Putting the Sex Back Into Rape

...He seemed simultaneously as large as all fear and as inhuman as a cockroach...

...Agamemnon was forced to make a delicate settlement for unity...

...Overwhelmed by superior strength, the earliest women were bombarded with rape until they saw fit to make a desperate deal...

...Actually, her vision is close to the nasty one of Hobbes...

...She calls for a flowering of sexual poetry by women, while denying that they can have a fleeting moment of imaginary rape...

...Freud and his disciples toyed with this idea like hominids pawing over the newly discovered stick, and Brownmiller does a good job of deflating the Freudian concept of the inherent power in the penis-the voodoo awe it strikes in women to create the passive female sexuality...

...Civilized” rape takes place down in the subtle pits where most people live...

...she assumes it to be simple...

...When men discovered that they could rape,” she writes, “they proceeded to do it...

...This is an absurdly antiseptic view of the mental interior of any person, man or woman, and it is particularly absurd when applied to the teenage boys and young men whom Brownmiller identifies as the prototypical rapists...

...what explains the grip of Albert De Salvo’s legend as the Boston Strangler...

...Simon & Schuster, 1975...

...Anatomical Opportunism The book contains a great deal on the penis, especially in sections devoted to Freud’s theories on “penis envy” and other related mystiques...

...The Brownmiller terms of rape are so straight-jacketed and political that they lead to embarrassing gaps whenever she ventures out of the war’s trenches...

...Young people grow up acutely aware of them...

...Brownmiller asserts that there is a searing contempt for women at the core of what she calls “the male psyche,” which produces an overarching “male ideology of rape...

...There is no question that peoples’ views on rape have always been guided by strange rudders in the gut...

...In real life, there are more occasions when vulnerable people meet stone walls...

...But I think Brownmiller has turned incredible mental cartwheels (within her own walls) to argue that none of these is sexual...

...Putting the Sex Back Into Rape by Taylor Branch I spent the better part of a week mulling over Susan Brownmiller’s bestseller on rape, Against Our Will.* To my considerable surprise, I decided the book was well worth the time...

...Brownmiller takes this as the model for all jurisprudence about rape: even when later kings established laws by which rapists were mutilated and executed, she sees no desire to do right by women, only evidence of a male desire to protect property rights to women by discouraging meddlesome activity by rapists...

...In the violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man,” she writes, “some woman somewhere had a prescient vision of her right to her own physical integrity, and in my mind’s eye I can picture her fighting like hell to preserve it...

...Brownmiller sees the crime as political plunder, and she goes out of her way to assert that rape has nothing to do with sexual emotions of any kind...

...Certainly the very capacity to do something may supply part of the inclination, as in mountain climbing, but not all of it...

...But these interpretive sensibilities are hidden in the midst of familiar Hail Sister effusions, continuous oozings of yellow bile toward all men, and her final remarks on how she went to the self-defense class and discovered the joy of learning how to kick men in the balls, the cause of it all...

...The old snickerings emerge about how she had it coming and wanted to be raped anyway...

...We listen to the victims, and we hear the bizarre interpretations of the legal authorities...

...And when people see the male rapist as a person afflicted with terrible sexual frustrations, hey are more inclined to blame things on the system or sympathize with his urges: boys will be boys, etc...

...The emotions on both sides of all rape, from the suburban bedroom to the dark ghetto corner, are as wide and deep as life itself-and her political theory floats over this panorama like a paper airplane...

...It begins in high school, with anxious moments of concealment and many awkward poses to take advantage of books, doors, and other visual barriers...

...This is the engine of sexual history...

...One can do a lot of speculating about what life would be like if the two requirements had been parcelled out evenly so as to negate each other-if women were much stronger than men, or if the shapes of genitalia were somehow reversed...

...We read of rape in all forms and eras-from the book of Genesis to the confessions of Bluebeard, from the crimes of Zeus and King Arthur’s Round Table to the saga of Jack the Ripper...

...Mobilizing Outrage The author bumps into the narrow limits of her definitions frequently in the book, and I believe she does so because of her insistence on such a robot-like interpretation of male psychology...

...The other is force-through weapons, allies, or simply overwhelming strength...

...She sees the continuum in politics: they are all male-dominated practices, revealing a hostile, instrumental view of women...

...Agamemnon angrily sought compensation for the loss of Chryseis by seizing Briseis, a slaveconcubine that his warrior Achilles had won...

