In Defense of Rape
Clark, Helen S.
Helen S. Clark hi Defense of Rape • • Rape is getting a bad name these days. It is assailed in best sellers, lectures and conferences, newspaper features, and on TV specials. The...
...The feminine psyche has a peculiar Twist which translates strong emotions nto physical pain and relishes the drama .f that pain...
...We will travel across the moors to the hollow he has marked out...
...So you must realize, all you skeptics with suspicions of social indoctrination, I was the Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 21 not conditioned to be a female—I was simply born one, and it would be as foolish for me to deny this as it would be for a man to deny that he would really rather be a cowboy...
...He is bothered )y the whippings and torture inflicted on he Marquis and states rather shrewishly hat "you can see the book is by a lady author...
...She knows women and women's romantic notions and she writes romances directly to these notions...
...It is not a piece of frumpery, but gracefully executed fiction, as evident in its elegant opening: "They were sitting in a hell, one night, the Marquis and his special friends...
...The second curious fact is that Germaine Greer, a woman who ought to know better, isn't smart enough to understand what's going on here...
...She reported to me that the exam began with the doctor exclaiming that she must be the one with the fungal infection...
...What I wish to say is that the rituals of lovemaking are a stylized game, regardless of the setting...
...And they do it better than real life or tranquilizers...
...She frequently has eyes too far apart and a mouth a bit too wide...
...Lolah Burford has merely translated the respectable flirtations into rape and the final physical act into spiritual conquest...
...Upon a moment's reflection she understood and protested that she had merely been reading a romance...
...But before I explain this difference, I will tell you the third curious fact...
...The titillating mush of Cartland and her ilk is supplying an imaginative need but their hypocrisy limits the gratification to that which can be gained from innuendo: bypass the innuendo and you short-circuit the whole process...
...In Fact, though, this eighteenth-century pastiche is more sentimental than Richard6on and more...
...Burford has written three other books...
...He performs so poorly as a husband that the father packs him off to a French pre-Revolutionary Bastille cell where he almost dies and is finally released...
...She can on occasion be a hellion, but if so, has a basic sensitivity which pulls her through...
...I would like to be raped...
...She is generally misunderstood, or at least underestimated, by her family and associates and is always a virgin...
...The story is perfect...
...The first is a true story which I hesitate to tell, but which underlines so succinctly what I am stumblingly trying to say, that its indelicacy is justified...
...My father called us "you guys...
...He has met no one whom he has loved—ardent affairs may splotch his past, but not real love...
...Of course it is all impossible, but it will happen to me, and when it happens, I will be a virgin...
...the final kiss as he bends my small body to his own and the flush of my face at the magic of the embrace...
...But this lust and mush is the only genre which does not attract both sexes...
...To discredit the ritual is to deny the truth, and if Miss Greer wishes to do that she should work on inventing other truths...
...Men do not particularly like or understand Vice Avenged...
...It is a man saying to a woman that she is so desirable that he will defy all rules of honor and decency in order to have her...
...They stretched so calmly, in that still cool light of May as if they had no beginning and would have no ending...
...They are playing to a common human quirk that is a little more than the yen for excitement...
...it translates these illusions into actual, if not particularly real, events...
...She's wrong, of course...
...The honesty in both authors is the same honesty on which all romantic literature is based: that there exists an element of regressive fantasy which can be released through certain associations...
...He will carry me down the ladder and onto his horse...
...Its own subtitle is A Vforal Tale, but the moral seems to be that even a sane modern writer can't approach the essentially balanced worldriew of even the most aberrant of eightenth-century neurotics...
...It is a Regency romance, and a very strange little book...
...I suspect she thinks she's getting old...
...She does not have to be beautiful—a significant point, considering the vulnerabilities of the audience...
...The novels are usually written in the third person, since things have to happen to the heroine which she does not understand, and the restrictions of the first person strain the necessary naivete...
...As any librarian will attest, cowboy novels and tough-guy adventures are read by women as well as men...
...Female violence is inward—torture, beatings, rape...
...And I read these books...
...Her treatment of sex is slightly removed and very delicate, pure emotion, all interwoven with physical pain...
...But once again, lest you misunderstand: I was raised by two homesteading parents in the Alaskan woods...
...Rape as a ritual of love exists in the fantasy world of every woman...
...But let me tell you a secret—chances are she really did...
...Males do things to other bodies...
...There is generally no real kissing till the very end, but he might touch her arm and often rakes her face with smoulder-eyes, which brings blood rushing to her cheeks...
...That there is a strong yen to reaffirm those rituals through romantic literature only points to a commonality in women that Miss Greer should be emphasizing rather than rejecting...
...A book was published in 1971 called Vice Avenged by Lolah Burford (Macmillan, now available in Fawcett paperback...
