Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (76 page)

* Love Story, the most popular movie of
i970,
was perhaps the epitome of the trend. The drama, and what little plot there was, turned on the untimely death of a beautiful, fresh-spirited girl.
It
was heralded by
Time
magazine as a "Return to Romance."

Not only were the Hollywood goddesses vulnerable to destruc tion, they often managed to self-destruct as well. A movie, The Goddess, made precisely that point. On the screen and off, where life has imitated art to a frightening degree, the self-destructive sex queen has been a powerful symbol in our culture, offering a glam orous lesson in the art of victimology. Her divorce, her miscarriage, her battle with alcoholism and drugs, her suicide or suicide at tempts, have been presented to us by the popular media as tinsel

. tragedy, glittering items for public consumption.

The most famous and overworked example is Marilyn Monroe, whose pathetic history of use and abuse is already memo rialized in several biographies, plays and paintings. In an earlier time there was the role model of Jeanne Eagels and Jean Harlow. The hard-luck stories of Hedy Lamarr and Betty Hutton crop up in the news from time to time, as have the episodic moments of crisis in the lives of Brigitte Bardot, Susan Hayward, Jennifer Jones and Lana Turner. The untimely deaths of a score of stars, some by their own hand, some by accident (of ten a car or plane crash ) , and sometimes from a combination of alcohol and pills, when viewed together present a pattern of glamorous destruction: Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield, Veronica Lake, Fran9oise Dorleac, Carole Landis, Carole Lombard, Linda Darnell, Gail Russell, Marie McDonald, Margaret Sullavan, Diana Barrymore, Dorothy Dandridge, Pier Angeli, Inger Stevens,
etc.
So few women reach the success and fame of the ones I've mentioned, yet in some weird way their tragic deaths become more vivid to us than their lifetime accom plishments.

The line between the real-life players and the movie product blurs. The rare motion picture that tells the story of a real woman's life is often a catalogue of destruction: the Helen Morgan story, the Jeanne Eagels story, the Lillian Roth story, the Grace Moore story, the Billie Holiday story, and the worst instance of the indus try feeding upon itself, two versions released simultaneously of the Jean Harlow story. Many of these women won fame as singers. For complex reasons having to do with the nature of the blues and vulnerability, girl singers seem the most
ill
fated of all, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin. Even though she led a full, rich life, it is the
death
of Bessie Smith that has passed into legend.

I think back now to my childhood years and the "required" poetry I dutifully memorized in public school. The little boys in

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I
AGAINST OUR WILL

class recited the heroic morality lesson of Abou ben Adhem, may his tribe increase, or gloried in the Charge of the Light Brigade, out of which a fair number did manage to survive. But I, searching for female images, pined with Poe for the death of the beautiful Annabel Lee and suffered again for his beautiful Lenore. I would rise to declaim at the slightest show of interest all twenty-eight stanzas of "The Wreck of the Hesperus," a hoary Longfellow ballad in which the captain's blue-eyed daughter is tied to the mast during an awful storm. She is found the next morning floating near shore, still lashed to the mast, beautiful and dead. Later, in my teens, I recall being puzzled and finally rebelling over the sympathy accorded to Mary Queen of Scots in her battle with Elizabeth in the tragic plays of Schiller and Maxwell Anderson. Mary was im prisoned in her tower and beheaded; Elizabeth won and survived. But it was haughty Mary, reduced in physical size and carefully feminized, who became the subject of romantic glorification, against the grain of history.

One might conclude, if one did not know the facts, that women were more prone to death than men. But the opposite is true. Women live longer than men, have fewer fatal accidents, suffer fewer violent deaths, and are outnumbered by men in suicide by a ratio of three to one. Yet the eternal image of the beautiful, desirable woman is Cami1Ie coughing her last on her deathbed, Mimi dying of consumption in her garret, Madame Butterfly killing herself over a broken heart, Carmen stabbed to death outside the arena, the damsel in distress locked into her tower, the sad-eyed Venus of Botticelli, the Hollywood starlet with dark glasses and an unhappy love life, the international fashion model dead at twenty

eight-the list is infinite.

"BLONDE Ex-Saowc1RL SLAININ HoTEL SU TE"

The conceptual link between tragic beauty and sexual desir ability was forged long ago, but it is perpetuated in our modern culture by books, movies, popular songs and television serials in which women are most of ten portrayed as victims, seldom as sur vivors. "Women Is Losers" ran Janis Joplin's most haunting re frain; and Bob Dylan sings a poignant love song to his "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." The staples of television, the doctor, law—

VICI'IMS: THE SETTING
I
337

yer and private-eye shows ( with the pioneering exception of Emma Peel in the English-made
The
Avengers), star handsome men as heroes and beautiful women as victims of disease and murder, or sometimes, for variety, as guilty co-conspirators. At its most bizarre, the concept of glamour-in-destruction is reinforced in the pages of our daily tabloid newspapers where rape, and most particularly rape murder, is reported with the brightest writing the old hands on the rewrite bank can muster.

Crime is valid news, and rape deserves a place in news cover age.
It
is also obvious that rape sells newspapers, or the stories would not appear on page one, as they sometimes do. But the tabloid treatment of rape is more complex than simple, factual reporting. The rape story that a big-city "picture newspaper" like the New York
Daily
News
is apt to feature is a
selected
rape, enhanced by certain elements of glamour and aided by the use of stimulating adjectives judiciously written in.
It
is rape dressed up to fit the male fantasy, lurid and "sexy."
It
is often the only news of women that can be found in the important first few pages of the paper on a given day.

I must stress that I am talking here about tabloid journalism. When I first began to monitor newspaper rape coverage in
1971
in an attempt to gain a national overview, I was struck with how differently rape is treated from paper to paper and from city to city. The Washington Post, for example, was consistently informative and unsensational in its handling of rape, and made real efforts to treat the crime as a social issue. But in New York City, where I live, I found little of substance reported on the crime of rape in
The New York
Times, stemming, I believe, from that paper's long unquestioned editorial policy of sexual conservatism. The small, infrequent, back-page squibs I did unearth in the Times concerned victims who had some kind of middle-class status, such as "nurse," "dancer" or "teacher," and with a favored setting of Central Park.* By contrast, the New York Post and the
Daily
News
were, in an ironic sense, something of a bonanza. My pile of clippings from these two tabloids grew at an alarming rate, but as I cut and clipped and filed, I discovered a pattern that was even more alarm-

* In
fairness to
The
New York
Times
I must report that its rape coverage had improved dramatically by i974, thanks to a new interest in rape inspired by the women's movement.