If someone is kind enough to request a repost, I feel I should oblige. Kellylark, perhaps you would comment.
The recent thread on pornography begun by Amy Tuteur is generating more heat than light. Now that I have appointed myself Open Salon's historian of socialism, perhaps I have some credibility for shedding some historical light on this issue.
I suspect that some of what's going on in that thread is a reopening of old wounds. The average age at Open Salon seems to be pretty high, and that means that most of us remember the early to mid-eighties pretty vividly.
In 1984, or thereabouts, I was in a bookstore browsing, and I ran across Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. The Penguin edition had a solid black cover. In red and white letters on that background were these words: "Rape is a crime committed by all men against all women." I wondered how anyone could say that, and I bought the book. It was a horrifying catalogue of rape in a wide range of contexts. However, the assertion on the cover was based on nothing more than this: (1) Men benefit from patriarchy. (2) Women's fear of rape reinforces patriarchy. Therefore (3) men benefit from rape committed by other men. I remember her words: "Rapists do myrmidon service" for the male population at large.
I asked a female friend about this, and she supported Brownmiller. I asked her how the collective guilt of men affected her in her own life, and she came up with a minor example of rudeness from her boyfriend.
"How is that rape?" I asked.
"He was trying to show that he's the man, that he's in charge," she said.
I lapsed into a baffled silence.
Another time, I was having dinner with some friends, all women, about five of them. They got to talking about rape, and how they would like to castrate any man who raped them, or any woman.
"If it weren't for the fear of punishment," said one, "men would rape."
I was, well, offended.
I regret that I took the whole thing as seriously as I did. I should have left Brownmiller's book on the shelf, dismissing the whole assertion as outrageous and insupportable stupidity. I'm sure the book had positive functions, particularly in the validation of women who had suffered sexual violence, but in my life it functioned as hate propaganda.
In those days, "the male gaze" was itself already rape. Unless you walked around with your eyes shut (or were capable of never feeling any sexual desire), you were, in the jargon of the time, "always-already" a rapist.
It's harsh stuff. I recognize that it had roots in women's harsh experience. I recognize, too, that feminism has never been a very unified creature, and a lot of very positive things were happening there too.
Still, for those of us old enough to remember the time, I think the scars are there, and men as well as women have a right to be a little heated on the issue.
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I love men, but I was 32 years old when I realized I was still 'ducking blows' around men who I cared about when my attacker was long gone. I had to work hard to stop ducking. Now imagine how such events foreclose any sense of freedom to act in the world or how much of my energy went into dealing with 'my issues' rather than into my education at the time. The violence done to me foreclosed my freedom to be intimate in my relationships because, against my will, something in me was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I wouldn't have chosen to be like that without the experience of rape in my past. Rape makes us work hard to regain our footing, energy that we might have used for something else, say building a family, career or a graduate education.
As long as educated men pretend to be offended by the effects rape has on everyone generally, and on victims in particular, as long as you see yourselves as the unintended harmed parties you are not fully mature in your view of the costs of rape. This isn't a feminism problem, this is a problem with everyone actually taking responsibility for the unintended consequences that violence against women has for everyone.
Lesh, if it is 'half-mad' it comes from real life scars. No woman is untouched by rape and women tend to know that better than men. The fact that the problem of rape and the subjugation of women doesn't occur as a problem to many men. That doesn't change the fact that it is a problem for them. If rape didn't happen to one personally, it happened to ones sister or friend. The fact that so many still aren't offended and committed to ending violence against women and children is surely a sign that they have not confronted the real costs or such violence. Imagine someone holding a knife against your throat, threatening you with death and taking the most intimate thing you have to share with a partner. The fact that you are offended by how women act about such an event is YOUR problem too. That you think it shouldn't be, that is your failing.