...There is no "short-circuiting" at all...
...gray eyes watching me across the ballroom floor...
...The tension of the love affair can be The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 19 built around any number of pesky disturbances: our heroine falls in love with a highwayman (gray eyes) who has saved her from abduction by an evil earl...
...The more effective it is in doing so, or in other words, the less it approaches reality and the more it plays to individual illusion, then the better it is...
...well, sadistic than the Divine Marquis...
...These books are all lavishly set in different centuries and are totally improbable...
...Women escape inward to that curious core of irrationality that confuses and bewilders not only all men, butalso a few twentieth-century women...
...I have looked some time now for a gray-eyed man and have concluded that it is a genetic characteristic peculiar only to romance novels...
...The gray-eyed Marquis, in his boredom, accepts a wager from his friends to rape a virgin...
...Miss Cartland can rip up a few dresses too—the bad earl again—and can even hint that the lace covering the breasts has been forcibly removed...
...But only women read romances—an interesting observation since it hints that the rituals of love which are reaffirmed in both every romance and every reader's heart are peculiar only to women, that the mystery of the female (which is really quite simple) is, all protestations aside, really not too fascinating to men...
...ision of Stephen (Macmillan, 1972) is a antasy of a young boy being tortured by is father and slipping back and forth into ifferent centuries during the torture...
...Or: "She lay so limp, he was surprised at the lack of spirit, forgetting the force of his grim threats, and he wondered if she had fainted...
...And now back to rape...
...I want a Marquis to come to my second-story window at night with a ladder...
...Heyer novels end with the hero enveloping the heroine in his strong arms and confessing all-consuming desire...
...They cast about for further amusement, idly...
...It conveniently happens that every little cell in her body is attuned to this charge, and, as with all the really big things in life—God, growing up, death, etc.—intelligent beings have a tendency to ritualize the things their cells, nerve endings, and hormones so disturbingly tell them to do...
...Their novels are compelling because they relax the defenses and satisfy that same yearning for melodrama that Zane Grey satisfies for men...
...I and my little friends swapped True Confessions back and forth because we were randy and curious...
...He will put on a mask and stuff a handkerchief in my mouth...
...Through enticement he must be shown that he desperately needs to marry, or in other words, make love to her...
...The ritual merely lends grace to the task and disguises the enormity of its truth...
...This man is jaded from years of high living and too many women...
...It will be quick, and that would rather suit me, but I warn you frankly you will find it rather shattering and it will frankly hurt.' " Cressida chooses to cooperate, but asks him to wait because she is frightened...
...We—my mother, sisters, father, and I—pulled stumps every year...
...Edward, Edward (Macmillan, 1973) is a strangetale of homosexuality, love, subjection, and torture between a young boy and an older man...
...But it is such a relief in this world of men and women where one must act with taste and discretion to allow these rather honest feelings their just, if not real due, and so nice to offer these shabby cells and foolish sets of nerve synapses a bit of indulgence every now and then...
...He may have cruel eyes, but we'll take care of that...
...Without romantic urges I would be a mere animal and I cannot feel that this it demeaning or that it will force me to do more than my share of the dishwashing...
...Miss Greer should realize that one just cannot get around the truth that romance is more important to women than to men, and since women are so strikingly unique in maintaining this interest, she should begin to wonder why...
...He accomplishes the act, is found out by themaiden's father and brothers who subsequently beat and torture him until he agrees to marriage...
...he discovers a plot against his life and suspects that she is part of it...
...He wanders around France until he discovers that he loves his wife and comes home to her...
...These women should take it easy and read Georgette Heyer...
...The programming is there, nagging and insistent, and I wouldn't dare, for the sake of my sanity, attempt to defy all my little cells when they tell me to cast a commensurate sidelong glance...
...Male violence is outward-directedposses go after bandits, people get shot, battles roar...
...A naughty historical novel, by Harry, of the school that used to flood the flaccid fifties...
...She and Burford aren't all that scary...
...The syntax is slightly off, the phrasing almost jagged, and the reader somewhat disoriented...
...If you leave the Housewives' Handbook [on Selective Promiscuity] lying about, your daughter may never read Cartland or Heyer with any credulity...
...The point is totally superfluous...
...Flowers with a fond note from an anonymous admirer...
...They were tired of cards, the hour was close to four, and they had tried a touch of the new weed that certain of the more unconventional bucks were using, in place of snuff...
...I have not discovered these books by loitering shamefully near the bookstand at K-Mart and watching selections by less intelligent and more dowdy women...
...Miss Heyer does none of this, but the bad earl can force a kiss and always get slapped for it, which, drat it anyway, enflames him even more...
