Unlocking Rape

IN NEW YORK CITY in 1971 there were 18 convictions for rape. Perhaps as many as 10,000 New York women were sexually abused that year in the most violent, degrading manner conceivable, and yet only 18 men could be found guilty. How could this happen? Superficially the blame lies with legal statutes (recently changed) which demanded "conclusive" corroborating evidence. But the true answer--fantastically complex, multi-faceted--can be found in Susan Brownmiller's portentous examination of rape, Against Our Will.

Brownmiller, with extensive documentation and enviable insight, studies rape from every possible standpoint--historical, psychological, anthropological, sociological...She shatters every myth surrounding rape--myths that have prevailed since the beginning of time, myths that have rendered us incapable of viewing rape in its proper political perspective.

She opens with a detailed presentation and analysis of the role of rape in history. "Only when all accounts of rape are collected and correlated does the true underside of women's history emerge," she writes. In almost every society, women have been regarded as male-owned chattel. Because they have been thus dehumanized their violation has historically been seen, not as an attack on a person, but rather, as the defilement of another man's goods. Brownmiller writes:

Women were wholly owned subsidiaries and not independent beings. Rape could not be envisioned as a matter of female consent or refusal; nor could a definition acceptable to males be based on a male-female understanding of a female's right to her bodily integrity. Rape entered the law through the back door, as it were, as a property crime of man against man. Woman, of course, was viewed as the property.

Defiled goods are not worthy of their owners; for this reason, raped women have often been rejected by their husbands and abandoned by their families (the plight of the women of Bangladesh is a prime example). In some cultures, like that of the ancient Hebrews, victims shared the terrible fate of their attackers--being stoned to death or bound and tossed into a river to drown. Women were double losers--degraded to the status of object, yet responsible for what befell them, protectors of what object-seekers sought. And women remain double losers, though in a far more subtle way, and to a slowly diminishing extent.

Several myths arose to justify such treatment, thereby buttressing the patriarchal system. The Biblical tale of Potiphar's wife continues to be used against rape victims. Potiphar (an Egyptian) has an unnamed wife who lusts after her husband's Hebrew slave, Joseph. When virtuous Joseph refuses to succumb to her charms, she becomes enraged and falsely accuses him of rape--Joseph is thrown into jail.

WOMAN, AS MAN'S most personal and vulnerable possession, became and remained the major battleground on which men proved their superiority to one another. Sometimes, as in the days of chivalrous knights, men jousted for the hand of the other's maiden--indirect rape. More often, however, rape has not been clothed so discreetly with societal justification, rather, it has openly defied society's laws and lawmakers. Eldrige Cleaver in Soul on Ice explained what motivated him to rape this way:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women--and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

The most devastating and massive acts of rape occur in the midst of war--violent times, times when machismo dominates. "Men who rape in war," asserts Brownmiller, "are ordinary Joes made unordinary by entry into the most exclusive male-only club in the world. Victory in arms brings group power undreamed of in civilian life. Power for men alone. The unreal situation of a world without women becomes the primary reality...A certain number of soldiers must prove their newly won superiority--prove it to a woman, to themselves, to other men."

In just one month, Japanese soldiers occupying Nanking during W.W. II raped 20,000 women. Pakistani soldiers raped perhaps as many as 400,000 women as they swept through Bangladesh. German soldiers storming across Russia sadistically abused every woman unfortunate enough to be found. When Russian soldiers reached Berlin they retaliated in kind. Brownmiller's compilation of figures and the transcripts of victims' tales are torture to read. To be forced, once again, to read accounts of the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam makes one physically ill.

"It's funny about man's attitude toward rape in war," she writes. "Unquestionably there shall be some raping. Unconscionable, but nevertheless inevitable. When men are men, slugging it out among themselves, conquering new land, subjugating new people, driving toward victory, unquestionably there shall be some raping." Because most historians agree with this traditional view of rape as a natural, while unfortunate side-effect of war, they continually gloss over the subject, if they mention it at all. Journalists can also be indicted for their reluctance to investigate rumors of massive rapes, or to publish reports of them even when verified. Their attitude stems not only from a callous view of rape as naturally concomitant with war, but also from their instilled suspicion of female accusations of rape. It took almost 9 months for the stories of the rape of the Bengali to filter out. It took 21 months for the story of My Lai to be brought to public attention.