Many thanks for your full and very interesting comment. It's Monday morning where I live, and the start of a busy week which will stop me saying anything worth hearing for at least several days. Then I'm due to be away for a week. I did though want to recognise your note as soon as I saw it. Of course it creates some turmoil — and I thought I'd adumbrate some reply in due course. I'm fully sympathetic towards you in the experience you report, even though there's much I dislike and would disavow in what you go on to say on its basis. If it suits you, and Matthew, I'll put something here when I've had time to reflect. It may be of interest to see whether a male and a female (or males and females, since I'm sure many others will want to pile in) could have a productive conversation on this key topic?
Keep well.
Don’t be disappointed; here we are. Life isn’t necessarily instant, though I can imagine it claps along at a fair pace in Washington. Matthew is probably gazing out of the picture window of his 42nd. floor flat on Hong Kong Island, reflecting on the sampans as they ferry from junk to junk, and on the junks as they dip away towards the Occident with their chests of tea and cloned refrigerators.
I’m just back from two days away from a quiet keyboard. I hope you’ll overlook the fact that all time is not cycling along at the one brisk speed, and that your fellow humans are not necessarily on tap just as you might want them to be. Also, the brains of dunces may grind small, but they can also grind exceeding slow — so Patience.
In any case we should all be careful what we wish for. Mustn’t snatch at our pleasures, nor be peremptory in demanding answers since those answers mayn’t necessarily be just the ones we’re silently intent on.
The first and key thing for me to do is what I hope I’ve done already in my earlier reaction — register the awful experience you’ve written about, and express my unqualified sympathy for the suffering I know it produced.
In an obvious way it would be best for everyone if we could leave things just like that. There may be a responsible argument for “least said soonest mended”. If we simply leave the question alone, maybe some of the destructive effects that rise from any debate on rape will dissipate naturally. A quiet chain of non-events could transpire, but I wouldn’t be sure of it. I think it’s probably a matter of temperament as to whether any given individual feels easier with discussing the question or not — with decently drawing a veil, or digging up the bones of the issue, and conducting a thorough forensic examination, with all the consequences that might flow.
To speak for myself: I certainly don’t want to be talking about rapes; I’d feel much easier in my life if neither the concept nor the practice existed. I’m pretty certain from his blog that Matthew doesn’t want to dwell on rape either; and my guess would be that you’d prefer to leave well alone if you were able.
In an obvious way the culture (the generality of our fellow humans) doesn’t want to talk about rape. Probably the mass of decent citizens would prefer in their own lives social amnesia — don’t you think? — if that were available to them: a soft option which would result in the topic’s being pushed away? Some past and current societies — and not all of them depraved or disgraceful, but some civil and civilised ones — have of course opted for this ‘polite’ approach on rape as on other difficult topics. They’re not manifestly inferior to ours.
Nonetheless, it seems unlikely, since so much noise has been generated about the question, that the option of non-discussion over rape is available to us here in the anglosphere, or in anglo-influenced places. Unhappily, and for numerous and complicated reasons, an experience like yours has become an ‘issue’, and one which declines to stop stalking us.
Like any stalker I think it needs to be confronted in the full light of day, and in the hope that efforts to shed reason on it will generate more light, rather than heat. The ideal would be that in the end the parties (the warring sexes, the ‘disputants’) might arrive at a form of understanding that’ll let them stay in touch — and co-operate for a joint future, as they must if we want to go on with the species.
Matthew’s central complaint — if he doesn’t object to my offering a gloss on what he’s written — seems to be that the nasty, undeniable (but in his view quite rare) fact of rape is extended in feminist polemics till rape is made to seem like a general and permanent activity. Being general (the feminist line goes) it characterises the male, and it defines the nature of patriarchy.
Though Matthew doesn’t go on to detail this, there is a range of classic methods used in feminist polemics to achieve this required generalisation. The point is easily verified by glancing at the numerous writings.
