Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (73 page)

VICTIMS: THE SETTING
I
l21

Boston, the other in New York, conducted a wicked battle of the footnotes as they worked to define their opposing views. In a major break with orthodox psychoanalysis, Homey argued that maso chism in women was a neurotic manifestation culturally induced and culturally encouraged, rather than a normal, inevitable result of female biology. Nevertheless, there was enough of the Freudian lef t in her to make her swallow whole the sexual interpretation of dreams.

Homey believed it was "instinctive" for young girls to dream of rape in various "guises"-and her list of guises was longer than Deutsch's: "Criminals who break in through windows or doors; men with guns who threaten to shoot; animals that creep, fly or run inside some place ( e.g., snakes, mice, moths ) ; animals or women stabbed with knives; or, trains running into a station or tunnel." Horney's stake in rape dreams was expressed in a
1933
paper, "The Denial of the Vagina," in which she postulated that the dreams "betray quite unmistakably an instinctive knowledge of the actual sexual process."

Rape dreams to Deutsch were proof of inherent female maso chism, but rape dreams to Horney were proof of nothing less than the primacy of the vagina. How a sensible woman like Horney got trapped into such an awkward stance deserves an explanation. Homey put her energy and her professional integrity into a long running refutation of Freud's theory that all women suffer from penis envy. But instead of attacking the master directly for the inflated importance he bestowed upon the penis, Horney sought to elevate the vagina to a position of equal stature. In her campaign for the primacy of the vagina, all clitoral sensations and corre sponding masturbatory impulses in prepubertal girls had to be downgraded, for it wouldn't do to have the vagina take second place and lie erotically dormant, unnoticed even, as per Deutsch, through the critical years of childhood. A young girl's dream into which rape might be read could be construed as an early indication, an actual affirmation, of vaginal sexuality:

ln other words we must assume that both the dread of rape characteristic of puberty and the infantile anxieties of little girls are based on vaginal organ sensations (or the instinctual impulses is suing from these), which imply that something ought to penetrate into that part of the body.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

Poor Helene! Poor Karen! Poor us! Freud's most clever-and mutually antagonistic-female disciples thus concurred, for quite different reasons, on the unconscious rape symbolism in young girls' dreams. As Bertha Pappenheim, the German feminist more familiar to us as "Anna O," might have said, "What a
pity!"

It is important to distinguish between the unconscious rape fantasies that the Freudians tell us are rife in young girls' dreams and the
conscious
rape fantasies, the deliberate, waking, sexually distorted daydreams that some women indubitably do have, and that I intend to discuss in the next few pages.
-
Belief in the uncon scious rape dream implies belief in an inherent wish for rape on the part of all women-a false assumption that today's Freudian ana lysts and Freudian-styled criminologists continue to perpetuate. Horney and Deutsch understood that the dreams they reported and interpreted were, for the most part, unpleasant dreams, filled with anxiety and dread, and yet they maintained that these fearful nightmares were the natural condition of womanhood-normal and healthy-either in the service of masochism or in the name of vaginal sexuality. I do not mean to lay the burden of Freudian rape fantasy theory exclusively at the feet of Deutsch and Horney; many of Freud's male disciples ( Rado, Abraham, Fenichel ) expounded similar views, though with less authority. But the fact tha t brilliant women chose to compromise their own sex has particular emo tional value. Of course they could not think otherwise and remain within the accepted psychoanalytic orbit-men and men alone determined what was heresy-but that does not give them full pardon.

I have examined the Freudian theory of inherent female rape dreams to uncover the origins of much of today's thinking in the fields of criminology, psychology and the law, and to lay the groundwork for an exploration of the conscious female fantasy of rape, the opposite, but hardly equal, polarity of the male rape fantasy, its distorted mirror image.

ff.he
·
rape
fantasy exists in
women as a man-made iceberg.
It
can
·
be destroyed-by. feminism. But first we must seek to learri the extent of its measurements.
·

Male sexual fantasies are blatantly obvious in the popular culture ( the burden of my previous chapter ) . Female sexual fan tasies are quite another matter. Rarely have we been allowed to explore, discover and present what might be some workable sexual daydreams, if only we could give them free rein. Rather, our female sexual fantasies have been handed to us on a brass platter by those very same men who have labored so lovingly to promote their own fantasies. Because of this deliberate cultural imbalance, most women, I think, have an unsatisfactory fantasy life when it comes to sex. Having no real choice, women have either succumbed to the male notion of appropriate female sexual fantasy or we have found ourselves largely unable to fantasize at all. Women who
have
accepted male-defined fantasies are of ten quite uncomfortable with them, and for very good reason. Their contents, as Helene Deutsch would be the first to say, are indubitably masochistic.

What percentage of women fantasize about sex? Frankly, I do not know the answer, nor would I care to hazard a guess. I know of no objective studies that deal with the nature and prevalence of women's sexual fantasies. Kinsey did not delve into this area; nor, as yet, have Masters and Johnson. I am vehemently hostile to suggestions that some known, popular sex fantasies attributed to women are indeed the product of a woman's mind, or the product of a healthy woman's mind. I am thinking here of the scurrilous, anonymous pornographic classic
The
Story
of
0 by "Pauline Reage," a pseudonym that many men delight in believing masks the name of a real woman.
The
Story
of
0 and its dreary catalogue of whips, thongs, bonds and iron chastity belts represents the pinnacle, or should I say the nadir, of painful masochism. I first became acquainted with 0 when it made the rounds of my college dormitory.
It
was during finals week, as I recall, and I was looking for some diversion. I nearly retched before I closed the book and handed it back to the giver. A few years ago, when I was working for one of the TV news networks, a fellow writer earnestly pre sented this same book to me as "the truest, deepest account of female sexuality" he had ever encountered. I am sorry I behaved with such civility at my second refusal of 0 and "her" story.

