Susan 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.

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.