One simple way of generalising is through radical assertion: “all men are rapists” “all heterosexual intercourse is a form of rape”. Another method is to re-define numerous activities as rape, so that we have digital rape, marital rape, date rape, group sex, prostitution, universal pædophilia of course — and no doubt many another act or activity that I don’t recall or haven’t heard of. We can carry this imperial expansion of rape right through to its farthest expression (as tends to happen in American debate) till in the end we’ve defined rape as any sexual contact which occurs in the absence of a woman’s written and formally witnessed and second-by-second-updated consent for the contact to proceed. Nothing short of that stands as compelling evidence that a rape has not occurred.
A third significant tactic for generalising the crime of rape is to use it figuratively: “he raped me with his eyes”, “the victim was raped all over again by the police with their questions”, “I experienced the mortgagee’s repossession of my house as a personal rape”. This group of statements does not describe rape. It describes a range of more or less unpleasant experiences which are being likened to rape. The constant use of such expressions assists the feminist project of fixing the belief that rape is omnipresent. Living in this figurative climate, numerous women who have not gone through your experience nonetheless feel that rape is all about them (in both senses). I doubt it is.
A yet fourth activity is the wilful confusion of female fear/anxiety over the danger of rape, with the actual male perpetration of it. (Please understand that I’ve made no calibration as to whether the fear is justified or baseless. Naturally I will have my views when it comes to this or that example, and you can tell from the way I’m talking that I have a general orientation — but here I’m chiefly pointing to the prevalence of the anxiety, as compared with what I suppose to be the comparative rareness of the event.)
On this point I’d say that every new week’s new deposit of ‘research’ which proves that 80 per cent of girls and 55 per cent of boys, or whatever the baloney figures are, have been raped before they’ve been weaned — merely depresses me (about the nature of contemporary research and the contemporary mentality), and alienates me further from other humans. So here is a fifth way feminism seeks to establish its claim about the pervasiveness of rape: through a steady flow of spurious ‘advocacy’ research. In the face of that ‘work’ it seems important for the sane person to recall that neither subjective fear nor ideological desire nor commissioned ‘social science’ automatically equate with objective fact.
We add that a sixth and profoundly dangerous feminist stratagem has been to have laws revised up and down the planet so that often violent gender-based prejudice is encoded in the statutes. This is dangerous not only for men who have anything to do with women (and who therefore would be well advised to desist from contact with women as much as feasible), but for our civilisation as a whole. This shift has involved a serious weakening of our common criminal code, sometimes doing away with key safeguards such as the close examination of witnesses, the presumption of innocence, the avoidance of double jeopardy.
Now all this is a rather laboured way of referring to one thing that both you and Mathew focus on, though in differing terms and from opposite perspectives.
Matthew points out that to allege an individual has spoken rudely cannot be to convict that individual of rape. He also hints that a man’s looking at a woman — whatever the nature or imagined nature of his gaze — is not a rape. It may be that the words were not pleasant; it may be that the glance was unwanted; but in both cases the claim or implied claim of rape is a wholly unacceptable escalation of a normal event.
(Matthew, incidentally, uses the explosive phrase “the collective guilt of men”. There is no time to go into that here — save to say that we should all be bright enough to dismiss such a dangerous figment, just as we reject Jung’s “collective unconscious” or Netanyahu’s “collective guilt of the Palestinians”.)
You exemplify the falsification which Matthew complains of, and which here I’ve called a ‘generalisation’. In reflecting on your dreadful experience, you go on to make a leap from it into broad societal experience: “imagine how such events foreclose any sense of freedom to act in the world”. I understand why you do this, and I hope I’ve expressed my feeling for your distress; but not everything that happens to us as individuals, happens to the whole world. Obviously.
It seems that, having been raped once, you became convinced that you were going to be raped over and over again — indeed that men were raping you all the time; perhaps that ‘the patriarchy’, and even existence itself, was a permanent form of rape. This is to get a serious personal experience out of all proportion. As you tell the tale, it was demonstrably not the case that you were suffering repeated rapes. What happened to you was bad, left deep and destructive wounds, but it did not demonstrate that all men are rapists all the time, or that organised society is an ongoing form of rape.