Both historians and journalists have been guilty of dismissing this very major consequence of war, this calculated, indiscriminate humiliation and torture of non-belligerent pawns. As Brownmiller points out, they have generally ignored rape "as tangential, inconsequential or as possessing dubious validity..."

WHO ARE THE RAPISTS of our society? According to Brownmiller,

Far from the stereotypic, psychiatric construct of mild-mannered, repressed, impotent homosexuals with an Oedipus complex, they are better understood as brutalized, violence-prone men who act out their raging hatred against the world through an object offering the least amount of physical resistance, a woman's body.

Most rapists are between the ages of 15-19. They most often assault women of the same race and same socio-economic background, generally because of proximity rather than choice.

The victims can be almost anybody. While the preponderance of rape victims are young women between 10 and 29 years old, Brownmiller cites a D.C. General Hospital report which lists ages from 15 months to 82 years. We are all vulnerable; those who claim otherwise are foolhardy. Having grown up in a high rape area in New York City, and having escaped untouched, I used to scorn women who took (reasonable) precautions. "They can smell you're scared," I used to chide them, "You're turning yourself into an easy prey." Nobody would mess with a strapping 6-ft. woman like me, I used to think. But I was very wrong.

Brownmiller writes: "If we say conservatively that only one in five rape incidents was actually reported we arrive at a figure of 255,000 rapes and attempted rapes in these United States in 1973, a figure that I consider to be an unemotional, rock-bottom minimum."

Rape is a game of conquests, a fight for superior standing in a culture that values those on top and scorns those on bottom. Even in the case of homosexual rape in prisons, as Brownmiller points out, it is "a product of a violent subculture's definition of masculinity through physical triumph, and those who emerged as 'women' were those who were subjugated by real or threatened force."

Women are intimidated into passivity and the dictates of society pressure them to remain so. Brownmiller deftly dismisses the Freudian theories of such psychiatrists as Helen Deutsch--proponents of the myth that women are at heart masochists, who can not only "enjoy" rape, but, in fact, fantasize about it. Theories such as these both stem from and help support the myth that women "ask for it", that they are somehow to be held responsible for their own violation and humiliation. The sorrowful disgrace of this is not only that men are socialized to accept these debilitating myths, but women are as well. Women have traditionally been taught to feel ashamed, disgraced, as though they were to blame.

Women have also been taught that they have absolutely no ability to resist attack. They learn early on that as fragile, vulnerable beings they are not physically capable of warding off attackers; they are physically doomed to submit. And yet, as Brownmiller shows, physical response from a potential victim can be a major, effective deterrent to sexual attack. Women can protect themselves by overcoming their fear of self-assertion and the belief that they are forever potential victims.

WHAT ELSE can free women from the frightening specter of rape? The most immediate step, Brownmiller argues, is a complete revamping of the legal statutes that continue to make trials often unbearably humiliating for women, and conviction exceedingly difficult. "Rape, as the current law defines it," says Brownmiller, "is the forcible penetration of an act of sexual intercourse on the body of a woman not one's wife." Outmoded statutes must be replaced with a "gender-free, non-activity-specific law governing all manner of sexual assaults."

A further step she proposes is to integrate fully all law enforcement agencies, "the nation's entire lawful power structure...(which) must be stripped of male dominance and control." This is absolutely necessary, she argues, in order to eliminate machismo, and if "women are to cease being a colonized protectorate of men."

Along with these basic structural changes Brownmiller insists the entire ideology of rape must be eradicated. She has launched a campaign to suppress all pornography--"the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." Brownmiller points out that pornography is a key factor in the development of many men. It is "like rape...a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access..." She adds: "...hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty'." The perpetuation of rape is predicated on man's ability to perceive his victims as inanimate objects he can degrade, humiliate, violate.

Some may not concur with Brownmiller's major assertion that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." Some may feel that Brownmiller places undue emphasis on this one manifestation of the subjugation of women. But rape is still the most extreme manifestation of sexist cultures; women will continue to be oppressed as long as they continue to be victims of sexual abuse--demeaned by those who attack them, demeaned by the society which doubts their word over the word of their male attackers, and demeaned by the world that insists they were born to be victims.