THE RAPE ATROCITY AND THE BOY NEXT DOOR

Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975; University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City, July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women’s Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3, 1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College, City University of New York, April 26, 1976.

I want to talk to you about rape—rape—what it is, who does it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what to do about it so that it will not be done any more.

First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks.* From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive. There was a small student body highly concentrated in the arts, a low student–faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition of intellectual and sexual “freedom.” In general, Bennington was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young women were educated to various accomplishments which would insure good marriages for the respectable and good affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools—in general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives—we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women—we were already very privileged women—and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not know that we had been consigned from birth to that living legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious example, that our Freudian psychology professor believed along with Freud that “the effect of penis-envy has a share … in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority.”1 In each field of study, such convictions were central, underlying, crucial. And yet we did not know that they meant us. This was true everywhere where women were being educated.

As a result, women of my age left colleges and universities completely ignorant of what one might call “real life.” We did not know that we would meet everywhere a systematic despisal of our intelligence, creativity, and strength. We did not know our herstory as a gender class. We did not know that we were a gender class, inferior by law and custom to men who were defined, by themselves and all the organs of their culture, as supreme. We did not know that we had been trained all our lives to be victims—inferior, submissive, passive objects who could lay no claim to a discrete individual identity. We did not know that because we were women our labor would be exploited wherever we worked—in jobs, in political movements—by men for their own self-aggrandizement. We did not know that all our hard work in whatever jobs or political movements would never advance our responsibilities or our rewards. We did not know that we were there, wherever, to cook, to do menial labor, to be fucked.

I tell you this now because this is what I remembered when I knew I would come here to speak tonight. I imagine that in some ways it is different for you. There is an astounding feminist literature to educate you even if your professors will not. There are feminist philosophers, poets, comedians, herstorians, and politicians who are creating feminist culture. There is your own feminist consciousness, which you must nurture, expand, and deepen at every opportunity.

As of now, however, there is no women’s study program here. The development of such a program is essential to you as women. Systematic and rigorous study of woman’s place in this culture will make it possible for you to understand the world as it acts on and affects you. Without that study, you will leave here as I left Bennington—ignorant of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society—that is, in a society where women are systematically defined as inferior, where women are systematically despised.

I am here tonight to try to tell you as much as I can about what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives. And that is why I chose tonight to speak about rape which is, though no contemporary Amerikan male writer will tell you so, the dirtiest four-letter word in the English language. Once you understand what rape is, you will understand the forces that systematically oppress you as women. Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to begin the work of changing the values and institutions of this patriarchal society so that you will not be oppressed anymore. Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant. Once you understand what rape is, you will find the resources to take your lives as women seriously and to organize as women against the persons and institutions which demean and violate you.

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The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere, which means “to steal, seize, or carry away.”

The first definition of rape in The Random House Dictionary is still “the act of seizing and carrying off by force.”

The second definition, with which you are probably familiar, defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse.”

For the moment, I will refer exclusively to the first definition of rape, that is, “the act of seizing and carrying off by force.”

Rape precedes marriage, engagement, betrothal, and courtship as sanctioned social behavior. In the bad old days, when a man wanted a woman he simply took her—that is, he abducted and fucked her. The abduction, which was always for sexual purposes, was the rape. If the raped woman pleased the rapist, he kept her. If not, he discarded her.

Women, in those bad old days, were chattel. That is, women were property, owned objects, to be bought, sold, used, and stolen—that is, raped. A woman belonged first to her father who was her patriarch, her master, her lord. The very derivation of the word patriarchy is instructive. Pater means owner, possessor, or master. The basic social unit of patriarchy is the family. The word family comes from the Oscan famel, which means servant, slave, or possession. Pater familias means owner of slaves. The rapist who abducted a woman took the place of her father as her owner, possessor, or master.

The Old Testament is eloquent and precise in delineating the right of a man to rape. Here, for instance, is Old Testament law on the rape of enemy women. Deuteronomy, Chapter 21, verses 10 to 15—

When you go to war against your enemies and Yahweh your God delivers them into your power and you take prisoners, if you see a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable, you may make her your wife and bring her to your home. She is to shave her head and cut her nails and take off her prisoner’s garb; she is to stay inside your house and must mourn her father and mother for a full month. Then you may go to her and be a husband to her, and she shall be your wife. Should she cease to please you, you will let her go where she wishes, not selling her for money; you are not to make any profit out of her, since you have had the use of her.2

A discarded woman, of course, was a pariah or a whore.