...The fellow is just another poor guy ill befuddled by the mystery of the female...
...a light touch on my silken-covered arm...
...He knows hunting, horses, and boxing...
...In light romance the heroine actually gives herself up to the hero at the first encounter...
...He calls the punishment "disproportionately lip-smacking and arduPus" and hints that Burford is a man-Rarer...
...I will be asleep...
...Now I do not want to take on Miss Greer as to whether or not women are treated fairly...
...She states: "The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography...
...her parents die and she inexplicably finds herself the ward of a gray-eyed duke whom she hates, but who curiously makes her legs go weak...
...Burford is not necessarily more honest than Heyer...
...And so these books go on, each pulling the reader into the excitement of the seduction...
...Mary Stewart, Agatha Christie, and the like, shoot up a lot of people, but it's all very dry and merely gets the plot moving...
...At that moment, since he felt not the slightest desire for her, his presence was infinitely restful in the quiet night...
...She is the queen of Regency romance, a subgenre which needs only Regency England, a few titled lords and ladies, and lots of manners...
...Perhaps they recognize some kind of kinship...
...He showed her the patterns on the moon, and what stars could be seen, still in its haze, and which planets had been out—described the little animals that were about them in the woods—chatted lazily about this and that...
...He is wealthy and titled, preferably a duke...
...Barbara Cartland, Joan Aiken, Sergeanne Golon, Jane Aiken Hodge, Dorothy Eden, Georgette Heyer—romance writers —the list of them goes on and on, and I thank them all for their struggles...
...He will carry me to the bed of bearskin rugs and furs which he has laid out...
...The veteran reader knows instantly when the hero comes on stage because he sneers a bit and has gray eyes...
...Because of the risk of ounding a bit foolish, I shall not even Liscuss childbearing...
...The recently-published Women's Organizations and Leaders Directory lists 298 organizations and people under the subject "rape" as well as 177 rape crisis centers, in which, I suspect, few words are said in favor of it...
...A glance at any paperback bookstand proves that the publishing industry relies heavily on novels of romance...
...Burford is not the only woman to throw a lot of physical pain into a love story: Golon's Angelique series, Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Glascow ' s Barren Ground, Bronte's Jane Eyre, Oates' Garden of Earthly Delights, Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, to name a few, use pain in this particular female fashion...
...In reality, they were a kind of bird of prey, the lines of the downcast nose severe and beaked, the glint in the eye hooded under an effect of ease...
...The author even does funny things with sentences every now and then: "But the house was dark, the moon not yet up above the trees, and casting patterned shadows in which he could walk, hardly visible even to a watcher, had there been one...
...She devotes an entire chapter in her Female Eunuch to these romances, and declares: "If women's liberation movements are to accomplish anything at all, they will have to cope with phenomena like the million-dollar Cartland industry...
...Vice Avenged is dedicated to GeorgetteHeyer...
...I will describe a typical Georgette Heyer novel to you...
...Burford chooses the most elegantly stylized of all forms of romance—Heyer's Regency romance—and merely extends it into violence...
...Freeman simply has not recognized this violence for what it is and has even slipped into the trap of getting a little nervous because of it...
...She is a scholar, and though her real love is fifteenth-century England, about which she has also written, she is at her best with the Regency romance...
...My mother lamented when we discovered lipstick...
...22 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976...
...But lest you misunderstand, let me tell you briefly about myself...
...We shot moose and packed in the carcasses...
...She always has a mind of her own and is more intelligent than all men, save one...
...That's a different problem, and I do not deny that it needs handling...
...I would find little else to say about these foolish books except for three curious things, all connected, even though they may not seem so at a cursory reading...
...I go to business lunches, and even on occasion (now getthis) pick up the tab...
...With apologies for the obvious, I must say that it is the primary purpose of all animals to perpetuate themselves and that furthermore it is the responsibility of the female to see to it that the job gets done...
...Novels of romance are not a flirtation with pornography and in fact are just the opposite since the purpose of pornographic literature is to describe reality for those who aren't fully enjoying it...
...Women use violence in fiction for the same reasons men do...
...He will make me understand what he means to do and will tell me: " 'But how I go about it can be in large part your decision...
...He gambles, but not to abandon, and is not above a duel now and then...
...My salary hovers in the top five percent of female workers in the country...
...The two types of fiction can achieve the same ends, as my friend on the doctor's table so correctly observed, but pornography can wear thin, since it is, after all, only physical...
...an invitation to the dance penned hastily on cream-colored parchment...
...I shall have to work into the subject...
...Men escape outward—across oceans, over mountains, to the prairie, out west...
...At first he stayed some inches from her, 20 The Alternative American Spectator June/July 1976 making no move to touch her, talking gently to her, mainly nonsense...