...If people see, or fantasize, a sexual glimmer in the heart of a woman who complains of rape, she falls prey to an ancient disadvantage...

...But on this continuum from rape to pornography, there is also loneliness, self-hatred, and a desperate sexual tension...

...By and large, the walls are still there when they are adults-shaped and remolded in thousands of ways they are not even aware of...

...Brownmiller wants to convince us that it is possible for a husband to rape his wife...

...I think it was once said of a volume on sex and history that one should read everything within quotation marks and forget the rest, and I was tempted to say the same thing here-to say that she did not write a book about rape so much as a book to use rape for her feminism, and that she shortchanged both the subject and feminism in the process...

...The Bordel is reported to have suffered a direct hit during the siege, but to have kept on functioning...

...There is a moment of truth, emotion, and surprise when the other character responds...

...Consider one of her musings on fear: “When I have stood, almost mesmerized, on my Fourteenth Street subway platform and watched a gang of youths methodically assault a gum machine for its pennies-in escalation of a dare-I could only think That could be my body...

...Her definition of rape makes it difficult to encompass the phenomenon of homosexual male rape, for example...

...Within the last six months the front pages were dominated for a stretch by the Joanne Little trial...

...The condition persists on through the teens and begins to fade in the twenties...

...For Brownmiller, the male body’s structural suitability for rape tells most of the tale...

...They may be melted a little, and they may also be kicked, reinforced, and played with in hopelessly complex ways...

...It is political in origin, violent in deed, and essentially mechanical in spirit-the collective male psyche seems to need rape pretty much the way a car needs gasoline...

...Why was it that the first great campaign against capital punishment was organized around the long death watch for Caryl Chessman, a multiple rapist...

...It truly has been everywhere...

...And she goes on to state that men have not “allowed” women to indulge their positive sex fantasies, whereas men have relished the female rape fantasy as an invitation to lust...

...Brownmiller’s examples invite discovery...

...Taylor Branch is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...As usual, the author makes justifiable sport of men’s labored thoughts on this subject, but her own position becomes rather tortured in the process...

...Boys are usually told vaguely that they will learn about such things when they are older, and girls are usually told that magic will alight on them one moment...

...The music swells...

...the need to heap up political treasure by looking down on women in the most graphic way...

...All we get, ‘however, is the male ideology’s contempt’ for women...

...The battle-camp arrangements suited him fine...

...Now this is an extremely narrow prism through which to view the history of the sexes, and it leads the author into trouble...

...If her feminist ideology, the grit in her liver, sustained her through four years of productive scholarship, it also placed severe limits on her understanding...

...Brownmiller points out that women live much more closely with such fears, and she views all male gutter attitudes with retaliatory anger: “Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage...

...Unlike many radical authors, Brownmiller hitched her passion to the drudgery of scholarship...

...Still, I do not believe that her own ideas are profound...

...And also sexual...

...What excused what...

...Men rape out of political hatred, she maintains, and furthermore they are rewarded for it, like miners ripping gold from the earth...

...She sees the penis more neutrally for her purposes as one of the two physical realities that make standard rape possible...

...I suspect that her book will come to be justly regarded as an impressive historical compendiumand the author herself as the first great librarian of rape...

...All this is nothing but a halting foray into one brand of elementary psychology...

...What I dreamed about was food and medicine...

...Reading her book is like climbing into a time machine programmed for sexual violence...

...Uncivilized” rape touches deep nerve endings that most people keep in the unconscious...

...You can see the private, insecure space of many people on the street at a glance...

...For me, as a man, they fired off as I read and watched the homosexual rape scene in Deliverancewhen the most terrifyingly evil and ugly man I had ever seen assaulted the city slicker in the woods...

...She dismisses sex as a partial motive for rape in Vietnam, for example, by citing the testimony of an ideal GI...

...The male body and the old male ideology of rape provide everything Brownmiller needs to understand why men rape...

...Was she raped or did she murder...

...I assumed it would be so with Brownmiller, and I approached her book with a heavy sense of duty, even duress-much as I might a new manuscript from Herbert Marcuse or TiGrace Atkinson...

...The crux of the relationship between the sexes is a primeval war declared by the men, and marriage is the contract of surrender...

...She knows that in questions of rape the slightest introduction of a sexual element has always worked against the interests of women...

