Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (68 page)

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       AGAINST OUR wn.L
       

       girl" as he plundered his way through the English countryside, to that mucho hombre, the chubby-faced Pancho Villa, who en tranced a corps of impressionable American newsmen, John Reed among them, with his shoot-'em-up,' love-'em-up exploits in the days when it looked like Mexico might be having a revolution. The Villa legend, carefully embroidered by Villa himself, stands as the ultimate in machismo mongering. No other semidisreputable figure won for himself a gushier. crew of biographers seeking to exploit, confirm or deny his rapacious conquests of peasant women and cantina barmaids as the wily caudillo and his ragged troops gal loped over the Mexican landscape yelling "Tierra
       y
       Libertad!" "After the Sack-the Saturnalia," gushed one simpatico Boswell. "The bowed peon of yesterday today reels in a vertigo of freedom and power-freedom to do what he will, seize what he will; power to plant his seed where he will, slay whom he will." And John Reed defended his hero with "What's wrong with that? I believe in rape."
       

       Central to the Villa legend, indeed, the significant formative experience that supposedly shaped this illiterate bandit's steal-from the-rich, give-to-the-poor ethic, is a tale of rape. Young Pancho's first taste of murder, it is faithfully recorded, was an act of blood vengeance against the hated landlord who had violated his virgin sister. Which sister, and whether the rapist was the landlord or the landlord's son, or perhaps the local sheriff, depends on which biog raphy one reads. Villa embellished the story as he went along. In any event and whatever the form, it remains a fixture in his Official Life, the "key," as it were, to his later ruthlessness toward land lords and women.
       

       Similarly, rape supposedly played a catalytic role in the rise to power of Brooklyn mobster Abe ( Kid Twist ) Reles. When Reles was just getting started in the nineteen thirties, Brooklyn's estab lished mob chief tain Meyer Shapiro decided to teach the Kid a lesson by raping and beating Abe's 18-year-old girlfriend. Shapiro sent her back to Reles with the message, "Tell the dirty rat what happened and who did it." In blood vengeance, so the story goes, Reles made appropriate new alliances, rubbed out the Shapiro mob, and established his own suzerainty over Brooklyn. This story was part of Reles' later confessions to the district attorney. Reles, some readers may recall, was the fellow who "fell" to his death from a police-guarded room in the Half Moon Hotel in Coney
       

       Island twenty months af ter he became an informer. Nothing more is known about the raped girlfriend.
       

       The Villa legend was resurrected in
       1971
       by Reis Lopez Ti jerina, charismatic macho bandido of
       la
       raza, the northern New Mexico land-claim movement, to give historical weight to his charge that a state trooper had raped his wife, Patsy, while he, Tijerina, was held in prison. This case is a sad one, saturated through and through with machismo. When Tijerina first got out of jail and learned of his wife's alleged independent sexual adven tures he filed for a divorce. His second impulse was to make political hay. He called a press conference in Washington and charged that his wife's alleged infidelity had been "a legal rape" aimed at him be cause Patsy had the mind of a child and was unable to resist the state trooper's advance. Thus
       la
       raza briefly had a new issue, at the double expense of Patsy Tijerina.
       

       

       Sexual assault of a wife, daughter, girlfriend, sister or mother is often appropriated by men as a major traumatic injury to them selves, a manifestation all the more significant when we remember that men have generally tended to discount the emotional injury suffered by women who have been raped. Harold Robbins made use of the Villa legend in
       The
       Adventurers, a tale of violence, rape and political intrigue spread over four continents, eight hundred pages and twelve million copies. His Latin-American hero, Dax, is six years old when he witnesses the rape-murder of his mother, sister and female servants by a band of soldiers. At age nine, befriended by a group of Villa-style bandits, an emotionally scarred Dax is ready to try it himself.
       

       "If
       I'm old enough to kill I'm old enough to rape a woman," Dax pleads af ter an older boy has scoffed that his "pecker isn't big enough."
       

       "Easy, my little cock," he is soothed by a grizzly old bandit. "Everything will come to you in time. Soon enough you will be a man."
       

       And soon enough he is. Sexual conquest and outlawry run as a dual theme throughout
       The
       Adventurers, becoming the novel's decisive expression of manhood.
       