Rape, then, is the first model for marriage. Marriage laws sanctified rape by reiterating the right of the rapist to ownership of the raped. Marriage laws protected the property rights of the first rapist by designating a second rapist as an adulterer, that is, a thief. Marriage laws also protected the father’s ownership of the daughter. Marriage laws guaranteed the father’s right to sell a daughter into marriage, to sell her to another man. Any early strictures against rape were strictures against robbery—against the theft of property. It is in this context, and in this context only, that we can understand rape as a capital crime. This is the Old Testament text on the theft of women as a capital offense. Deuteronomy 22:22 to 23:1—

If a man is caught sleeping with another man’s wife, both must die, the man who has slept with her and the woman herself. You must banish this evil from Israel.

If a virgin is betrothed and a man meets her in the city and sleeps with her, you shall take them both out to the gate of the town and stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry for help in the town; the man, because he has violated the wife of his fellow. You must banish this evil from your midst. But if the man has met the betrothed girl in the open country and has taken her by force and lain with her, only the man who lay with her shall die; you must do nothing to the girl, for hers is no capital offence. The case is like that of a man who attacks and kills his fellow; for he came across her in the open country and the betrothed girl could have cried out without anyone coming to her rescue.

If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and is caught in the act, the man who has lain with her must give the girl’s father fifty silver shekels; she shall be his wife since he has violated her, and as long as he lives he may not repudiate her.

A man must not take his father’s wife, and must not withdraw the skirt of his father’s cloak from her.3

Women belonged to men; the laws of marriage sanctified that ownership; rape was the theft of a woman from her owner. These biblical laws are the basis of the social order as we know it. They have not to this day been repudiated.

As history advanced, men escalated their acts of aggression against women and invented many myths about us to insure both ownership and easy sexual access. In 500 B. C. Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, wrote: “Abducting young women is not, indeed, a lawful act; but it is stupid after the event to make a fuss about it. The only sensible thing is to take no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.”⁴ Ovid in the Ars amatoria wrote: “Women often wish to give unwillingly what they really like to give.”5 And so, it became official: women want to be raped.

Early English law on rape was a testament to the English class system. A woman who was not married belonged legally to the king. Her rapist had to pay the king fifty shillings as a fine, but if she was a “grinding slave,” then the fine was reduced to twenty-five shillings. The rape of a nobleman’s serving maid cost twelve shillings. The rape of a commoner’s serving maid cost five shillings. But if a slave raped a commoner’s serving maid, he was castrated. And if he raped any woman of higher rank, he was killed.⁶ Here, too, rape was a crime against the man who owned the woman.

Even though rape is sanctioned in the Bible, even though the Greeks had glorified rape—remember Zeus’ interminable adventures—and even though Ovid had waxed euphoric over rape, it was left to Sir Thomas Malory to popularize rape for us English-speaking folk. Le Morte d’Arthur is the classic work on courtly love. It is a powerful romanticization of rape. Malory is the direct literary ancestor of those modern male Amerikan writers who postulate rape as mythic lovemaking. A good woman is to be taken, possessed by a gallant knight, sexually forced into a submissive passion which would, by male definition, become her delight. Here rape is transformed, or mystified, into romantic love. Here rape becomes the signet of romantic love. Here we find the first really modern rendering of rape: sometimes a woman is seized and carried off; sometimes she is sexually forced and left, madly, passionately in love with the rapist who is, by virtue of an excellent rape, her owner, her love. (Malory, by the way, was arrested and charged with raping, on two separate occasions, a married woman, Joan Smyth.)⁷ In his work, rape is no longer synonymous with abduction—it has now become synonymous with love. At issue, of course, is still male ownership—the rapist owns the woman; but now, she loves him as well.

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This motif of sexual relating—that is, rape—remains our primary model for heterosexual relating. The dictionary defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to have sexual intercourse.” But in fact, rape, in our system of masculinist law, remains a right of marriage. A man cannot be convicted of raping his own wife. In all fifty states, rape is defined legally as forced penetration by a man of a woman “not his wife.”8 When a man forcibly penetrates his own wife, he has not committed a crime of theft against another man. Therefore, according to masculinist law, he has not raped. And, of course, a man cannot abduct his own wife since she is required by law to inhabit his domicile and submit to him sexually. Marriage remains, in our time, carnal ownership of women. A man cannot be prosecuted for using his own property as he sees fit.

