Abnormality As a Norm

...She does not mention the alternative anthropological hypotheses that tribal woman may have been viewed as man's equal because of her little understood procreative power, or that her fertility and industry may have made her an object of male worship and not a captive of his militancy...

...She even commends the recent work of criminologists who have placed rape at the center of a "subculture of violence" formed by "the poor, the disenfranchised, the black"- or "the thwarted, the inarticulate, and the angry"-whose values counter those of the dominant culture and whose only expression of power may be physical...

...The female victim of rape has been forced to offer evidence of noncompliance-in effect, to prove her innocence...

...Thus, in her portrait of slavery and in her more substantial material on rape in war-from Troy to Vietnam and Bangladesh-she can maintain that rape was not simply peripheral to the violence, but she fails to show that it was something beyond a symptom of the general civil and social disorder...

...between anonymous strangers, husband and wife, father and child...

...Contrary to her testimony, it is generally held that institutionalized slave breeding scarcely existed in the South and that slave marriage was widely encouraged, along with other Christian ritual...

...Yet the next sentence contains the significant qualification that this is true only if you happen to be part of the lower socio-economic classes and happen to live in a neighborhood that fits the description of a ghetto...

...The situation has been further complicated because theory and reality have not always corresponded in the American system of justice...

...in the ghetto and in the prison...

...Author's italics...

...Moving on to the American past, Brownmiller tells us the experience of the slave South is a "perfect study of rape...

...Had she really done her homework here, she would have had to acknowledge that most historians writing today find evidence that the sexual exploitation of female slaves was tempered by sexual inhibitions, religious constraints, and the presence of a large resident white population...

...This is not a mere academic quibble...

...at strength, and at power...

...Brownmiller gathers more data on violent sexuality in human history than anyone could ever have conceived existed, as if the sheer weight of the numbers would convince...

...Historians now emphasize the conflict between desire and aversion that shaped the typical Southern slave-holder's attitude toward his black female property...

...One comes away accepting the tragic reality of rape and the author's contention that it has been ignored by male historians, yet skeptical of the meaning she assigns to it in the context of the male-female dilemma...

...Nevertheless, the frequent abuse of these theories in the courtroom hardly seems adequate cause for Brownmiller's unrestricted tirade against Freudianism...

...It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear...

...She doesn't comment on today's high-brow pornography, which tends to display woman as man's "playmate," and sex as guiltless childlike fun...

...But that doesn't exactly make him your everyday kind of guy, either, as is suggested by her conclusion: "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.' Assuming all men are guilty, Brownmiller demands a crackdown on criminal rape that would abrogate much of what falls under the category of civil liberties, including the publication of pornography portraying unchecked male lust...

...She argues convincingly that the presumption of innocence in rapists has entailed a presumption of female complicity...

...This prompts one to examine the author's sources, listed in the back of the book, and they turn out to be a newspaper clipping about the folklore of "bride capture" in Sicily, another from the New York Times about the stone-age Tasadays of the Philippines, and a 1959 article from the American Anthropologist...

...Brownmiller begins in the primitive past, when physical strength was presumably the law of the land...

...in fact and in fiction...

...From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function...

...It is a passionate, often angry, sometimes downright nasty treatise on man's historical oppression of woman, an oppression that Brown-miller feels is rooted in the incontrovertible biological truth that only the male can initiate forcible sexual intercourse...

...on the plantation and on the frontier...

...Similarly Brownmiller notes that in personality profiles comparing criminals, the rapist falls midway between the man who commits aggravated assault and the man who commits robbery...

...She dismisses the controversial 1974 work by cliometrioians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross, whose statistics on the antebellum South indicate that sexual abuse of black women was uncommon...

...She quotes from Winthrop Jordan's towering analysis of race and slavery, White Over Black, to establish the point: "White men extended their dominion over the Negroes to the bed, where the sex act itself served as a ritualistic re-enactment of the daily pattern of social dominance...

...in war, in riot and in revolution...

...Female fear of an open season of rape, and not a natural inclination toward monogamy, motherhood or love, was probably the single causative factor in the original subjugation of woman by man," she speculates...

...Since class, race and ethnicity have historically been intertwined with criminal rape in our society, the accused has often been presumed guilty before taking the stand...

...Brownmiller barely considers, moreover, the historical literature that shares neither abolitionist fury nor Fogel and Engerman's problematically happy view of life on the ole plantation...

...When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it," she asserts at the outset...

...One cannot accept the evidence she assembles to prove that rape is a basic aspect of male-female relations unless one is willing to go along with the proposition that male sexual behavior is, by definition, pathological...

...More compelling, Brownmiller says, is a 1931 economic study of U.S...

...This is not the definitive "historical analysis" it purports to be...

...Seeking to compensate for the court's bias, liberal defense attorneys have concentrated on the psychological and sexual elements of the crime, sometimes to the extent of introducing easily misinterpreted Freudian and neo-Freudian theories about female rape fantasies...

...slave trade that leaves unchallenged the favorite arguments of 19th-century abolitionists who deliberately exploited the sexual anxieties of their Yankee constituency by dwelling upon the lasciviousness and immorality of the male slaveholder...

...She introduces the subject by announcing: "The typical American rapist might be the boy next door...

...But his words are too mild, she then declares, "a vastly inadequate description of the brutal white takeover and occupation of the black woman's body...

...Not surprisingly, many women have refused to suffer this ordeal...

...This sociological portrait, she reminds us, has supplanted a Freudian analysis favored in the 1950s of the rapist as "weirdo, psychic, schizophrenic," beset by a domineering wife or mother...

...Her difficulty is that she hasn't come to terms with what is normal and what is deviant sexual behavior-where sex ends and rape begins...

...One is left agreeing that women have been victims of sexual abuse, without being able to see the logic that links this to the norm...

...For in her vast catalogue of crimes, all the examples of rape are set in situations of violent social upheaval having more complex roots than she allows...

...What is more important, assigning guilt to every man will not put an end to rape, nor is it the wav to redress the discrimination women have suffered at the hands of judges or psychiatrists...

...10.95 Reviewed by Ellen Chesler FIVE YEARS ago, while helping to organize a feminist speak-out on rape, Susan Brownmiller made a discovery: Rape could be seen as an extraordinary historical metaphor, a fundamental "way of looking at male-female relations, at sex...

...Brownmiller's treatment of "the police blotter rapist" is another example of her problem...

...it speaks to the underlying intellectual problem of Brownmiller's book...

...What she gives us, though, is often superficial and contradictory...

...Indeed, her own scholarship seems to confirm the very argument she is seeking to refute: that rape is a dimension of social and psychological pathology, and may have little to do with the historic inequality of the sexes...

...By using rape as an analytical tool for a treatise on sexual politics, Brownmiller leads us far afield from the criminal act...

...Now, after four years of what she describes as grueling and methodical research, she has given us a book that jams the facts-against their will-into the Procrustean bed of her original "moment of revelation...

...The proof: rape in tribal and feudal societies...

...In fact, one would have thought that psychoanalysis, given its emphasis on biology as destiny and its coupling of female penis envy with male castration anxiety, would be of particular interest to her...