadays were recently discovered to be plying their Stone Age civilization. Remnants of the philosophy of forcible abduction and marriage still influence the social mores of rural Sicily and parts of Africa. A proverb of the exogamous Bantu- . speaking Gusiis of southwest Kenya goes "Those whom we marry are those whom we fight."

It seems eminently sensible to hypothesize that man's violent capture and rape of the female led first to the establishment of a rudimentary mate-protectorate and then sometime later to the full blown male solidification of power, the patriarchy. As the first permanent acquisition of man, his first piece of real property, woman was, in fact, the original building block, the cornerstone, of the "house of the father." Man's forcible extension of his bound aries to his mate and later to their offspring was the beginning of his concept of ownership. Concepts of hierarchy, slavery and

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I
AGAINST OUR WILL

private property flowed from, and could only be predicated upon, the initial subjugation of woman.

A female definition of rape can be contained in a single sen tence.
If
a woman chooses not to have intercourse with a specific man and the man chooses to proceed against her will, that is a criminal act of rape. Through no fault of woman, this is not and never has been the legal definition. The ancient patriarchs who came together to write their early covenants had used the rape of women to forge their own male power-how then could they see rape as a crime of man against woman? Women were wholly owned subsidiaries and not independent beings. Rape could not be envisioned as a matter of female consent or refusal; nor could a definition acceptable to males be based on a male-female under standing of a female's right to her bodily integrity. Rape entered the law through the back door, as it were, as a property crime of inan against man. Woman, of course, was viewed as the property. Ancient Babylonian and Mosaic law was codified on tablets centuries af ter the rise of formal tribal hierarchies and the perma nent settlements known as city-states. Slavery, private property and the subjugation of women were facts of life, and the earliest writ ten law that has come down to us reflects this stratified life. Written law in its origin was a solemn compact among men of property, designed to protect their own male interests by a civilized exchange of goods or silver in place of force wherever possible. The capture of females by force remained perfectly acceptable outside the tribe or city as one of the ready fruits of warfare, but clearly within the social order such a happenstance would lead to chaos. A payment of money to the father of the house was a much more civilized and less dangerous way of acquiring a wife. And so the bride price was codified, at fif ty pieces of silver. By this circuitous route the first concept of criminal rape sneaked its tortuous way into man's definition of law. Criminal rape, as a patriarchal father saw it, was a violation of the new way of doing business.
It
was, in a

phrase, the thef t of virginity, an embezzlement of his daughter's fair price on the market.

About four thousand years ago the Code of
.
Hammurabi, chipped on a seven-foot column of diorite stone, made plain by its omissions that a female was allowed no independent status under Babylonian law. She was either a betrothed virgin, living in the house of her father, or else she was somebody's lawfully wedded

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LAW
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wife and lived in the house of her husband. According to Ham murabi, a man was to be seized and slain if he raped a betrothed virgin, but the victimized girl was considered guiltless. As an inter esting indication of the powers and rights of patriarchs over their female dependents, Hammurabi decreed that a man who "knew" his own daughter ( i.e., committed incest ) was merely banished from the walls of the city. A married woman who had the misfor tune to get raped in Babylon had to share the blame equally with her attacker. Regardless of how the incident occurred, the crime was labeled adultery and both
partici pants
were bound and thrown into the river. Appeal from such stern justice is revealing. A hus band was permitted to pull his wife from the water if he so desired;