In addition, rape is our primary emblem of romantic love. Our modern writers, from D. H. Lawrence to Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Ayn Rand, consistently present rape as the means of introducing a woman to her own carnality. A woman is taken, possessed, conquered by brute force—and it is the rape itself that transforms her into a carnal creature. It is the rape itself which defines both her identity and her function: she is a woman, and as a woman she exists to be fucked. In masculinist terms, a woman can never be raped against her will since the notion is that if she does not want to be raped, she does not know her will.

Rape, in our society, is still not viewed as a crime against women. In “Forcible and Statutory Rape: An Exploration of the Operation and Objectives of the Consent Standard,” The Yale Law Journal, 1952, an article which is a relentless compendium of misogynistic slander, the intent of modern male jurisprudence in the area of criminal rape is articulated clearly: the laws exist to protect men (1) from the false accusation of rape (which is taken to be the most likely type of accusation) and (2) from the theft of female property, or its defilement, by another man.9 The notion of consent to sexual intercourse as the inalienable human right of a woman does not exist in male jurisprudence; a woman’s withholding of consent is seen only as a socially appropriate form of barter and the notion of consent is honored only insofar as it protects the male’s proprietary rights to her body:

The consent standard in our society does more than protect a significant item of social currency for women; it fosters, and is in turn bolstered by, a masculine pride in the exclusive possession of a sexual object. The consent of a woman to sexual intercourse awards the man a privilege of bodily access, a personal “prize” whose value is enhanced by sole ownership…. An additional reason for the man’s condemnation of rape may be found in the threat to his status from a decrease in the “value” of his sexual “possession” which would result from forcible violation.¹⁰

This remains the basic articulation of rape as a social crime: it is a crime against men, a violation of the male right to personal and exclusive possession of a woman as a sexual object.

Is it any wonder, then, that when Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, the authors of Against Rape, did a study of women and rape, large numbers of women, when asked, “Have you ever been raped?” answered, “I don’t know.”¹¹

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What is rape?

Rape is the first model for marriage. As such, it is sanctioned by the Bible and by thousands of years of law, custom, and habit.

Rape is an act of theft—a man takes the sexual property of another man.

Rape is, by law and custom, a crime against men, against the particular owner of a particular woman.

Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love.

Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men.

Rape is the right of any man who desires any woman, as long as she is not explicitly owned by another man. This explains clearly why defense lawyers are allowed to ask rape victims personal and intimate questions about their sexual lives. If a woman is a virgin, then she still belongs to her father and a crime has been committed. If a woman is not married and is not a virgin, then she belongs to no particular man and a crime has not been committed.

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These are the fundamental cultural, legal, and social assumptions about rape: (1) women want to be raped, in fact, women need to be raped; (2) women provoke rape; (3) no woman can be sexually forced against her will; (4) women love their rapists; (5) in the act of rape, men affirm their own manhood and they also affirm the identity and function of women—that is, women exist to be fucked by men and so, in the act of rape, men actually affirm the very womanhood of women. Is it any wonder, then, that there is an epidemic of forcible rape in this country and that most convicted rapists do not know what it is they have done wrong?

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In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly says that as women we have been deprived of the power of naming.12 Men, as engineers of this culture, have defined all the words we use. Men, as the makers of law, have defined what is legal and what is not. Men, as the creators of systems of philosophy and morality, have defined what is right and what is wrong. Men, as writers, artists, movie makers, psychologists and psychiatrists, politicians, religious leaders, prophets, and so-called revolutionaries have defined for us who we are, what our values are, how we perceive what happens to us, how we understand what happens to us. At the root of all the definitions they have made is one resolute conviction: that women were put on this earth for the use, pleasure, and sexual gratification of men.

In the case of rape, men have defined for us our function, our value, and the uses to which we may be put.

For women, as Mary Daly says, one fundamental revolutionary act is to reclaim the power of naming, to define for ourselves what our experience is and has been. This is very hard to do. We use a language which is sexist to its core: developed by men in their own interests; formed specifically to exclude us; used specifically to oppress us. The work, then, of naming is crucial to the struggle of women; the work of naming is, in fact, the first revolutionary work we must do. How, then, do we define rape?

Rape is a crime against women.

Rape is an act of aggression against women.

Rape is a contemptuous and hostile act against women.

Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to self-determination.

Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to absolute control of her own body.

Rape is an act of sadistic domination.

Rape is a colonializing act.

