Revolt Against RAPE

One of the reasons that men continue to rape is that they continue to get away with it. --Author Susan Brownmiller

The statistics back up Brownmiller's conclusion. More than 55,000 American women reported being raped last year.

Official estimates say unreported rapes would place the figure at least three times as high, and some analysts claim as many as 500,000 people a year are at tacked by rapists. Yet few rapists, perhaps 2% of offenders, are actually convicted and jailed.

At the very least, society is beginning more and more to consider rape one of the major social issues. First emphasized in the feminist press, the subject of rape slowly percolated into popular women's magazines and then into the rest of the press and television. At more than 500 "speak-outs" and conferences on rape in the past year alone and at more than 150 rape crisis centers set up by the feminist movement since 1973, women have been raising an increasing clamor for reform.

Slowly, government has been responding. In dozens of cities women have participated in rape investigations and packed police and hospital personnel off to sensitivity training courses to erase a traditional image: the snickering male authority who believes the victim "was asking for it." The Government is now pouring millions of dollars into research on the rape problem and care for victims. Seventeen states have barred courtroom inquiries into a rape victim's previous sex life on the ground that it is not pertinent. New York eliminated a requirement for corroborating evidence. In pushing through the change, feminists won the support of civil liberties groups, an unusual step for organizations devoted largely to the rights of defendants.

These measures have done little to assuage the growing anger of many American women, who look upon the rape problem not as one feminist cause among many, but as a metaphor for all suffering at the hands of men. Some women wear CASTRATE RAPISTS buttons. In Florida this year, feminists tracked and beat up a rape suspect who allegedly preyed on lonely women in singles bars. Some mutter darkly about assassinating rapists if the courts will not convict. Feminists made a national cause celebre out of the case of Joan Little, the black woman acquitted of murder in the stabbing of a jailer who she says attacked her sexually. When Inez Garcia, a Chicane woman in Soledad, Calif., shot a man to death 27 minutes after he allegedly held her down during a rape, a smattering of feminists loudly applauded the act. Though troubled by this vigilante version of justice, Feminist Gloria Steinem asked: "But what do we do with our rage?"

One possible answer: write a book.

Indeed, for more than four years, some feminists have been waiting for The Book: Journalist Brownmiller's forthcoming study of rape. ("It's one of the two books I lay awake nights lusting after," said a woman editor in the Village Voice.) A week before publication, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Simon & Schuster; $10.95) is already a major event; it is the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for November, is being serialized in four national magazines and will be promoted on a nationwide tour. All this is likely to make Brownmiller the first rape celebrity who is neither a rapist nor a rapee.

The book's thesis, startling to those who have not closely followed recent trends in the feminist movement: rape is not a random act by deviant or troubled men, but a worldwide social mechanism by which men control women. Says Brownmiller: "It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Rather than society's aberrants or 'spoilers of purity,' men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known."

In Brownmiller's view, civilization is in fact built upon rape. When primitive man realized he could force intercourse while women could not, "this single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it . . . Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe."

She thinks that early woman struck "the risky bargain" of accepting domination by a single male to prevent wholesale rape, thus leading to a rudimentary mate-protectorate and then to patriarchy. Women became property, acquired either through raiding other tribes or purchasing a daughter from a father in one's own tribe. Rape entered the law as a property crime. Brownmiller insists that to this day the law treats rape primarily as a violation of male rights of possession. Today rape is aggression against the female's "owner" as well as a reminder of male dominance.

In piling up historical and anthropological data, Brownmiller paints a convincing and awesome portrait of men's cruelty to women. The ancient Babylonians and Hebrews routinely executed married rape victims along with those who attacked them. The Hebrews also stoned to death any virgin raped within the city walls--on grounds that sound suspiciously modern: if the virgin had not wanted the sex, she would have screamed and been rescued in time. An Assyrian whose virgin daughter was raped was entitled to gain justice by raping the attacker's wife. The chivalry of medieval knights included the notion that unescorted women of the nobility could not be molested, but women of lower station were fair game.

In war, Brownmiller argues, women are usually the biggest losers--the targets of savage rape, mutilation and torture, or simply part of the natural rewards enjoyed by invaders. She also sees rape as a conscious military tactic to break the will of a civilian population (e.g., the actions of the German army in Belgium and France at the start of World War I). Gang rape appears throughout history as a recurring punishment. The Mundurucu Indians of Brazil prescribed gang rape for any woman who spied on the sacred musical instruments used by men. Missourians gang-raped Mormon women in driving the sect out of the state in 1838.

Among some American bike and youth gangs today, gang rape is standard punishment for infractions by females.

The rape of males in prison is also used by Brownmiller to help advance her thesis: rape is primarily an act of power, not of sex. Most penal experts agree that rape is part of the system of establishing the power structure in many jails; a prisoner will either rape or be raped. Sodomy is so important to prison society, Brownmiller says, that even if prisoners were allowed sex with visiting wives or girl friends, homosexual rape would continue.