       "A bandit against the world and women" is also the theme of A
       Clockwork
       Orange, in which among other antisocial escapades young Alex and his buddies give a slobbering writer's wife the old "in-out, in-out" before his eyes. This particular rape scene is indica-
       

       

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       AGMNST OUR WILL
       

       tive of the male approach. Had the rape not been performed before the busband's eyes there would have been no recognizable expro priation of property, no outrageous impudence from man to man, for we must keep in mind that within the myth of the heroic rapist women play a minor role. Just how small a role may be gauged by the ecstatic reviews accorded Stanley Kubrick's movie version of the Burgess novel in which Kubrick glamorized sadistic little Alex to extravagant proportions. Beside himself with enthusiasm, News week's usually rational reviewer forgot that there were two sexes who watched this movie, and that one sex had no role in the picture other than as victim of assault. "At its most profound level," Paul D. Zimmerman intoned, "A
       Clockwork
       Orange is an odyssey of the human personality, a statement of what it is to be truly human. . . . As a fantasy figure Alex appeals to something dark and primal in all of us. He acts out our desire for instant sexual gratification, for the release of our angers and repressed instincts for revenge, our need for adventure and excitement."
       

       I am certain no woman believes that the.punk with the Pinoc chio nose and pair of scissors acted out her desire for instant gratification, revenge or adventure. We could chalk up the News week review to the excesses of one effusive writer did we not have it straight from the horse's mouth. Film-maker Kubrick used similar words to define his grand purpose: "Alex symbolizes man in his natural state, the way he would be if society did not impose its 'civilizing' processes upon him. What we respond to subconsciously is Alex's guiltless sense of freedom to kill and rape, and to be our natural savage selves, and it is in this glimpse of the true nature of man that the power of the story derives."*
       

       A
       Clockwork
       Orange was no aberration among movies during its box-office season. Hitchcock's Frenzy, Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and a Robert Mitchum vehicle,
       Going
       Home, were also notable for their glamorization of rape. There is nothing I can say about Frenzy that was not perceived with great sensitivity by Victoria
       

       

• Another highly respected film maker, Luis Buiiuel, was a bit more honest when he discussed his reasons for making Viridiana. "As a child," he con fessed, "I dreamed of making love to the Queen of Spain, who was very blonde, very white, like a sublime nun. I imagined I stole into the palace, drugged Her Majesty, and then raped her.
  Viridiana
  is the crystallization of this masturbator's dream."
  

Sullivan writing in
The
New York Times Sunday entertainment section. The underlying message of Frenzy, she wrote, is that "psy chopathic rapists are basically nice guys screwed up by their mums . . . [and] to graphically remind a woman of her vulner ability." Her furious conclusion with which I heartily agree: "I suddenly want to retaliate: I want to see films about men getting raped by women. . . . I want to see the camera linger on the look of terror in his eyes when he suddenly realizes that the woman is bigger, stronger and far more brutal than he." ( Compare Victoria Sullivan's pro-woman commentary to
Newsweek' s
senior reviewer, who once again presumed to speak for all of us with these words, "Hitchcock's graphic, brutalizing handling of a rape sequence with a crescendo of groans from the killer mixed with the recited prayers of the victim triggers our own latent excitement . . . [and makes] his audiences accomplices to his acts of criminal genius.") What was notable about the Mitchum movie, Going Horne, which featured the rape of a father's woman friend by his son, was that this picture won a GP ( all ages admitted ) rating from the Hollywood censors-the movie was deemed acceptable to children! (Thus are young boys taught important lessons.) To achieve the box-office-valuable GP, some footage had to be deleted from the boffo rape scene. The director's outburst when he learned of the studio cuts was unwittingly ironic. He screamed, "They unilaterally

and arbitrarily raped my picture."

Although movie makers generally take inordinate delight in glorifying rape-the critic Aljean Harmetz counted twenty such rape scenes in two years of Hollywood productions-and often wrap up the package by having the female victim enjoy it (Straw Dogs,
Blume
in Love ) , one aspect of the crime has received more sensitive cinematic treatment. This is when the plot line views the rape as man's revenge against another man-either in the case of homosexual rape or in situations where the female victim is merely a passive vehicle of retribution within a larger battle between two men. ( Most of the movies that fall int

The movie , cm.
;made from the James Dickey novel, presented one of the ugliest rapes committed by some of the ugliest rapists in cinematic history. There is no doubt in
Deliver
ance that the homosexual rape scene is intended to horrify viewers; in no way can it be construed as a sexual turn-on. Far from being

glamorized and heroic, the backwo.ods rapists in Deliverance are physically repulsive and appear to be possessed of subnormal intel ligence. What
is
presented as heroic in
Deliverance
is the justifi able murder of one of the rapists by the victim's buddy, a revenge that is never allowed to women friends of women victims in the movies. I doubt if there. exists even one viewer of this powerful film who identified his manhood with the rapist-aggressors. And signifi cantly, lest any viewer have too strong a case of jitters by identify ing with the chief victim, he, too, was presented in uncompli mentary terms as fat, huffy-puffy and "womanish." Interestingly, critics who saw Deliverance did not use lines like "true nature of man" and "our need for adventure and excitement" when referring to the homosexual rape. Instead, they viewed the scene as some sort of metaphor for the rape of the environment.