RAPE REALITY, RAPE FANTASY

...They are mistaken, because ultimately this choice undercuts the very values Ms...

...Brownmiller also argues, from the evidence of movies, tabloid treatments of rape, and the romance-confession magazines read by millions, that the rapist is by no means a sheer aberration from the patterns of mass culture...

...Unfortunately, I think her argument is silly...

...Could this be true, I wondered...

...the twentieth century, for many good reasons, is all too prone to think ill of itself...

...After thirty-five pages of carefully destroying common myths about 'The Police-Blotter Rapists," for example, the author spins out her own:the rapist carries out "an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force...

...To give "housework" such a world-historical character would probably have seemed laughable a few years ago, as it would have to propose the average muscular differential between males and females or the rate of maternal death as central factors in our understanding of human relations...

...the fertilized ovum is human life...

...Policemen and folk wisdom have it that the victim of rape is only -a woman who changed her mind or a prostitute who didn't get paid...

...Unlike, the murderer, who is, oddly enough, thought of as "normal" though wicked, and yet who stands apart on a host of indices, the profile of the rapist fits statistically between that of the man who commits aggravated assault and the man who commits robbery...

...Perhaps a similar leap of imagination and empathy will overtake her in regard to men who have feared for and suffered with women they love...

...Why not say, the gist of the matter is a spirit-filled life...

...That is not Susan Brownmiller's stopping point...

...He is apt to be around nineteen years old, of lower socio-economic class, have a prior arrest record for crimes other than rape, attack women of his own race, and commonly operate not in a secretive, solitary way but as part of a group or gang...

...And yet the essence of new knowledge is often the insight that what we had previously believed peripheral is in reality central...

...unbelieving policemen...

...even more so...

...Freudiantheorists of masochistic female rape fantasies have hardly been more helpful...

...One need not disparage the liturgy by suggesting that it is not everyone's answer to living fully and faithfully in the contemporary world...

...As Brownmiller sees it," wrote the admiring reviewer in the New York Times Book Review, "rape is the hidden foundation for too much of our social order, the cardinal act of defilement by which men assert possession and control over the other half of humanity...

...but it may be like auto accidents, clearly related to the way we organize our society without being an important force in that organization-more of an effect than a cause, except of multiplied instances of suffering, injury, death and heartbreak...

...That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation...

...In this book men appear almost entirely as rapists...

...In the meantime, does it all matter...

...As far as I can tell, there is a logical fallacy in it-that is, she is generalizing from a part to the whole...

...Keifer is correct about the often bland, often saccharine, often superficial state of contemporary liturgical reform...

...If hard cases make bad law, exceptional atrocities surely make bad social thought...

...Brownmiller confesses that her book represents a conversion from an earlier disinterest in and lack of sympathy for the women who were victims of rape...

...He errs, I believe, when he speculates that a liturgy rooted in a theology of "proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes" or a Jo-hannine theology of "entry into the liturgy of the heavenly court" will provide a universally satisfactory remedy...

...The rapist is not the "psycho schizophrenic beset by timidity, sexual deprivation, and a domineering wife or mother," an image inherited from the downright silly psychoanalytic literature, typically as strong in assertion as it is weak in evidence...

...The fertilized egg is a human being, needing only time and care to grow...

...The personhood of the fetus is no more "a matter of faith" than is the person-hood of one who would choose death over life because he or she was not sure just what life was...

...Now we all know that the arm and leg are human parts as well, but neither they, nor the sperm or the egg are human beings...

...I suspect these statements are dem-onstrably false...

...the facts about interracial rape in America are hopelessly confused by political presuppositions...

...the hundreds of thousands which occur yearly in the U.S...

...To begin with, it should be said that in all its four hundred and fifty pages of exhausting and painful detail, Against Our Will contains not the slightest evidence to support this thesis...

...The liturgy, with or without a return to the good tidings of the gospel, may contribute to this spirit-filled life-it may even be its principal stimulus...

...But it, unfortunately, may not help...