Because mn control the definitions of sex, women are al lotted a poor assortment of options. Either we attempt to find enjoyment and sexual stimulation in the kind of passive/ masochis tic fantasies that men have prepared us to have, or we reject these

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AGAINST OUR WILL

packaged fantasies as unhealthy and either remain fantasyless or cast about for a private, more original, less harmful daydream. Fantasies are important to the enjoyment of sex, I think, but it is a rare woman who can successfully fight the culture and come up with her own non-exploitative, non-sadomasochistic, non-power driven imaginative thrust. For this reason, I believe, most women who reject the masochistic fantasy role reject the temptation of all sexual fantasies, to our sexual loss.

Given the pervasive male ideology of rape ( the mass psychology of the conqueror ) a mirror-image female victim psychology ( the mass psychology of the conquered ) could not help but arise. Near its extreme, this female psychosexuality indulges in the fantasy of rape. Stated another way, when women do fantasize about sex, the fantasies are usually the product of male conditioning and cannot be otherwise.

Two extreme examples of male fantasy that were commer cially palmed off as female fantasy in recent years have been the pornographic movies
Deep Throat
and
The Devil
in Miss
Jones,
and I cannot deny I know a few women who claim they enjoyed seeing them. But I am not talking about such obvious junk, but of the normal run of books and movies with the theme of man as the conquering sexual hero, works that influence the daydreams of women, unfortunately, as well as men.

I do not mean to suggest that a woman's basic erotic fantasy, through cultural conditioning, is a fantasy of being raped. Rape is simply a noticeable marker near the end of a masochistic scale that ranges from passivity to death. And I do not intend to limit this discussion to specific erotic fantasies. At issue here is Every woman's attitude toward her sexuality, her being, her attractiveness to men.

I owe it to Helene Deutsch to quote from her writings once more, since she was the first to define the female rape fantasy:

The conscious masochistic rape fantasies [Deutsch writes] are indubitably erotic, since they are connected with masturbation. They are less genital in character than the symbolic dreams, and involve blows and humiliations; in fact, in rare cases the genitals themselves are the target of the act of violence. In other cases, they are less cruel, and the attack as well as the overpowering of the girrs will constitute the erotic element. Often the fantasy is divided into two

acts: the first, the masochistic act, produces the sexual tension, and the second, the amorous act, supplies all the delights of being loved and desired. These fantasies vanish with the giving up of masturba tion and yield to erotic infatuations detached from direct sexuality. The masochistic tendency now betrays itself only in the painful longing and wish to suffer for the lover (often unknown ) . . . . Many women retain these masochistic fantasies until an advanced age.

The combination of perception and dogma contained in the above paragraph continues to amaze me no matter how many times
I
read it through. The conscious rape fantasy is offered as proof of inherent female masochism; masturbation is seen as an adolescent stage to be "given up." Yet despite these rigidities in her thought, Deutsch perceives that the female rape fantasy is no simple mat ter: For some,
the
rape of
the will
constitutes the erotic element; yet for others, the sufferance of a physical attack, or mental abuse, is a necessary prelude to the acceptance of love and affection.

These two quite different sets of responses might have given Deutsch a clue that the most significant factor of all lies precisely in the
lack
of a uniform response.
I
would conclude that both sets of responses, or utilizations of the rape daydream, indicate a pitiful effort on the part of young girls, as well as older women, to find their sexuality within the context of male sexuality-as we have seen
it
operate, as part and parcel of the male power drive. This effort is the crux of woman's sexual dilemma.*

* Karen Horney, while abiding by the dogma of the inherent rape dream, parted
_
company with Helene Deutsch on the importance of the conscious rape fantasy. "The possibility of rape . . . may give rise in women to the fantasy of being attacked, subdued, and injured," she ventured at the close of her paper "The Problem of Feminine Masochism." "In our culture it is hard to see how any woman may escape becoming masochistic to some degree from the effects of the culture alone," she proposed. Beyond such "culture-com plex" phenomena as the economic dependence of women on men that must produce an emotional dependence, the societal estimation of women as inferior, the restriction of women to "spheres of life that are built chiefly upon emotional bonds, such as family life, religion, or charity work," and the "blocking of outlets for expansiveness and sexuality," Horney ad duced that "women presenting the specified [masochistic] traits are more fre quently chosen by men. This implies that women's erotic possibilities depend on their conformity to the image of that which constitutes their 'true na ture.' " She then went on to list four "anatomical-physiological factors in

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I refer here again to my own concentration-camp fantasy at age eight, at the height of Nazi power, in which I lay passive and beautiful, and offer as a companion piece a favorite childhood fantasy described by Viva in her autobiographical novel, Superstar:

I was naked, strapped in an army cot . . . hung up in a stand ing position in this contraption, on the wall, very near the ceiling. There were a lot of other little girls hanging around me in the same cots, all on the same level and in the same suspended standing posi tion. Then the room would fill up with men wearing grey pin-stripe suits. They all had grey hair and glasses and white shirts and ties. When the room was absolutely full of them, they would all look up at once.