Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (58 page)

By pitting white women against black men in their effort to alert the nation to the extra punishment wreaked on blacks for a case of interracial rape, lef tists and liberals with a defense-lawyer mentality drove a wedge between two movements for human rights and today we are still struggling to overcome this historic legacy. Yet the similarities between the types of oppression suffered by blacks and women, and heaped upon black women, are more im pressive than the antagonisms between us. As I have stated else where, the rapist performs a myrmidon function for all men by keeping all women in a thrall of anxiety and fear. Rape is to women as lynching was to blacks: the ultimate physical threat by which all men keep all women in a state of psychological intimi dation.

Women have been raped by men, most often by gangs of men, for many of the same reasons that blacks were lynched by gangs of whites: as group punishment for being uppity, for getting out of line, for failing to recognize "one's place," for· assuming sexual freedoms, or for behavior no more provocative than walking

A QUESTION OF RACE
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and presenting a convenient, isolated target for group hatred and rage. Castration, the traditional coup de grace of
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a lynching, has
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its

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  counterpart in the gratuitous acts of defilement that often acconi
  

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  pany a rape, the stick rammed up the vagina, the attempt to
  

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  annihilate
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  the sexual cote. •
  

  History is never "behind" us, and we must not forget how the white man has used the rape of "his" women as an excuse to act against black men. But today the incidence of actual rape com bined with the looming spectre of the rapist in the mind's eye, and in particular the mythified spectre of the black man as rapist to which the black man in the name of his manhood now contributes, must be understood as a control mechanism against the freedom, mobility and aspirations of all women, white and black. The cross roads of racism and sexism had to be a violent meeting place. There is no use pretending it doesn't exist.
  

  

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  Power:
  

  Institution and Authority
  

  

  All rape is an exercise in pwer, but some rapists have an edge that is more than physical. They operate within an institution-
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  alized setting that works to their advantage and in which a victim has little chance to redress her grievancet Rape in slavery and rape in wartime are two such examples. But rapists may also operate
  ·
  within an emotional setting or within a dependent relationship that
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  provides a hierarchical, authoritarian structure of its own that weakens a victim's resistance, distorts her perspective and confounds her will: A therapist who suggests to his patient that the solution to her problem of frigidity lies in having sex with him is practicing rape upon a vulnerable victim, although the patient may be slow to discover that she has been "had," and a court of law would not recognize such emotional coercion as a forcible act.
  

  Similarly the glamour attached to cultural heroes, such as a movie star, sports figure, rock singer or respected-man-in-the community, provides a psychologic edge that lessens the need for physical coercion until it is too late for the victim to recognize her predicament. Cases of celebrity rape pop up in the news from time
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  to time and usually vanish again with immoderate speed. These cases are "tainted" from several angles: the glamour that emotion ally disarmed the unwitting or foolish victim ( and the fact that a victim has been foolish should not diminish the import of the offender's crime; many robbery and con-game victims are also fool ish and unwitting) also acts as a shield in the rapist's defense—
  

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  POWER: INSTITUTION AND AUTHORITY
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  police and prosecutors have little enthusiasm for ruining reputa tions over a charge of rape.
  

  Date rapes and rapes by men who have had prior relationships with their victims also contain ele
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  ments
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  ;of coercive.tatithori that militates against decisive resistance. Here the "authority" takes the form of expected behavior. In a dating situation an aggressor may press his advantage to the point where pleasantness quickly turns to unpleasantness and more than the woman bargained for, yet social propriety and the strictures of conventional female behavior that dictate politeness and femininity demand that the female gracefully endure, or wriggle away if she can, but a direct confron tation falls outside of the behavioral norms. These are the cases about which the police are wont to say, "She changed her mind af terward," with no recognition that it was only afterward that she dared pull herself together and face up to the fact that she had truly been raped.
  

  Date rapes look especially bad for the victim in court, if they ever get to court, nor do they look good on paper. The intangibles of victim behavior (which I deal with in my "Victims" section ) present a poor case. Upon hearing such cases, even with my femi nist perspective, I of ten feel like shouting "Idiot, why didn't you see the warning signs earlier?" But that, of course, is precisely the point. As debatable as the case may appear when one tries to apply objective standards, it is the
  subjective
  behavioral factors that may determine a rape.
  

