Spotlight on Rape

...The clashes over political solutions promoted during the recent murder trials of Joan Bird and Inez Garcia, two who abandoned the St...

...What, if any, is the connection here between thought and deed...

...Incidentally, publication of Brown-miller's book indicates an interesting shift in the popular wind: the Book of the Month Club, which bypassed The Feminine Mystique and other non-fiction by feminist intellectuals, did select Against Our Will and thus guaranteed it a large audience...

...I have been asked—by men as well as women—about Brownmiller's ideas on the confounding question of female rape fantasies...

...I, for one...

...In the past, women, whether highborn or low-born, were property to be claimed by seizure...

...ANN MARIE CUNNINGHAM Susan Brownmiller wrote this remarkable, prickly book, the first history of rape, because she changed her mind...

...Against Our Will is one firm step: ignorance of its appalling history is no longer an excuse...

...Rape literally has been an unspeakable act...

...Against Our Will accomplishes so much that I would like to call it impressive in every way...

...Breaking the silence, Brown-miller pulls rape's badly tangled story from many skeins: the Old Testament, the Iliad, military history, tribunals and propaganda, war correspondents, LeMorte d' Arthur, law texts, a diary kept by a slaveowner's wife, Eldridge Cleaver, anthropology and zoology, The Pentagon Papers, histories of the American Indian wars, records of interracial rape cases, those "baffling crossroads" of racism and sexism...

...hungered for a better answer, one less grandly political...

...Initially, Brownmiller comes across as a bit of a crank...

...Unfortunately, Brownmiller will not let the evidence make its own capable case...

...After drawing amplification from Jean Genet, Red Riding Hood, and Helene Deutsch's theories of innate female masochism, Brownmiller seems to tire and resorts to italics: "The rape fantasy exists in women as a man-made iceberg...

...more recently, "Women have been raped by men, more often by gangs of men, for many of the same reasons that blacks were lynched by gangs of whites: as group punishment for being uppity, for getting out of line, for failing to recognize 'one's place,' for assuming sexual freedoms, or for behavior no more provocative than walking down the wrong road at night in the wrong part of town and presenting a convenient, isolated target for group hatred and rage...

...Basically a violent means of overpowering and humiliating women or other men, rape has been used as "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear...

...Ann Marie Cunningham is a contributing editor of More...

...A woman who always walked quickly and carried a confident look, a civil libertarian whose sympathies went out to the accused, Brownmiller had to hear victims' testimonies at a 1970 public speak-out before she stopped believing that if women were raped, it was their own fault...

...Why is the thought of violation embarrassingly titillating...

...And Brownmiller not infrequently undercuts herself with misplaced black humor...

...As its history has been obscured, so rape's nature and attendant problems of law enforcement have been clouded by folklore and movie versions...

...I could not take her woman-centered revisionism seriously when I found it bolstered, early in Against Our Will, by such shrilling as: "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...

...As for victims, classes at police academies and law schools have traditionally been taught to regard them as descendants of Potiphar's wife—a legend common to Christian, Hebrew, and Moslem...

...But as Brownmiller learned by listening, so too I learned by reading her exhaustive, horrifying documentation of atrocious treatment accorded women in the course of humen events...

...It can be destroyed—by feminism...

...Such is the legacy of male-controlled sexuality, under which we struggle," Brownmiller writes...

...She realized then that the physiological truism that women can be raped but cannot rape, has meant that although few men are rapists, the threat of "the one crime" has cut across age, race, class, and time to chill and circumscribe all women's lives...

...Maria Goretti model of Gandhian resistance, demonstrate how far we must go to understand and prevent rape...

...The reality is terrifying for the victim, and rarely erotic for her attacker...

...Yet in New York City, when police-women began interviewing rape complainants, the number of false charges dropped to the same rate reported for other violent crimes...

...Like the soldier who rapes in war, the police-blotter rapist is statistically an all-too-average aggressive youth, not a sexual highwayman out of Ian Fleming or Harold Robbins...

...What she learned in her research made her angry, and she wants her book to startle, upset, and rally readers to one victim's cry, "It's a war and you can't let them win...

...He may actually be someone a woman would expect to trust—a policeman, a relative...

...When this analysis of Brown-miller's appeared, more than halfway through Against Our Will, I could not call it overreaching...

...Freud, amazingly, never wrote a word about it, and "a casual reader of history quickly learns that rape remains unmentionable, even in war...