...There are strategic reasons at play here...

...Rape is not needed for sex, and therefore it arises from other needs-i.e...

...We see the redoubtable old Molotov issuing his “Molotov Note,” on the rape of Rusiian women by Germans, and we see European pamphlets on how the same Jewish women were raped by their successive captors and liberators alike...

...Clearly, she does not entertain the possible existence of the female rape fantasy because to do so would have the practical effect of weakening the cause...

...While it is patently unjust to use this puzzling affliction to excuse or explain rape, it is simply wrong to argue that it is, not even marginally related...

...The Trojan Chryseis was captured by the Spartans and allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine of the battle camp, and her father had to enlist the god Apollo to help, reclaim her...

...Augustine declare, for example, that the legendary rape of the Sabine women was unjust because it occurred before the war at issue-not after it, as demanded by the laws of war...

...Then they adjust their own walls to be bolder, more withdrawn, more calculating, more aggressive, and so on...

...They demonstrate that rape carries a compelling interest in areas far beyond crime and punishment, evoking much more insight into human nature than one would expect...

...All through history, we drop in on moments of violated privacy...

...You can broaden the concept of rape as much as you like, but not without widening the emotional scope into new worlds...

...We learn that in ancient times, if the men of Clan A raped the women of Clan B, the accepted path to justice was for the men of Clan B to rape the women of Clan A and to kill the men on the side...

...I have long since grown weary of the procession of cosmic revelations...

...For men, this war is wholly and fundamentally politicalmotivated by a universal desire to make women into property (a Marxist motif...

...Since Helen was a queen, she lived as wife of Paris during her stay in Troy...

...People play roles to put the best possible faces on their walls, and they play games with each other...

...Or that the groundwork for the civil rights movement was laid on the sensational cases of Emmett Till and Mack Charles Parker, Southern blacks who were lynched on suspicion of rape...

...Occasionally, she breaks out of the feminist crankshaft into a tone of wise bemusement, and her conclusions on what to do about criminal rape are remarkably sound...

...I agree on all these points...

...There must be something very weird going on inside rapists...

...She pronounces dogmatically that women do not have fantasies of being raped (or “ravished,” as it is usually called in male descriptions of such reveries...

...And we see how Brownmiller herself-even after many of the grisli est testimonials on the details of rape-murders and women whose vaginas were stuffed with grease guns or logs or broken glass-writing about rape in a tone of subdued discovery bordering on whimsy, as in her account of the Trojan War: “Homer’s Iliad describes the Trojan War as the attempt by Menelaus of Sparta to recapture Helen, who had been stolen by Paris along with her treasure...

...Recent American history abounds with instances of rape as a cultural lightning rod...

...He ceremoniously returned Briseis to Achilles, along with the following carefully enumerated loot from his treasure hut: seven tripods, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses, ten talents of gold and seven craftswomen...

...Lesser women fared less advantageously during the war...

...Seasoned observers strained to be reasonable, which produced a reasonable doubt about Little’s guilt-just as there would probably have been reasonable doubt if the jailer had lived to be tried for rape...

...But it is not so much the regularity or the quantity of rape that is striking...

...The more avidly readers speculated about what really happened in the jail cell, the more prominently their emotions were displayed...

...Because of an “accident of biology,” men have always possessed both of the functional requirements for rape while women have possessed neither...

...Each of them went off like an ideological geyser, but each could be seen quickly as a doomed attempt to transform, by rhetorical hyperbole, what should be tolerated into an ideal, or to make some standard outrage into the key to all history...

...Occasionally, Brownmiller presses this view to ludicrous extremes...

...There are famous scenes in the movies when a character, carefully portrayed as formal and insecure, “accidently” opens up to someone else...

...We learn that 19th century congressional committees issued sensational reports on the rape of white women by Indians, reports which were used to inspire further cavalry slaughter of Indians...

...Moreover, she says, the actual rapists serve as representatives of men in general, shock troops of the overall subjugation effort...

...They would sell their bodies to particular men in return for protection from the rest: “The earliest form of permanent, protective conjugal relationship, the accommodation called mating that we now know as marriage, appears to have been institutionalized by the male’s forcible abduction and rape of the female.’’ From this point, the author’s framework falls into place...

...Readings of her previous work led me to expect little of the author, for she is a veteran of so many of the windblown movements that have passed and left little but philosophical embarrassment...

