The best-seller list includes two books about money, several about physical fitness, one titled Power! and one called Winning Through Intimidation. There are no books on the joy of sex, the greater joy of more sex, the joyier more of sexier joy. There may soon be, however, a bestseller about rape. As a friend cheerily observed on this situation, in a time of recession people get down to basics.
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. And the author, Susan Brownmiller, does make rape a “basic.” “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.”
A few days later the reviewer in the daily Times did blink momentarily at Ms. Brownmiller’s thesis: “Well, of course, one muttered to oneself, rape is awful, deplorable, an unalloyed tarnish on the human condition. But so are cancer, forest fires, and the sundry other disasters that people have been heir to….” Yet he too apparently assented, overwhelmed by this “exhaustive and detailed study.”
Could this be true, I wondered. A single rape is horrible enough to contemplate; the hundreds of thousands which occur yearly in the U.S. even more so. But why elevate a peripheral abnormality, no matter how terrible, into an organizing principle for understanding our institutions and personal relations? If hard cases make bad law, exceptional atrocities surely make bad social thought.
And yet the essence of new knowledge is often the insight that what we had previously believed peripheral is in reality central. 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. 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.
Feminists have already accomplished something similar. 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. I find myself persuaded, as Rosemary Ruether states in an article on “The First and Final Proletariat,” that “Housework…is the invisible economic base of male autonomy, mobility, and concentrated energy at work.” 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. But now, specifically, rape?
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. 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. But Brownmiller’s greatest contribution is in establishing the continuity between rape and other facets of American culture. 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. 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.” 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. In a majority of cases, he does not use a weapon but terrorizes with physical force or by sheer numbers. Nor does he usually kill his victim—and whether he does seems to bear no relationship to her resistance or submissiveness. 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. Within the miserable patterns of American crime, the rapist is unfortunately not an oddity.
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. The myths of male superiority, 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. 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. Freudian theorists of masochistic female rape fantasies have hardly been more helpful. No wonder that of all convicted criminals, rapists are the most likely to insist they received a bum rap.
It is always possible that Ms. Brownmiller’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. At this point, however, her book convinces me that rape is not as peripheral a phenomenon as I had believed. But that does not mean it is central either. Rape may not be like lightning, virtually a random danger, 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 is not Susan Brownmiller’s stopping point. Rape, she writes, “from prehistoric times to the present … has played a critical function. 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.” What are we to make of this claim? 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. 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 noncombatants in a number of vicious wars—of nations, of classes, of races—between men.
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. 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.” Rapists “function as anonymous agents of terror.” “A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation….”
I suspect these statements are demonstrably false. 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. 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 Brownmiller criticizes arrive at the “fact” that all women instinctively enjoy unconscious rape fantasies.
In any case, these statements are at least demonstrably unproven. Which raises two questions. Why did the author make them? Why did reviewers not only tolerate but welcome them?
The first question is especially puzzling, for one of Ms. Brownmiller’s qualities is a skeptical common sense. 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; the facts about interracial rape in America are hopelessly confused by political presuppositions. 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. Why then should she burden the problem with a new layer of dogmatism?
Part of the answer, I am afraid, is to be found in a constriction of feeling. In this book men appear almost entirely as rapists; unbelieving policemen; mass propagandists who either use rape for political ends, propagate the values which support it, or dismiss its reality; husbands who reject their assaulted wives; patriarchs who must revenge the damaging of their female “property.” Ms. 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. 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. 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.
In the meantime, does it all matter? Are these not simply hyperboles operating to catch the attention of reviewers and indeed of potential readers like myself? It does matter, and profoundly. We can choose rape as the prism through which to view the relations between men and women. More than that, history is laden with millions of acts of killing, torture, child abuse, enslavement … of which rape is but a part. We can take them as the fundamental reality in our view of humanity—if we choose. At heart, Man is a killer, or men are rapists.
If we make this choice, the evidence will be there, although the evidence may not demand it. 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.
The nineteenth century, in the West, was all too prone to think well of itself; the twentieth century, for many good reasons, is all too prone to think ill of itself. Perhaps that is why Ms. Brownmiller, having woven a perfectly taut argument, felt impelled to pull it one notch tighter. Under the strain, I believe, it collapses into falsehood. Perhaps that is also why reviewers are willing to pass lightly over this choice. They are mistaken, because ultimately this choice undercuts the very values Ms. Brownmiller’s book is obviously meant to serve, and in so many ways does.