Rape is a function of male imperialism over and against women.

The crime of rape against one woman is a crime committed against all women.

Generally, we recognize that rape can be divided into two distinct categories: forcible rape and presumptive rape. In a forcible rape, a man physically assaults a woman and forces her, through physical violence, threat of physical violence, or threat of death, to perform any sexual act. Any forced sexual act must be considered rape—“contact between the mouth and the anus, the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the vulva, [contact] between the penis and the vulva, [between the] penis and anus, or contact between the anus or vulva” and any phallic substitute like a bottle, stick, or dildo.13

In a presumptive rape, we are warranted in presuming that a man has had carnal access to a woman without her consent, because we define consent as “meaningful and knowledgeable assent; not mere acquiescence.”¹⁴ In a presumptive rape, the constraint on the victim’s will is in the circumstance itself; there has been no mutuality of choice and understanding and therefore the basic human rights of the victim have been violated and a crime has been committed against her. This is one instance of presumptive rape, reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape:

The woman is seventeen, a high school student. It is about four o’clock in the afternoon. Her boy friend’s father has picked her up in his car after school to take her to meet his son. He stops by his house and says she should wait for him in the car. When he has pulled the car into the garage, this thirty-seven-year-old father of six rapes her.15

This sort of rape is common, it is contemptible, and needless to say, it is never reported to the police.

Who, then, commits rape?

The fact is that rape is not committed by psychopaths. Rape is committed by normal men. There is nothing, except a conviction for rape which is very hard to obtain, to distinguish the rapist from the nonrapist.

The Institute for Sex Research did a study of rapists in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In part, the researchers concluded that “… there are no outstandingly ominous signs in [the rapists’] presex-offense histories; indeed, their heterosexual adjustment is quantitatively well above average.”¹⁶

(…)

Who are the victims of rape? Women—of all classes, races, from all walks of life, of all ages. Most rapes are intraracial—that is, white men rape white women and black men rape black women. The youngest rape victim on record is a two-week-old female infant.¹⁷ The oldest rape victim on record is a ninety-three-year-old woman.¹⁸

(…)

Now, I could read you testimony after testimony, tell you story after story—after all, in 1974 there were 607, 310 such stories to tell—but I don’t think I have to prove to you that rape is a crime of such violence and that it is so rampant that we must view it as an ongoing atrocity against women. All women live in constant jeopardy, in a virtual state of siege. That is, simply, the truth. I do however want to talk to you explicitly about one particularly vicious form of rape which is increasing rapidly in frequency. This is multiple rape—that is, the rape of one woman by two or more men.

In Amir’s study of 646 rape cases in Philadelphia in 1958 and 1960, a full 43 percent of all rapes were multiple rapes (16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes).19 I want to tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape. A twenty-five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town. She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity. These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she was raped by approximately forty men. These men also tried to force intercourse between her and a dog. These men also put bottles and other objects up her vagina. Then, they took her to a police station and charged her with prostitution. Then, they offered to drop the charges against her if she was institutionalized. She was institutionalized; she discovered that she was pregnant; then, she had a complete emotional break down.

One man who had been a participant in the rape bragged about it to another man. That man, who was horrified, told a professor. A campus group confronted the fraternity. At first, the accused men admitted that they had committed all the acts charged, but they denied that it was rape since, they claimed, the woman had consented to all of the sexual acts committed. Subsequently, when the story was made public, these same men denied the story completely.

A women’s group on campus demanded that the fraternity be thrown off campus to demonstrate that the university did not condone gang rape. No action was taken against the fraternity by university officials or by the police.20

The second story that I want to tell was reported by Robert Sam Anson in an article called “That Championship Season” in New Times magazine.²¹ According to Anson, on July 25, 1974, Notre Dame University suspended for at least one year six black football players for what the university called “a serious violation of university regulations.” An eighteen-year-old white high school student, it turned out, had charged the football players with gang rape.

The victim’s attorney, the county prosecutor, the local reporter assigned to cover the story, a trustee of the local newspaper—all were Notre Dame alumni, and all helped to cover up the rape charge.