Brownmiller is ingenious in discerning the pro-rape message in today's culture: rock stars who feature abuse of females in their routines, comic books that dwell on images of bound women, men's magazines and women's romance magazines that feed rape fantasies, the obvious hostility to women that frequently shows up in male pornography, much of it devoted to bondage and sadism. In Roger Vadim's recent film Charlotte, the heroine voluntarily submits to murder during sex. (Last week there was growing suspicion that some film producers were outdoing Vadim's fantasies; New York police and the FBI revealed that they were investigating persistent reports that underworld figures are discreetly, and at prices as high as $1,500, renting out "snuff films"--pornographic movies culminating in the actual murder of a woman.) The depth of such anti-female hostility in great numbers of normal, well-adjusted males is poorly understood by men. As Germaine Greer writes: "The men who do cruel things to women are not a class apart; they are not totally in capable of relating to women."

But in supplying a theory for under standable female resentment, Brown-miller has politicized rape in a chilling way. Rape, she insists, is somehow a conscious conspiracy among all men.

Men are the enemy, and the horrible rapes at My Lai were just incidents in "the casual continuing war against women." The line between psychopaths and normal men--all members of the same team--is erased. Rape is the real basis of the family, monogamy or any other exclusive sexual relationship be tween men and women. In sum: Brownmiller's analysis of rape may have less to do with the problem itself than with the sour antimale, anti-family attitudes currently fashionable among militant feminists.

While many of those who have studied rapists and their victims may not accept Brownmiller's heavy ideological breathing about male conspiracy, they would agree that the cultural ideal of the aggressive male has something to do with the rape rate.

They have also long accepted the the ory that hostility toward women is an important ingredient in rape.

All habitual rapists "have developed an anger and contempt for women," says Nicholas Groth, chief psychologist of the Massachusetts Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sexually Dan gerous Persons. But he sees the core defect as "a sense of emptiness--of being nothing, and therefore having no regard for himself or for others. When you don't have anything else--job success, friend ship, family ties--your last resort for creating your own identity is sexual aggression."

In studies of the rapists sent to the center over the past 16 years, Groth and his colleagues have identified four types of the act: displaced rape (brutalizing of women to strike back at a female in the rapist's past); compensating rape (an attempt to bury insecurities by controlling a woman, and sometimes trying to impress her with sexual prowess during rape); narcissistic rape (self-gratification rather than deep hostility, as in the case of the burglar who rapes a woman who happens to be in the house he robs); and sadistic rape (sexual pleasure comes only from inflicting pain).

Frederic Storaska, who has studied more than 4,000 rape cases as executive director of the National Organization for the Prevention of Rape and Assault, believes that there are two broad categories of rapists: the man who feels inferior, puts women on a pedestal and rapes to increase his own sense of worth; and the man who actually thinks women are "asking for it." Like the feminists, Storaska considers the principal cause of rape to be male aggressiveness, fostered by "the overall pressure our competitive society puts on its male contingent, giving men the impression that all things are there for the taking." Storaska is pessimistic about any attempts to curb rape by enacting tough new laws. "We have to change attitudes on juries," he says.

Feminists agree that juries remain a troublesome problem in their anti-rape drive, a point that is also supported by Judge Lawrence H. Cooke of the New York State court of appeals. Says Cooke: "The defense rarely ever waives a jury trial, knowing that the jury is an ally, not an enemy. Juries, which are often male-dominated, are extremely reluctant to convict." So are a surprising number of female jurors. Many middle-class women jurors prefer not to believe young, braless and freewheeling rape victims. In particular, the myth that victims somehow provoke and accept rape is still very much alive. "In our many years of work with the sexual offender," reports Psychologist Groth and Co-Researcher Ann Wolbert Burgess, "we have yet to find a genuine case of sexual provocation on the part of a victim."

The dilemma for women is that they are still unlikely to win a rape conviction if they cannot present evidence of a struggle with the rapist, though fighting back may bring mutilation or murder. In an extreme example of this bias, a one-armed Chicago woman who had been raped at gunpoint was asked accusingly by the defense attorney: "Did you even try to grab the gun?" Yet researchers increasingly agree with the feminist advice to fight back unless the attacker is armed. Says Clinical Psychologist James Selkin, director of the Denver General Hospital's Violence Research Unit: "A potential rapist looks for a woman who is vulnerable to attack." In Selkin's view, an unarmed rapist who approaches a woman on a dark street, seizes her and says, "Don't scream," is usually testing the potential victim by asking, in effect, "Can you be intimidated?" His advice:

scream, kick or flee instantly--since he has not yet committed a crime, the rapist can back down and pick a less troublesome victim.

Some women report success in engaging the rapist in calm conversation.

One Florida woman began chattering about the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Apparently stunned--or perhaps just bored--by her tales of the book, the assailant left without raping her.

Despite the risk, the signs are that more and more women are inclined to fight back. In her book, The Politics of Rape, Diana Russell, a Mills College sociologist, gives a dramatic example of their growing pugnacity: three women--angry at a man who boasted that he had committed rape--sought him out, punched him in the genitals and beat him up. "I'd like to see more women hit back or hit first," said one of the women. "I think women should learn how to use guns, and I think they should carry them in the streets. And if they are harassed, they should pull them out, and if that doesn't work and a man continues to harass them, then they should shoot him."

Brownmiller, too, insists that it is time for women to fight back. But she is less interested in individual action than in defining the issue politically and forcing society to act. "My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history," she writes. "Now we must deny it a future."

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