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?