Notre Dame University, according to Anson, has insisted that no crime was committed. It was the consensus of university officials that the football players were just sowing their wild oats in an old-fashioned gang bang, and that the victim was a willing participant. The football players were suspended for having sex in their dormitory. The President of Notre Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, a noted liberal and scholar, a Catholic priest, insisted that no rape took place and said that the university would produce, if necessary, “dozens of eyewitnesses.” I quote Anson:

Hesburgh’s conclusions are based on an hour-long personal interview with the six football players, along with an investigation conducted by his Dean of Students, John Macheca, a … former university public relations man … Macheca himself will say nothing about his investigation… Various campus sources close to the case say that, throughout his investigation, no university official spoke either to the girl [sic] or her parents. Hesburgh himself professes neither to know or to care. He says testily, “It’s irrelevant…. I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.”22

According to Anson, had Dr. Hesburgh talked to “the girl” he would have heard this story: after work late on July 3, she went to Notre Dame to see the football player she had been dating; they made love twice on his dormitory bunk; he left the room; she was alone and undressed, wrapped in a sheet; another football player entered the room; she had a history of hostility and confrontation with this second football player (he had made a friend of hers pregnant, he had refused to pay for an abortion, she had confronted him on this, finally he did pay part of the money); this second football player and the woman began to quarrel and he threatened that, unless she submit to him sexually, he would throw her out the third-story window; then he raped her; four other football players also raped her; during the gang rape, several other football players were in and out of the room; when the woman finally was able to leave the dormitory she drove immediately to a hospital.

Both the police investigator on the case and a source in the prosecutor’s office believe the victim’s story—that there was a gang rape perpetrated on her by the six Notre Dame football players.

All of the male university authorities who investigated the alleged gang rape determined that the victim was a slut. This they did, all of them, by interviewing the accused rapists. In fact, the prosecutor’s character investigation indicated that the woman was a fine person. The coach of the Notre Dame football team placed responsibility for the alleged gang rape on the worsening morals of women who watch soap operas. Hesburgh, moral exemplar that he is, concluded: “I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.” The Dean of Students, John Macheca, expelled the students as a result of his secret investigation. Hesburgh overruled the expulsion out of what he called “compassion”—he reduced the expulsion to one year’s suspension. The rape victim now attends a university in the Midwest. Her life, according to Anson, has been threatened.

The fact is, as these two stories demonstrate conclusively, that any woman can be raped by any group of men. Her word will not be credible against their collective testimony. A proper investigation will not be done. Remember the good Father Hesburgh’s words as long as you live: “I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.” Even when a prosecutor is convinced that rape as defined by male law did take place, the rapists will not be prosecuted. Male university officials will protect those sacrosanct male institutions—the football team and the fraternity—no matter what the cost to women.

The reasons for this are terrible and cruel, but you must know them. Men are a privileged gender class over and against women. One of their privileges is the right of rape—that is, the right of carnal access to any woman. Men agree, by law, custom, and habit, that women are sluts and liars. Men will form alliances, or bonds, to protect their gender class interests. Even in a racist society, male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding.

It is very difficult whenever racist and sexist pathologies coincide to delineate in a political way what has actually happened. In 1838, Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and feminist, described Amerikan institutions as “a system of complicated crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood, sweat, and tears of my sisters in bonds.”23 Racism and sexism are the warp and woof of this Amerikan society, the very fabric of our institutions, laws, customs, and habits—and we are the inheritors of that complicated system of crimes. In the Notre Dame case, for instance, we can postulate that the prosecutor took the woman’s charges of rape seriously at all because her accused rapists were black. That is racism and that is sexism. There is no doubt at all that white male law is more amenable to the prosecution of blacks for the raping of white women than the other way around. We can also postulate that, had the Notre Dame case been taken to court, the rape victim’s character would have been impugned irrevocably because her lover was a black. That is racism and that is sexism. We also know that had a black woman been raped, either by blacks or whites, her rape would go unprosecuted, unremarked. That is racism and that is sexism.

In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim’s life to absolute zero. In the Notre Dame case, the woman’s lover allowed his fellows to rape her. This was a male bond. In the course of the rape, at one point when the woman was left alone—there is no indication that she was even conscious at this point—a white football player entered the room and asked her if she wanted to leave. When she did not answer, he left her there without reporting the incident. This was a male bond. The cover-up and lack of substantive investigation by white authorities was male bonding. All women of all races should recognize that male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding except in one particular kind of rape: that is, where the woman is viewed as the property of one race, class, or nationality, and her rape is viewed as an act of aggression against the males of that race, class, or nationality. Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice has described this sort of rape:

I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically …

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.24

In this sort of rape, women are viewed as the property of men who are, by virtue of race or class or nationality, enemies. Women are viewed as the chattel of enemy men. In this situation, and in this situation only, bonds of race or class or nationality will take priority over male bonding. As Cleaver’s testimony makes clear, the women of one’s own group are also viewed as chattel, property, to be used at will for one’s own purposes. When a black man rapes a black woman, no act of aggression against a white male has been committed, and so the man’s right to rape will be defended. It is very important to remember that most rape is intraracial—that is, black men rape black women and white men rape white women because rape is a sexist crime. Men rape the women they have access to as a function of their masculinity and as a signet of their ownership. Cleaver’s outrage “at the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman” is wrath over the theft of property which is rightly his. Similarly, classic Southern rage at blacks who sleep with white women is wrath over the theft of property which rightly belongs to the white male. In the Notre Dame case, we can say that the gender class interests of men were served by determining that the value of the black football players to masculine pride—that is, to the championship Notre Dame football team—took priority over the white father’s very compromised claim to ownership of his daughter. The issue was never whether a crime had been committed against a particular woman.

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Now, I have laid out the dimensions of the rape atrocity. As women, we live in the midst of a society that regards us as contemptible. We are despised, as a gender class, as sluts and liars. We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us—against our bodies and our whole lives. Our characters are defamed, as a gender class, so that no individual woman has any credibility before the law or in society at large. Our enemies—rapists and their defenders—not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists, and teachers.

What can we, who are powerless by definition and in fact, do about it?

First, we must effectively organize to treat the symptoms of this dread and epidemic disease. Rape crisis centers are crucial. Training in self-defense is crucial. Squads of women police formed to handle all rape cases are crucial. Women prosecutors on rape cases are crucial.

New rape laws are needed. These new laws must: (1) eliminate corroboration as a requirement for conviction; (2) eliminate the need for a rape victim to be physically injured to prove rape; (3) eliminate the need to prove lack of consent; (4) redefine consent to denote “meaningful and knowledgeable assent, not mere acquiescence”; (5) lower the unrealistic age of consent; (6) eliminate as admissible evidence the victim’s prior sexual activity or previous consensual sex with the defendant; (7) assure that marital relationship between parties is no defense or bar to prosecution; (8) define rape in terms of degrees of serious injury.25 These changes in the rape law were proposed by the New York University Law Clinical Program in Women’s Legal Rights, and you can find their whole proposed model rape law in a book called Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, by the New York Radical Feminists. I recommend to you that you investigate this proposal and then work for its implementation.

Also, we must, in order to protect ourselves, refuse to participate in the dating system which sets up every woman as a potential rape victim. In the dating system, women are defined as the passive pleasers of any and every man. The worth of any woman is measured by her ability to attract and please men. The object of the dating game for the man is “to score.” In playing this game, as women we put ourselves and our well being in the hands of virtual or actual strangers. As women, we must analyze this dating system to determine its explicit and implicit definitions and values. In analyzing it, we will see how we are coerced into becoming sex-commodities.

Also, we must actively seek to publicize unprosecuted cases of rape, and we must make the identities of rapists known to other women.

There is also work here for men who do not endorse the right of men to rape. In Philadelphia, men have formed a group called Men Organized Against Rape. They deal with male relatives and friends of rape victims in order to dispel belief in the myth of female culpability. Sometimes rapists who are troubled by their continued aggression against women will call and ask for help. There are vast educative and counseling possibilities here. Also, in Lorton, Virginia, convicted sex offenders have organized a group called Prisoners Against Rape. They work with feminist task forces and individuals to delineate rape as a political crime against women and to find strategies for combating it. It is very important that men who want to work against rape do not, through ignorance, carelessness, or malice, reinforce sexist attitudes. Statements such as “Rape is a crime against men too” or “Men are also victims of rape” do more harm than good. It is a bitter truth that rape becomes a visible crime only when a man is forcibly sodomized. It is a bitter truth that men’s sympathy can be roused when rape is viewed as “a crime against men too.” These truths are too bitter for us to bear. Men who want to work against rape will have to cultivate a rigorous antisexist consciousness and discipline so that they will not, in fact, make us invisible victims once again.