There’s existence, and then there’s our feeling about existence. There’s fact and there’s our reaction to it. It seems elementary that we need to keep the two mentally distinct.
If Matthew’s account of Brownmiller’s argument is accurate (and it’s many years since I looked at her book and would prefer not to have to revisit it), she was of course arguing a syllogism. That it was an ideologically motivated and logically suspect argument will surprise nobody who’s familiar with feminist writing.
That “Women’s fear of rape reinforces patriarchy” may in some special sense be true. But it is also true that tractors reinforce patriarchy; football reinforces patriarchy; the need for a great number of us to go through the daily grind of work to make ends meet tends to reinforce patriarchy. However, it does not follow from any of this that men who support tractors or football or work, also support rape. (The flaw in the argument is readily discoverable, but readers may prefer to do he uncovering for themselves.) Nor are “men” — a significant number of men in organised caucus — responsible for rape in the way that they’re RESPONSIBLE for tractors and many another beneficial thing. The argument leaks.
We’d have expected as much from the doubtful starting premise. The point of Brownmiller’s argument is not to investigate things as they exist, but to assert the obviously untrue gender-calumny that “all men are rapists”.
Now when you, Suzanne, start your response to Matthew, “The problem is that there is a certain amount of uncomfortable truth in …” — you hit a reasonable note, but we suspect that your form of words is already acknowledging the substantial flaw in the Browmiller thesis. You’re acknowledging (am I right?) that Brownmiller may be correct for a very small number of men, or true ‘in a manner of speaking’, or may be true under special circumstances — something like that. But not true in the general and totalising way that she claims. And which, I believe, Matthew is gently refuting.
What’s worse than any of that I fear, is that you seem to indicate your wish that Brownmiller’s argument WERE true — even though your intellect can see quite clearly that it isn’t.
Now I’ll get out of your ear.
One of my sisters was grabbed by 4 high school boys and dragged into the back of a van and gang raped. These were ordinary 1960's high school boys. Then they told everyone that she was a slut. She was 14 years old and hardly a slut.
I was speaking personally about the foreclosure of my experience of freedom after the experience of rape. While I am not a scientist, I did work in rape crisis counselling and found that I did not agree much with the approach that they took because, it seemed to me, that the 'common knowledge' for how to help a rape victim seemed to me to extend the experience of victimhood rather than aid someone who experienced a rape in reclaiming and reasserting their life as fully as they could.
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I am not very interested in the extremes of argumentation because they are so often used to muddy up what we could actually do as a culture to improve upon a situation.
I do agree that Susan Brownmiller is absolutely extreme in her assertions. I don't really understand publishers choices in whose arguments to publish. I am not good at picking what others will be interested in -- I just don't think I have much of a clue about anyones interests but my own.
I think in some ways I am a rather masculine thinker and a very feminine woman. Modern life allows us to assert ourselves in ways that were frowned upon in the past. As for me, having already had the experience of rape I am not afraid to think about it in any respect: I am not fragile in that way. When I learned that it had also happened to my sister, I thought there must be something about my family that drew predators to us. Not something personal, something cultural. We were poor and without someone at home to look after us because my mother worked and couldn't afford help. I think that similar circumstances are one reason why working class girls may be raped more often, they don't have the protections that money provides. But, class is not a protection when the rapist or molester is a friend of the family I have learned.
Women who experience rape have children whom they teach about life, and so they pass on their attitudes and fears, particularly to their daughters. I know this out of experience and not from academic study or scientific tests. I have put myself in the position to meet other women who share the experience of rape and I have listened to them, read what they write, studied reports and generally let myself think about rape and sexual abuse. One of the things that I noticed was that there weren't many men in the conversation, not many men trying to help unless they were police officers or social workers.
