Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (77 page)

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ing. Although I already knew that the rapist chooses his victim with a striking disregard for conventional "sex appeal"-she may be seventy-four and senile or twelve and a half with braces on her teeth-and although New York City police statistics showed that black women were more frequent victims of rape than white women, the favored victim in the tabloid headline, I discovered, was young, white, middle-class and "attractive." .

As the months wore on, I decided to make a special study of the New York Daily
News,
the very model of the modern tabloid newspaper. More people read the News-more than two million of them every day and more than three million on Sunday-than any other paper in the United States. Half of these people may be presumed to be women, and what we read of the lives of other women-or what other women get into the news for-cannot help but affect our own life and expectations.

The limited concept of the role of women that the
Daily

News sells each morning for fif teen cents was forcibly driven home to me when I spent a full week exploring the microfilmed front pages of its four-star final for the complete year of
1971.
At the end of the week my eyes were aching, but I had learned a lot. The moral code of the News is simple.
It
is "for" law and order and the good, honest working bloke, as exemplified by cops, fire men and other city employees. It is fascinated by crime but eager to see criminals brought to justice.
It
has a nose-pressed-against-the window approach to America's first family in the White House and toward a few other families of our American political aristocracy. He-man style, i t likes its women mute and interchangeable, with a show of leg and bosom. Family-man style, it grumbles over higher taxes and is capable of outrage when innocent women, children and animals are hurt-but, he-man again, sometimes it thinks that gals get what is coming to them. (Blacks, too, although the News has shown some uncertainty of late in its vision of blacks, a lesson of the moral suasion of political power tha t women must learn. ) There are two sure ways a woman becomes newsworthy in the eyes of the Daily News, I learned: as wife or daughter of a famous politician or astronaut, or as an anonymous, innocent victim of a rape-murder or some other disaster. A third way is when she herself has committed a crime.

The job of a tabloid is to present the news in an entertaining

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fashion, and news is mostly made by men since it is men who are engaged in the "real world out there" of government, industry, sports, adventure and crime. Newspapers are edited for men by men. Women readers are tagalongs: advertisements and the "women's pages" alone are designed with us in mind. Tabloid editors operate under the assumption that sex is a necessary spice for their daily stew, and since they are men editing for men, sex means women. A standard feature of the Daily News is the anony mous bathing beauty, regardless of the weather. In summer she may be of the local variety; in winter the caption reads Miami or Australia. Although her name may be duly printed, it is of no consequence. She is a nobody, strictly there for men to admire. For women readers she can only offer an uncomfortable model for emulation: so, we think, this is what men find attractive. A rape murder story is also presented in the News for sex: so, we cannot help but conclude,
this is what
happens
to
attractive women.

The use of the word "attractive" to describe a rape-murder victim in the lead paragraph of a Daily News story is a significant part of the story's formula. In a year's study of the News I found only two instances where this did not apply. One was a story of an eight-year-old victim; the other was a second day's follow-up story on a publicized rape-murder that occurred on the street in which I live. In this particular case, the first day's story had duly called the girl "attractive." For the follow-up, the News sent one of its few female reporters. She got her facts straight. The victim was
not
attractive, and the reporter broke the formula and wrote it that way. Two sideline facts are of interest here. This was the only instance I could find in a year's study of the News in which the paper sent a woman to report on a rape-murder; and at the corner newsstand where I buy my papers, the owner had also noticed that the adjective "attractive" was strangely missing from the story. He thought it showed a marked unkindness to the girl in death.

The use of "attractive" or similar glamour adjectives to de scribe a young woman in death is employed in place of other relevant material-the kind of relevant material that a good re porter writes in when he is describing a man. The following lead paragraph from a Sunday
News
story of January
16, 1972,
"cAR FUMES STIFLE TEEN PAIR'S DREAM"
( front-page headline and page 3 news story) , illustrates what I mean: "A Long Island University

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sophomore and the tall, good looking brunette whom he hoped to marry were killed by carbon monoxide early yesterday as they attended a drive-in movie in Valley Stream, L.I."

We are immediately told that the young boy who died had a place in the world: he was a college sophomore. The young girl's news value, however, is as "tall, good looking brunette whom he hoped to marry." Not until the third paragraph, af ter we learn that the boy was a music major and a part-time messenger, do we discover that the girl, too, had an identity. She was also a student, a senior in high school. But this fact could be sacrificed to her physical description: that way the story had more "sex appeal."

Women who die violently are memorialized in the Daily News in bold headlines that attest to their physical appeal to men. In life they would not rate a story. The violence of their death has made them newsworthy, but it does not lessen their anonymity. Female victims are objectified and glamorized chiefly by the color of their hair, although it is odds-on certain that hair color had little
to
do with their death.