It is the belief of many men that their sexism is manifested only in relation to women—that is, that if they refrain from blatantly chauvinistic behavior in the presence of women, then they are not implicated in crimes against women. That is not so. It is in male bonding that men most often jeopardize the lives of women. It is among men that men do the most to contribute to crimes against women. For instance, it is the habit and custom of men to discuss with each other their sexual intimacies with particular women in vivid and graphic terms. This kind of bonding sets up a particular woman as the rightful and inevitable sexual conquest of a man’s male friends and leads to innumerable cases of rape. Women are raped often by the male friends of their male friends. Men should understand that they jeopardize women’s lives by participating in the rituals of privileged boyhood. Rape is also effectively sanctioned by men who harass women on the streets and in other public places; who describe or refer to women in objectifying, demeaning ways; who act aggressively or contemptuously toward women; who tell or laugh at misogynistic jokes; who write stories or make movies where women are raped and love it; who consume or endorse pornography; who insult specific women or women as a group; who impede or ridicule women in our struggle for dignity. Men who do or who endorse these behaviors are the enemies of women and are implicated in the crime of rape. Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.

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I have been describing, of course, emergency measures, designed to help women survive as atrocity is being waged against us. How can we end the atrocity itself? Clearly, we must determine the root causes of rape and we must work to excise from our social fabric all definitions, values, and behaviors which energize and sanction rape.

What, then, are the root causes of rape?

Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions; rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms. In this male-supremacist society, men are defined as one order of being over and against women who are defined as another, opposite, entirely different order of being. Men are defined as aggressive, dominant, powerful. Women are defined as passive, submissive, powerless. Given these polar gender definitions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against women. Rape occurs when a man, who is dominant by definition, takes a woman who, according to men and all the organs of their culture, was put on this earth for his use and gratification. Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these definitions remain intact—that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity—men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.

In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.

In thinking about this, you must realize that this is not a question of heterosexual or homosexual. Male homosexuality is not a renunciation of phallic identity. Heterosexual and homosexual men are equally invested in phallic identity. They manifest this investment differently in one area—the choice of what men call a “sexual object”—but their common valuation of women consistently reinforces their own sense of phallic worth.

It is this phallocentric identity of men that makes it possible—indeed, necessary—for men to view women as a lower order of creation. Men genuinely do not know that women are individual persons of worth, volition, and sensibility because masculinity is the signet of all worth, and masculinity is a function of phallic identity. Women, then, by definition, have no claim to the rights and responsibilities of personhood. Wonderful George Gilder, who can always be counted on to tell us the dismal truth about masculinity, has put it this way: “… unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity…. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.”26 And so, what are the actions that validate and express this masculinity: rape, first and foremost rape; murder, war, plunder, fighting, imperializing and colonializing—aggression in any and every form, and to any and every degree. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.

As women, of course, we do not have phallic identities, and so we are defined as opposite from and inferior to men. Men consider physical strength, for instance, to be implicit in and derived from phallic identity, and so for thousands of years we have been systematically robbed of our physical strength. Men consider intellectual accomplishment to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are intellectually incompetent by their definition. Men consider moral acuity to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are consistently characterized as vain, malicious, and immoral creatures. Even the notion that women need to be fucked—which is the a priori assumption of the rapist—is directly derived from the specious conviction that the only worth is phallic worth: men are willing, or able, to recognize us only when we have attached to us a cock in the course of sexual intercourse. Then, and only then, we are for them real women.

As nonphallic beings, women are defined as submissive, passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have been defined by law, custom, and habit as inferior because of our nonphallic bodies. Our sexual definition is one of “masochistic passivity”: “masochistic” because even men recognize their systematic sadism against us; “passivity” not because we are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy and as a result, we cannot move.

The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female.” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.

As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When we change, those who define themselves over and against us will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives, our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth—we must take for ourselves the power of naming. We must refuse to be complicit in a sexual-social system that is built on our labor as an inferior slave class. We must unlearn the passivity we have been trained to over thousands of years. We must unlearn the masochism we have been trained to over thousands of years. And, most importantly, in freeing ourselves, we must refuse to imitate the phallic identities of men. We must not internalize their values and we must not replicate their crimes. In 1870, Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend:

So while I do not pray for anybody or any party to commit out rages, still I do pray, and that earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the abject degradation of their present position; which will force them to break their yoke of bondage, and give them faith in themselves; which will make them proclaim their allegiance to woman first; which will enable them to see that man can no more feel, speak, or act for woman than could the old slaveholder for his slave. The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. O, to compel them to see and feel, and to give them the courage and conscience to speak and act for their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of all the world for doing it.27

Isn’t rape the outrage that will do this, sisters, and isn’t it time?

 

 

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* These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there was no women’s studies program.