Nonetheless, even with little information, it is not difficult to think that such an experience as rape, would mark ones life and that the effects of such experience would spread to others in ways similar to the affects of PTSD after a war or a catastrophic event.
I was in a class where we polled the members of the class to see who had been sexually molested or raped. 1 in 3 women had been and 1 in 4 men. Its not science, but it was a fairly clear exposition that rape and sexual molestation affects us all. In any room where we sit there is likely someone in the room whose life has been changed.
When we have to teach our children to be careful of strangers, when we learn that rapists are most likely someone we know or members of our families, that isn't hyperbole, it is borne out in crime statistics. I think for those reasons alone, rather than fighting and arguing with extremists such as Brownmiller, that it is our lot to do our best to create a world where it is easier to be fully self-expressed regardless of gender.
I am unapologetically a feminist, but that doesn't mean that I don't love and fully respect the men in my life. It doesn't mean I don't want every happiness for each of them. It means I want to share responsibility for creating a safer environment for all of us to experiment with living as fully as we can.
I have a life that I love and I built it little by little with the people with whom I have shared my life, many of them smart and loving men. It is the understanding and cooperation of such men that I was seeking here.
I apologize for the delay. Responsibilities out there in the physical world.
It's very difficult to write about these issues, and it takes a lot to form thoughts and feelings into neat paragraphs as you have done.
Rape is an appalling crime, for all the reasons that you list and more. You shouldn't have to cope with it. No one should, and no one should have anything against condemnation of rape. I don't believe my post reveals any lightness or indifference on that topic. Indeed, I took offence with my friend exactly because I took rape far more seriously than apparently she expected me to.
My issue with Brownmiller is that she pins men into a sort of nightmare world with no possible or imaginable escape. She states ex cathedra that we are all guilty of an appalling crime, a sort of original sin of maleness, and then she denies us the possibility of escape. I have never been able to see that this constitutes anything like an effort to persuade us or anyone to be better. Following her logic, we might as well be literal rapists, if we are guilty already. Far better to reject her entire position outright than to accept that.
Lesh is right that she seems to feel the need to say these things with hyperbolic force because she "can't imagine anyone listening." Perhaps that is why her work punishes those men who open themselves to what she says.
Your position, Susanne, is very distinct from hers. You write, "This isn't a feminism problem, this is a problem with everyone actually taking responsibility for the unintended consequences that violence against women has for everyone." That is, everyone, men and women, should take responsibility, and I think you mean in social terms. Her claim is that only men should take responsibility, and then in an altogether senseless way. We should each, personally, admit responsibility for an appalling violent crime that we have not in fact committed. I do insist it makes a difference whether we are personally rapists or not.
Lesh is not merely "offended." He writes that he was traumatized. Possibly you don't believe this, but you shouldn't slide from the one word to the other without comment. I do believe it. I think words do have that kind of power, and feminists should be the last people in the world to deny that power. Even though you may feel that his pain is less than your own, I do think it would be better to recognize that he has pain, and that you see where it comes from.
I also don't think you should need to say that you love men. Supposing you didn't. What difference would that make? Your experience would still be your experience. You would still have the same claim to understanding as a human being as if you didn't. It's as if you're trying to avoid an ad hominem argument that hasn't as yet been made. Ad hominems are invalid. Just ignore them. Come to think of it, Brownmiller's central assertion is essentially an ad hominem.
Lesh, I think you can see, based on what Susanne has written, why I wrote the way I did. I do know that the excesses I write about have roots in very genuine suffering. I have tried to recognize that, with what success I don't know.
Susanne, many thanks for responding so promptly. It looks as if some discussion might start up.
Having actually had a knife at my throat while I was being raped, I just don't feel that I am the one that needs to apologize to anyone. Having ones feelings hurt has no comparison to having ones ability to bear children taken. So, while I recognize that people say horrible, horrible things, I don't think I ever have said anything cruel or disrespectful on this subject. I believe that Lesh would agree with me that I don't need to serve as an apologist for the likes of Susan Brownmiller. Couldn't we just agree that she became overzealous as a result of her years of research and lost sight of what would really make a difference in the issue she was addressing?
