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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.
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.
Just to darken your day a little –
“The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.”
From Hopes and Prospects
“Unless we accept that women are biologically programmed to engage in beauty practices, then they need to be understood as cultural practices that are required of women. All practices required of one sex class rather than the other should be examined for their political role in maintaining male dominance. ”
-From Beauty and Misogyny:Harmful Cultural Practices in the West by Sheila Jeffreys. (p. 30)
Reading this text now… by golly there are so many ideas that are clarified; and this only in the first two chapters.
” In Loving to Survive she makes an analogy between femininity and the behaviour of hostages om situations of captivity and threat that has been named Stockholm syndrome. She explains that the idea of Stockholm syndrome comes from a hostage situation in Stockholm in which it because clear that hostages, instead of reacting with rebellion to their oppressors, were likely to bond with them. This bonding, in which hostages can come to identify the interests of their kidnappers as their own, comes from the very real threat to their survival that the kidnappers pose. Graham extends this concept to cover the behaviour of women, femininity, that is a reaction to living in a society of male violence in which they are in danger. Femininity represent societal Stockholm syndrome, “If one (inescapable) group threatens another group with violence but also – as a group – shoes the victimized group some kindness, an attachment between the groups will develop. […] (Graham, 1994, p.57)
Graham states unequivocally that, “masculinity and femininity are code words for male domination and female subordination” (1994, p.192). She says that women, like hostages, are afraid, and “use any available information to alter our behaviour in ways that make interactions with men go smoothly”(p.160). One of the things they [women] do is change their bodies in order to win men over. She lists the harmful beauty practices that are considered in this book, such as make up, cosmetic surgery, shaving and waxing body hair, high-heeled shoes and restrictive clothes, as examples. She says that these practices reflect:
1. The extent to which women seek to make ourselves acceptable to men,
2. The extent to which women seek to connect to men, and thus
3. the extent to which women feel the need for men’s affection and approval
4. the extent to which women feel unworthy of men’s affection and approval just as we are (unchanged). (Graham, 1994, p.162)”
From Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys. (p. 25-26)
Powerful stuff that makes difficult societal concepts more easily understood and more easily argued. Please feel free to reference this post when you’re trying to get across basic societal ideas to the next clueless dude who “knows what feminists are all about.”
“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) |
Short, sweet and to the point –
“Pornography is the graphic representation, not just of violence against women, but of male supremacy. It degrades all women. It erodes the humanity of all women. Porn use fetishizes violence and supports male supremacy. Porn is the expression of patriarchy. Porn use is the practice of patriarchy.”
-Twisty, from I Blame the Patriarchy.
Discuss in the comments section.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…