Brownmiller, Against Our Will
Posted: Thu, Sep 12, 2024
Rape as “Violence, Not Sex”
Dominant social understanding of rape:
- Rape arises out of sexual desires/needs/impulses; it is a response to sexual “provocation.”
- Rape is sex done just a little too aggressively, but the line is thin: “no” means “yes” because that’s [from men’s perspective!] how women work.
- Rape is really easy to accuse a man of.
- Rape is rare.
- Rape is a private, individual issue; it is between one man and a woman (or perhaps the woman’s husband or father).
- As we just discussed, the law has long been confused about whether rape is an offense against the woman qua herself or the woman qua a man’s wife/daughter.
Brownmiller:
- Rape and sex are categorically distinct.
- This gets around the thin line.
- Rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction, physically or psychologically; rape is more like physical assault—literally, sexual assault.
- Rather, rape is “man’s basic weapon of force against women,” “nothing more or less than a conscious-process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (pp. 14–15, her emphasis).
- This gets around the victim-blaming: there is nothing about how the victim’s sexual attractiveness/“provocation” that’s relevant to whether something is rape.
- False accusations are irrelevant; “all men” are complicit in rape anyway.
- Rape is everywhere.
- Rape is a political issue; it is between men as a gender and women as a gender.
A Biological Analysis of a Political Problem?
Brownmiller then traces rape to:
- The lack of estrous cycles in human females (pp. 12–13).
- “Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability” (p. 13).
- The inability of women to “retaliate in kind” (p. 14, her emphasis).
- “By anatomical fiat—the inescapable construction of their genital organs—the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey” (p. 16).
Some issues for discussion:
- Is this biology?
- Is the penis, or really any body part, by nature a weapon?
- Brownmiller thinks that women are “structurally” incapable of rape only because she presumes a certain definition of what sex is?
- Is rape not sexual?
- Surely, rape as a form of violence is still different from other forms of violence, and that difference has to do with sex? (e.g., rape messes up survivor’s relationship with sex in profound ways)
- Is there anything we can do about it?
- No hope whatsoever for a way out?
- Blames biology for a political problem?
In-class activity: Please read the poems by Sharon Olds and torrin a. greathouse.
- What is the point that Olds is trying to make?
- Why does greathouse find it demeaning?