...As the fruit of this labor, she offers the reader a truly astounding collection of tales...

...There are walls between any two people of any kind, and they are always partly and deeply sexual...

...If my own experience is at all representative, there is a lot of strange sexual gurghg during the prime rape years for men, and boys seem to go through a stage of what seems like perpetual erection...

...We hear St...

...She conveys the image of an unextraordinary, self-assured man, counting up the rewards he derives from the terror of his victim...

...Generally, she believes that it involves a transference of the contempt for women on to the victimized men...

...Brownmiller does not probe this murky world...

...This stuff about not being able to live without sex is nonsense,” he says...

...The face that launched a thousand ships was the ultimate prize...

...It is the everlasting potency of rape as a symbol, rallying cry, and jungle drum of politics...

...Sex is big enough and complicated enough to accommodate the kinky thrills and the monumental hostility and the gut-rending fear of rape all at once...

...If you look at rape broadly as a humiliating sexual subordination of one person by another, then untold numbers of husbands are raping their wives every night-along witl- wives ra.pin-g there husbands, and lovers raping lovers, and raping brothers, and raping would-be lovers, and so on...

...She also wants to convince us that neon-light prostitution and spread-assed pornography are depraved first cousins to rape...

...Wq see the contribution of modem technology to rape-prostitution-how the French Army invented the handy mobile field brothel (Bordel Mobile de Gzmpagne), one of which was captured in the famous battle of Dienbienphu...

...As a result, we do not know why young boys (or girls) rifle subway pennies (or start wars), and of course Brownmiller does not posit a male ideology of gum machines...

...All through the book, Brownmiller argues that the typical rapist is not the celebrated psychopath with pimples, but a fairly normal male with some sort of hair-trigger on his instincts...

...I would have murdered the rapist if I could have...

...Achilles responded by sulking in his tent and refusing to fight, and the Spartan cause began to suffer...

...It cannot be the sexual outlet, she says, since masturbation is so perfectly suited to such relief-it is cleaner, faster, more honest...

...I recommend reading her own argument mainly because of the signs that she came to rise above it and to see that her thesis is too small for the vastness of rape...

...It is unclear what succor this brought to the women, and the contest was at least partly a political one among the men...

...They are all emotionally and conceptually related, matters of degree...

...She apparently read everything there is to read on the subject of rape-in literature, ancient parchments, fables, diaries, FBI reports, academic studies, war records, and in the treatises of our great thinkers...

...This kind of fear is genuine and piercing, but there is no way to link the vandalism to rape under the rules of the Brownmiller state of nature...

...Briseis held out hope that Achilles might marry her after this elaborate negotiated settlement, but the warrior didn’t...

...Rape lies at the intersection of sex and violence, which accounts for its power over our minds, but the campaign against rape has always been aided by circumstances and arguments that push toward violence, away from sex...

...I do not know very much about the psychology of rapists, but I believe that there is something much more desperate and depraved about them...

...She says it just comes naturally...

...A Primeval War Like Locke or Rousseau, she begins the book with her description of the State of Nature...

...It casts spells far beyond its importance on a feminist scale of crime...

...Given Brownmiller’s laudable purpose of mobilizing outrage against rape, it makes sens?,that she wages a constant campaign against all interpretations involving sex...

...The 15-19year-old age group is most prone to rape...

...She can only offer the dubious proposition that it is not motivated at all by sexual need, since masturbation would be easier and “more natural...

...Through sheer force of example, Brownmiller elevates the position of rape in the landscape of human affairs...

...Female homosexual rape gets even shorter shrift as a concept, written off as a minute “imitativk rape ideology among females...

...Rapists do the dirty work, but it is to all men that “the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued...

...She sees primitive man grunting dumbly on the discovery that he has the power to rape, and primitive woman struggling vainly but gallantly against the horror...

...My point is that it is absurd to think of rape as a nonemotional act on the part of the rapist, and that it is also absurd to think of the emotion as non-sexual...

...She discusses FBI reports showing that 61 per cent of all rapes are committed by men under the age of 25, and notes that other studies put the figure even higher...

...As for men, Brownmiller tries to drive a wedge between rape and the sexual urge...

...We could do so *if she offered some general motivation for violence and larceny that would apply to both crimes...

...A friendship is bonded or love is born...

...This is a sure sign of theoretical ambitions...