...It is not supposed to be real, since its honesty lies in triggering and exploiting illusion...
...I want it to happen to me exactly as it happened to Cressida in Vice Avenged...
...gathered her onto the fold of his arms, and lay there breathing quietly, holding her lightly...
...It was reported that she has become the darling of the San Francisco homosexuals, something which I'm not prepared to fit into my earlier statement about how no men read romances...
...I am waiting for it...
...I cannot recall one female novelist who described a beating, for instance, that happened outside of her own character...
...I pass and receive the word from my equally tasteful and intelligent colleagues and friends, and I know from firsthand experience that scratch any female and you will find the flutter: we all wear French cambric and scalloped lace with much more grace than we wear sweatshirts and blue jeans, and we waltz ever so much better than we march in street demonstrations...
...The house should be a country mansion...
...There is a stock plot which no reader would ever want altered...
...I will be dreadfully frightened and in my fear will only cling to him more tightly since his strength is the only antidote to that fear...
...At first glance it would appear that the plot departs drastically from the standard convention, but it does not...
...They sat like beautiful birds, in their bright shining colours, their hair elaborately dressed, their long graceful fingers lying careless on the table among the equipment of the game, seeming frail, their hard and very real power masked under the lace...
...Although reason would have told her still to be afraid, these things had their way and gentled her, until her heart stilled, and she rested quietly, even drowsily in his arms on his breast...
...We cut down trees and dragged them from the woods to our home...
...But that would be a big job: it might be possible eventually to breed a female who will blush when entering a sperm bank, but the excessive scientific energy hardly seems worth the effort...
...They do things...
...I'd also wager that not one policeman in the country would dare think, much less say, that any rape victim really wanted it to happen...
...They provide a rational understanding of the irrational...
...She claims that Heyer and Cartland strain the credulity, which of course they do, as do Hardy, the Brontes, Poe, Mrs...
...One Heyer heroine was a read dowd and got away with it...
...Romanticism is wish-fulfillment literature...
...I still receive enough proposals of marriage not to worry about it, and I am very pretty...
...There's just you and 1, and if there's no one here to help, there's also no one here to watch or know how it is done.' He paused...
...Burford is not attempting reality...
...Then after a while he put a folded rug under his head, and reaching out...
...I positively cannot put them down and I must even ration them out to my seething soul, lest my mind turn to gray slush and my sensitivity to throbbing tastelessness...
...She is merely more direct...
...We built cabins...
...Some of Miss Heyer's imitators, Barbara Cartland especially, can get down to a kiss or two before the end...
...Miss Heyer is the best at it because she writes gracefully, can sustain tension interminably with perfect taste, and provides plenty of humor and detail...
...Martin Levin of the New York Times said, "Gad, sir, what have we here...
...I wish another Burford novel to be dedicated to Germaine Greer, who I am sure is slightly puzzled that the Housewives' Handbook on Selective Promiscuity just doesn't do the same thing for her that Heyer novels used to do...
...viacLyon (Macmillan, 1974) is a wild ronance about a young virgin who is viorntly raped and who follows the rapist ground the world, selling her body countess times in order to save him...
...Now if your pride, your virtue, honour, whatever you want to call the thing, demands a forcible rape, I can oblige you...
...They all understand the female ritual of love, and they play it to its fullest...
...According to the author's note, it is "an 18th century fairy tale, frankly unserious, frankly unrealistic, for a realistic, serious age...
...and rape, ah rape...
...I handle grievance procedures...
...A rather independent and flamboyant friend of mine in her early forties was once reading a Georgette Heyer novel in a doctor's office while waiting for her yearly female check-up...
...A Richard Freeman in the Chicago Tribune "Book World" said: "On the face of it, Vice Avenged would seem to be a unique cross between the subtitles of Samuel Richardson's 1740 tear-jerker, Pamela (or Virtue Rewarded) and the Marquis de Sade's 1791 rib-smasher, Justine (or Virtue Punished...
...It is the indulgence of childhood illusions...
...I shall be able to read romances forever...
...It is the attempt to exploit emotion through physical action, and since the most physical thing that can happen to a body is, with the exception of lovemaking, pain, it is inevitable that violence finds its way into all sorts of fiction...
...I am a woman executive—I hire and fire...
...Shelley, and Byron, among others...
...Females have things done to their own...
...On the other hand, the hero is always handsome...
...Prurient interest and romantic urges are as far apart as are, say, Increase Mather and Jacqueline Susann...
...Years later, she thought to her surprise, she might name these moments as among the most peaceful and most pleasant she would spend...
...she is an orphan with no title and no inheritance and thus seemingly unapproachable to a duke into whose path she somehow stumbles...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