  In this chapter I will deal only with certain objective condi tions that are institutionalized or so overwhelmingly authority ridden as to be incontestable. These are prison rapes and rapes within juvenile correctional facilities, which provide the statistical bulk of all homoexual rapes, and rape or molestation of children by adults, of ten within the family. Because of its Kafkaesque qual ity-the ultimate nightmare of rape by the ultimate authority charged with the duty of protection-the small incidence of rape by policemen that has come to public light also deserves mention.
  

  

  PRISON RAPE: THE HOMOSEXUAL EXPERIENCE
  

  The prison movie Fortune and Men's Eyes portrays the ideo logical evolution of Smitty, an attractive heterosexual youth. Be-
  

  

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  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  cause of his tensile good looks Smitty has been forcibly raped by King Rocco-Rocky, who turns the unhappy victim into his prison "girl." There are certain advantages to being the girl of a punk like Rocky, small favors of food, cigarettes, dope and protection from other predatory males, but Smitty wants desperately to break out of his sexual bondage. One day in the showers, af ter Rocky has told him to go get the Vaseline, the prelude to anal penetration, Smitty turns on his tormentor. Summoning all his courage, he manages to beat down Rocky in a wet and steaming brawl. When the other inmates learn what has happened, Rocky is dethroned and Smitty becomes the acknowledged king of the cellblock. Smitty's first act as victor is to command his gentle friend and cellmate, Jan-Mona, to smear himself with the Vaseline. Bewildered, Jan-Mona pleads, "You have power now, Smitty-do you need sex, too?" But Smitty does "need sex." How else within the confines of prison can he exercise his hard-won power?
  

  It is finally being acknowledged that one of the main problems of prison life is the assault and rape of other inmates by their fellow men. Shrouded in secrecy and misinformation, so-called homo sexual "abuse" in prison was formerly thought to be symptomatic of the deranged brutality of a few prison guards or an "infection" spread throughout a cellblock by a certain number of avowed homosexuals within the prison population. More information and a relatively enlightened modern perspective has drastically altered this old-fashioned view: Prison rape is generally seen today for what. it is: an acting out of power roles within an all-male, authoritarian environment in which the younger, weaker inmate, usually a first offender; is forced to play the role that in the outside world is assigned to women.dn a wicked twist of irony, it is of ten the avowedly homosexual youths, because of their "feminine" man nerisms and pariah status, who fall victim to the most brutal of prison gang rapes-and when prison authorities segregate homo sexuals these days, as they do in the New York City Tombs, it is for their own protection The other favored category of inmate who is earmarked for prison rape-perhaps the favored victimis the slight, sensitive young man, whatever his sexual persuasion, who cannot or does not wish to fight.
  

  In the summer of
  i973
  a 28-year-old Quaker pacifist named Robert A. Martin, a former seaman with a background in journal ism, held a stunning press conference in Washington, D.C. Ar—
  

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  rested during a peace demonstration in front of the White House, Martin had chosen to go to prison rather than post a $io bond. His first week in the District of Columbia jail, Martin told reporters, passed uneventfully enough in a quiet cellblock populated by older prisoners including Watergate burglar C. Gordon Liddy, but then he was transferred to Cellblock
  2,
  a tier of "predominantly young black prisoners, many of them in jail for serious crimes of vio lence." During his first evening recreation period on the new tier, the boyish-looking pacifist was invited into a cell on the pretext that some of the men wanted to talk with him. Once inside, he said, "My exit was blocked and my pants were forcibly taken off me, and I was raped. Then I was dragged from cell to cell all evening." Martin was promised protection from further assaults by two of his violators. The next night his "protectors" initiated a second general round of oral and rectal rape. The pair stood outside his cell and collected packs of cigarettes from other prisoners want ing a turn. When his attackers gave him a brief rest period to overcome his gagging and nausea, Martin made his escape and alerted a guard. He was taken to D.C. General Hospital where he underwent VD tests and a rectal examination. The following morning a Quaker friend posted his bond.
  

  When a skeptical reporter asked where the prison guards had been during his two nights of multiple assault, in which Martin estimated he had been ganged by; 45 to 50 men, he replied in all honesty, "That's a good question." q:rying to make,
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  : some ·sense ut
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  oLa Jetrorizing experience, the nonviolent Quaker strongly
  

  -.
  suggested
  that he had been deliberately transferred to the violent' aellblock · as
  ,.a
  .sure-fire way of getting a political demonstrator and
  ".
  potential troublemaker out of the ja'jL He told the assembled
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  group that the guard captain who transferred him "put me in Cellblock
  2
  knowing what Cellblock
  2
  is like, probably knowing
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  what would happen to me in there and figuring that it would
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  nduce me to leave, which it did
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