...No wonder that of all convicted criminals, rapists are the most likely to insist they received a bum rap...

...Why did reviewers not only tolerate but welcome them...

...Women in a world without rapists would still have much to fear, just as men, who by and large live in a world without rapists, have much to fear...

...I find myself persuaded, as Rosemary Ruether states in an article on 'The First and Final Proletariat," that "Housework...

...Is the problem with the liturgy only a matter of renewed language or of re-educating the people, or of some other yet to be found pastoral objective...

...JOSEPH W. DREW Associate Provost, Rutgers University Logical Fallacy Denton, Tex...

...Yet he too apparently assented, overwhelmed by this "exhaustive and detailed study...

...Why must the totality of men, even the totality of Christian men, need a liturgy (with all due respects to Professor Pleasants' thoughts on the liturgy as a significant provider of adult filial needs...

...For we will have to set aside all those other millions of acts, some heroic and unforgettable, some daily and taken for granted, of self-sacrifice, of endurance, nurturing, of fidelity, of care for the young, the weak, the vulnerable, which make up the History, and histories, of men and women...

...In my judgment, they misunderstand the/ extent and character of the problem...

...They are parts of human beings...

...In a majority of cases, he does not use a weapon but terrorizes with physical force or by sheer numbers...

...On the contrary, chapter after chapter, when they are not documenting how rape is the act of particular men in particular circumstances, demonstrate that women are not the targets of a universal war of intimidation launched by men but the victimized noncomba-tants in a number of vicious wars-of nations, of classes, of races-between men...

...There are no books on the joy of sex, the greater joy of more sex, the joyier more of sexier joy...

...Feminists have already accomplished something similar...

...Perhaps that is why Ms...

...But Brownmiller's greatest contribution is in establishing the continuity between rape and other facets of American culture...

...Part of the answer, I am afraid, is to be found in a constriction of feeling...

...It does matter, and profoundly...

...Are these not simply hyperboles operating to catch the attention of reviewers and indeed of potential readers like myself...

...Rape may not be like lightning, virtually a random danger...

...Brownmiller's thesis: "Well, of course, one muttered to oneself, rape is awful, deplorable, an unalloyed tarnish on the human condition...

...We can choose rape as the prism through which to view the relations between men and women...

...I am sympathetic with Keifer's main position: a return to the gospel, a concentration on the truths that set men free should quicken and galvanize a goodly number of inert Christians...

...If we make this choice, the evidence will be there, although the evidence may not demand it...

...husbands who reject their assaulted wives...

...Perhaps that is also why reviewers are willing to pass lightly over this choice...

...As for the "fact" that all women are in a constant state of intimidation, one can derive it only by a doctrinaire act of definition, the way the Freudian theorists whom Brown-miller criticizes arrive at the "fact" that all women instinctively enjoy unconscious rape fantasies...

...At heart, Man is a killer, or men are rapists...

...Brown-miller's evidence will not survive the eventual scrutinizing by specialists in the various branches of history, criminology, sociology, psychology and law where she has had to seek out data...

...You can't transfer treatment of parts to treatment of the whole and expect to make sense...

...But now, specifically, rape...

...Rape, she writes, "from prehistoric times to the present . . . has played a critical function...

...mass propagandists who either use rape for political ends, propagate the values which support it, or dismiss its reality...

...To the Editors: I read Jimmye Kim-mey's letter of IS August with great interest...

...But so are cancer, forest fires, and the sundry other disasters that people have been heir to...

...What first appeared as a problem in "career opportunities," the province of high school counselors and government agencies, feminists have shown to be a problem of language, child rearing, identity, and division of labor, the province of entire cultures...

...Under the strain, I believe, it collapses into falsehood...

...Judging from the enthusiastic reviews, the book-club response, the extra printings, Against Our Will, subtitled "Men, Women and Rape," if not a best-seller, will certainly be influential...

...The first question is especially puzzling, for one of Ms...

...LAURA B. KENNELLY Steinfell (Cont) of the prerogative of male needs, of the woman who "asks for it," or of cosmic retribution for undue glamor serve to reinforce and excuse the rapist's act...

