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I’m finishing Brownmiller’s book, Against our Will. Funny how the arguments really have not changed and are still regularly trotted out by ‘feminist allies’ and critics here in 2012. As Brownmilla concludes, she thoroughly brings the noise and lays it all down on the table with bon mots like this:
“Critics of the women’s movement, when they are not faulting us for being slovenly, straggly-haired, construction booted, whiny sore losers who refuse to accept our female responsibilities, often profess to see a certain inexplicable Victorian primness and anti-sexual prudery in our attitudes and responses. “Come on, gals,” they say in essence, “don’t you know that your battle for female liberation is part of our larger battle for sexual liberation? Free yourselves from all your old hang-ups! Stop pretending that you are actually offended by those four-letter words and animal noise we grunt in your direction on the street in appreciation of your womanly charms. When we plaster your faceless naked body on the cover our slick magazines, which sell millions of copies, we do it in sensual obeisance to your timeless beauty – which, by our estimation, ceases to be timeless at age twenty or thereabouts. If we feel the need for a little fun and go out and rent the body of a prostitute for half and hour or so, we are merely engaging in a mutual act between two consenting adults, and what’s it got to do with you? When we turn our movie theatres into showcase for pornographic films and covert our bookstores to outlets for mass produced obscene smut, not only should you marvel at the wonders of our free-enterprise system, but you should applaud us for pushing back the barriers of repressive middle class morality, and for our strenuous defense of all the civil liberties you hold so dear, because we have made obscenity the new frontier in defense of freedom of speech, that noble tradition. And surely you’re not against civil liberties and freedom of speech, now, are you?”
The case against pornography and the case against toleration of prostitution are central to the fight against rape, and if it angers a large part of the liberal population to be so informed, then I would question in turn the political understanding of such liberals and their true concern for the rights of women.”
[…]
Once we accept as basic truth that rape is not a crime of irrational,impulsive, uncontrollable lust, but is a deliberate, hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of the would be conqueror, designed to intimidate and inspire fear, we must look toward those elements in our culture that promote and propagandize these attitudes, which offer men, and in particular impressionable, adolescent males, who form the potential raping population, the ideology and psychologic encouragement to commit their acts of aggression without awareness, for the most part, that they have committed a punishable crime, let alone a moral wrong. ”
-Susan Brownmiller quoted from her book Against our Will p.389-390.
The words are Susan Brownmiller’s. Her noble goal, to end the exploitation of women –
“But my horror at the idea of legalize prostitution is not that it doesn’t work as a rape deterrent, but that it institutionalizes the concept that it is a man’s monetary right, if not his divine right, to gain access to the female body, and that sex is a female service that should not be denied the civilized male. Perpetuation of the concept that the “powerful male impulse” must be satisfied with immediacy by a cooperative class of women, set aside and expressly licensed for this purpose, is part and parcel of the mass psychology of rape. Indeed, until the day is reached when prostitution is totally eliminated (a millennium that will not arrive until men, who create the demand, and not the women who supply it, are fully prosecuted under the law), the false perception of sexual access as an adjunct of male power and privilege will continue to fuel the rapist mentality. ”
-Susan Brownmiller, Agianst our Will. p.392.
Susan Brownmillar examines the role of the justice system with regards to rape. Or perhaps more accurately the “male-justice” system.
[On raping a minor under the age of consent]
[…] States with a high age of consent usually employ the chastity standard for the upper-age limits. In some states the burden of proving prior chastity, that is virginity, falls on the prosecutor; in others, the burden of proving prior unchastity falls on the defense. Previous unchastity on the part of a young victim means there can be no conviction for statutory rape.
[…] According to the Yale Law Journal, “Evidence of the complaining witness’s consent to previous acts of coitus with the defendant may be admitted, via the theory of ‘continuing state of mind’ to prove her consent to the act in question. Also, evidence of her general moral character is usually admissible. Courts apparently reason that a reputation of ‘loose moral character’ probably has a basis in fact and that a girl with such a character is more likely than not to consent to intercourse in any given instance.”
All jurisdictions allow testimony regarding previous acts of intercourse between offender and victim. In addition, many states allow testimony as to specific acts of intercourse between the victim and other men at other times in her life in an effort to prove her “loose moral character.” Some states restrict admissible testimony to a general appraisal of her “reputation for chastity in the neighbourhood in which she lives” from any number of witnesses, to be answered by “good” or “bad.” Still other jurisdictions allow testimony concerning a woman’s prior sexual history on the grounds that such information has a bearing on her “credibility.”
-From Against our Will by Susan Brownmiller p. 370-371.
Mad yet? You should be.
Here is a quaint idea that deserves some legal traction. Consent has fuck-all to do with “moral-character” or any sort of antediluvian notion of “chastity”. The first pico-second that a woman decides in any situation that activities need to stop signifies the end to her consent. Anything after said consent is removed is assault and/or rape.
“Against Our Will” is an important book, I suggest that everyone read it as soon as possible.
“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, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent… Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity,’ men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”
| — | Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) |
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