Also, Matthew being the debate expert here, I just want you to know that I see this as more personal, an important conversation in some ways. That is a feminist idea as well, that what is personal is political.
DNA evidence is backed up all over the US in rape cases. Backed up for years and years while new rapes are committed by people who we have evidence enough to convict. Those budget decisions not to test that evidence are a political decision not to do everything we can to protect our citizens.
In the past week they've found 10 bodies at the home of a convicted rapist in Ohio. They are still taking the home apart and digging in the yard. How could the police be so callous that they ignored the stench of dead human beings coming from the house? Reports of the police inaction, callousness and insults when families reported women missing are a matter of deep concern and point to part of the problem.
Do we really care? Are we more concerned about having our feelings hurt than we are about living in a world where people are safe? I gave up that concern for my feelings long ago when I decided to try to help.
I have respect for anyone who fights his or her corner, and despite the very strong feelings involved, I think we have more here than a dialogue of the deaf.
Irony upon ironies with the Nanjing trip. Having written about feminist issues, I immediately found myself, a middle-aged man, presiding over an all-female team of seven 18-year-olds and two assistant coaches, both female, in their early twenties. One of the assistant coaches understood debating much better than I do, and yet my position as authoritative was structurally inevitable. I hope I dealt with that all right.
Our girls gave a solid account of themselves, offering a rich case on a complicated issue. The other side (all-female except for a male leader) edged us on style rather than substance. He (the male leader) subsequently urged them to send a team to the all-China English debating tournament in Beijing in May. They think they will.
An experience of debating can be an enormous step forward for a student, at once in language skills and in personal development. It’s nerve-racking, though, to guide them to it. You always think someone is going to crash and burn, move back rather than forward. Hasn’t happened yet, though.
On our issue, and in relation to debating:
It does strike me that much of the rhetoric that Lesh discusses is ineffective as well as offensive. The fundamental reason for using rape in making other arguments is that men as well as women are appalled by it. In terms of expression of feeling, this makes sense (“sexism in all forms makes me feel raped”). In terms of persuading men, though, the effort to make other things equivalent to rape in effect makes light of rape. It makes it look like the person making the argument doesn’t take rape seriously. If a rude remark is just as bad as rape, well then rape is no worse than a rude remark. That is what gives substance to Lesh’s statement that the rhetoric is “half-mad.” The refusal to create a scale of offensiveness, the insistence that everything is as bad as the worst, creates an emotionalized muddle. When we deal with issues that have so much emotional resonance, it is especially important to be logical, to create careful distinctions. The heat is important, but coolness is just as important as heat.
Another problem I have with the Brownmiller line of argument is that it seems to be trying to get men and boys to imprison themselves, to say, “I am potentially violent, and therefore I should police my own thoughts and imagination, make very sure that I am pure of the evil of male violence.” I just think that’s a misguided approach. I believe that men and boys do have aggressiveness within them that is partly chemical. Well, that’s the place where we live, and it’s not all bad. Boys should learn identification with girls, not only as general human beings, but as girls, understanding the issues of their reality that are not the same as boys’ experience. I think one thing that necessarily means that boys should imaginatively explore violent urges, and imagine fully what the implications would be for other people, girls included. Boys should not be treated as potential criminals. They should be treated as fully responsible, able to deal with themselves. If they are motivated to, they can. The only way to move forward on this is to treat them as responsible, and that is what Brownmiller fails to do.
Susanne, I think your suggestion that social and economic status also played a role in the abuse of you and your family is depressingly accurate. The trauma must affect you all still.
And for the record, I love women. Which is fortunate, given what I do in life.
I can't imagine debating in Spanish, my second, if partial, language. Kudos to all of your team!
It would be an honour. Please give me the address.