...She strives to rescue her topic from the coils of political ideology: reports of rape are typically seized upon as propaganda in wartime, then blanketly disbelieved afterwards...

...is the invisible economic base of male autonomy, mobility, and concentrated energy at work...

...She may recognize that a dogmatic formula reducing their experience to mere concern about "tainted goods" will not suffice, and that to suggest they are secretly complicit with the maraudings of SS troops and Hell's Angels is a cruel insult...

...We finally learned what foreign observers like de Tocqueville had immediately perceived, that the unhappy relations between blacks and whites were at the heart of this nation's experience...

...The myths of male superiority, (Continued on page 573) munity...

...Four hundred and fifty pages after asking myself that question, I too can testify that Susan Brownmiller has written a book which is, as the reviewers said, chilling, monumental, exhaustive, detailed, absorbing and original...

...Nor does he usually kill his victim-and whether he does seems to bear no relationship to her resistance or submissiveness...

...Why then should she burden the problem with a new layer of dogmatism...

...It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women [the emphasis is the author's] in a state of fear...

...In the '60s, for example, liberals learned that racial discrimination was more than America's "unfinished business," an item unfortunately placed at the bottom of freedom's agenda, terribly important, yes, but somehow external to our nation's central character...

...Brownmiller's book is obviously meant to serve, and in so many ways does...

...At this point, however, her book convinces me that rape is not as peripheral a phenomenon as I had believed...

...Brownmiller, having woven a perfectly taut argument, felt impelled to pull it one notch tighter...

...It is most chilling, perhaps, in its unremitting documentation of the wartime victimization of women by troops setting out either to terrorize enemy populations or celebrate conquest...

...of which rape is but a part...

...I am even more sympathetic with his caution that no amount of ritual can substitute for the Tightness of a man's perception and direction...

...A single rape is horrible enough to contemplate...

...In any case, these statements are at least demonstrably unproven...

...Why did the author make them...

...You could care for a sperm, an egg, an arm, or a leg for 1,000 years and you still would not raise a human being...

...Instead, Brownmiller argues on the basis of sociological data about thousands of rapes, "The typical American perpetrator of forcible rape is little more than an aggressive, hostile youth who chooses to do violence to women...

...A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men...

...Brownmiller's qualities is a skeptical common sense...

...Which raises two questions...

...But that does not mean it is central either...

...Within the miserable patterns of American crime, the rapist is unfortunately not an oddity...

...patriarchs who must revenge the damaging of their female "property...

...We can take them as the fundamental reality in our view of humanity-if we choose...

...It is always possible that Ms...

...Rapists "function as anonymous agents of terror...

...It is not surprising therefore that Brownmiller neglects her own thesis for long stretches of the book, yanking it back in the spotlight at the end of a chapter...

...There may soon be, however, a bestseller about rape...

...Ralph Keifer prescribes as a remedy a strong dosage of the "normative theology" of John, Paul and Augustine insisting that the diluted modern efforts at liturgy fail to help anyone...

...But why elevate a peripheral abnormality, no matter how terrible, into an organizing principle for understanding our institutions and personal relations...

...The problem seems to lie in the sentence "The sperm and ova of the human are human life...

...Why cling to the liturgy at all costs...

...And the author, Susan Brownmiller, does make rape a "basic...

...Ten years after the docu-ment on the liturgy, it seems to this writer, find us still saying too much for too many people...

...More than that, history is laden with millions of acts of killing, torture, child abuse, enslavement...

...What are we to make of this claim...

...I wish he had "stretched out" his possibilities a little further...

...As a friend cheerily observed on this situation, in a time of recession people get down to basics...

...The nineteenth century, in the West, was all too prone to think well of itself...

...Nor is she timid about offending liberal ideologies with her law-and-order stance, her opposition to the legalization of prostitution, her desire to ban pornography...

...The liturgy can be a procrustean bed on which some contemporary men can't find rest...

...A few days later the reviewer in the daily Times did blink momentarily at Ms...