Thus I found:
"BLONDE TIED TO BED, STRANGLED"
(July 6,

1971) .
She was reported to be someone's "estranged wife." And two months later:
"BRUNETTE,
26,
FOUND SLAIN IN A VILLAGE FLAT"

(September
19, 1971).
She was a shy, overweight clerk-typist who lived down the street from her parents. Although the newspaper did not report it this way, her rape and subsequent death by suffocation was most probably an accidental by-product of a routine "break-and-enter" burglary.

The occupation of a female victim is buried deep within the story of a tabloid newspaper unless the occupation has a glamorous connotation, however tenuous. Model, actress, stewardess, show girl, go-go dancer, career girl, heiress and divorcee are the words to conjure with. Women who can be fitted into these categories may be catapulted in death to page one on a slow news day:
"BLONDE EX SHOWGIRL SLAIN IN HOTEL SUITE"
made page one of the News on March 8,
1971.

"AIR STEWARDESS IS FOUND SLAIN"
made page one on June
25,

1971,
and again on fune
26
with
"HUNT SEX KILLER OF STEW ARDESS."
The victim in this case, Cornelia Michelle Crilley, was genuinely beautiful. She became New York City's big sex-killing case for
1971.
Her picture was plastered on the front pages of both the News and the
Post,
and the
Post
kept her on the front page for

three days running. Her occupation and the neighborhood in which she lived, Manhattan's Upper East Side, offered rich material for tabloid feature writers. The News ran
"coMB 'GIRL BELT' SWING SPOTS"
and
"EAST SIDE-THE MECCA FOR MAIDENS"
with pictures of other "swinging singles." The Post countered with
"cORNELIA's TINSEL TOYLAND."
( Cornelia Michelle Crilley was pushed off the front pages by Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. At this writing her murderer has not been found. )

The murder of a beautiful young woman is no more regret table, no greater tragedy, than the murder of a plain one, except in a culture that values beauty in women above other qualities. By putting great store in the murder of a beauty, beauty acquires the seeds of its own destruction. The
Daily
News does not deliberately set out to create a myth of glamorous destruction, but its editorial policy performs that function by reporting the news of men-the doers and spicing it with news of women as victims, with more space accorded to beautiful victims. Thus the myth that rape is a crime of passion touched off by female beauty is given great cre dence, and women are influenced to believe that to be raped, and even murdered, is a testament to beauty. Beauty's beauty
is con
firmed by the Beast: we all may not be fair of face, but all of us
can
be
victims.

From January to December,
1971,
a year in which Indira Gandhi won a landslide election victory and Golda Meir paid a visit to New York, all female-related front-page headlines in the Daily
N ews
were headlines of disaster, crime and rape-murder, with the one exception of Tricia Nixon's wedding.
"MOTHER, BABY

SLAIN IN QUEENS" . . . "FALL IN JAIL KILLS N.Y. HEIRESS" • • . "ALICE GUILTY IN lST DEGREE" . . . "MISSING GIRL,
8,
FOUND SLAIN" • • . "KNIFED TO DEATH IN HER ELEVATOR" • • • "PROBE

DIVORCEE MYSTERY DEATH."
Meanwhile, men of strength and cour

age, alive and breathing, directed the reins of government, caught criminals, put out fires, ordered strikes and settled strikes, and went to the moon and came back victorious.

CoNFESSIONs: "HE MADE ME
Do IT!"

"BRUNETTE,
26,
FOUND SLAIN IN VILLAGE FLAT"
lived in my

street, although I did not know her. We shared the corner candy

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store and newsstand, where I learned from the store's owner that she often browsed at the well-stocked rack of confession magazines. Kathy was her name, and from the second day's headline in the
Daily
News I also learned that the
"SLAIN VILLAGE GIRL DIDN'T DRINK,
DATE."
But Kathy did read, and when one day in the course of my research I scooped up a month's supply of confession magazines from the corner newsstand, the thought crossed my mind that this was the stuff that Kathy devoured, that fed her fantasies and nourished her daydreams.

Who takes romance-confession magazines seriously? Certainly not the editors who edit them, and certainly not any literary critic or chronicler of the culture. Nor have the sociologists and psychol ogists shown interest, for that matter. Fredric Wertham's Seduc
tion
of the Innocent, the famous study of cultural violence and its effect on children, raised the comic book to serious and controver sial status, but no one has examined the romance, confession and movie magazine industry for its cumulative effect on impression able young women.* Who takes the magazines seriously? Only the several million girls and women who read them each month, women who are, for the most part, from the lower economic classes, with high-school educations or less, women who, statistics show, are the most frequent victims of forcible rape.

Between one dozen and fifteen confession magazines are car ried on the newsstands, and each sells a minimum of one-quarter of a million copies. Confession-magazine addicts usually read more than one magazine a month and as many as nine readers may share one copy, passing it from hand to hand until it is in tatters. This multiple readership is generally acknowledged to be higher than for any other magazine genre. In the South and the Southwest, where the magazines have a wide audience, the readership is estimated to be
40
percent black. More than ten million girls and women form