Last Days at Hot Slit

by Andrea Dworkin

  The consent standard in our society does more than protect a significant item of social currency for women; it fosters, and is in turn bolstered by, a masculine pride in the exclusive possession of a sexual object. The consent of a woman to sexual intercourse awards the man a privilege of bodily access, a personal “prize” whose value is enhanced by sole ownership…. An additional reason for the man’s condemnation of rape may be found in the threat to his status from a decrease in the “value” of his sexual “possession” which would result from forcible violation.10

  This remains the basic articulation of rape as a social crime: it is a crime against men, a violation of the male right to personal and exclusive possession of a woman as a sexual object.

  Is it any wonder, then, that when Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, the authors of Against Rape, did a study of women and rape, large numbers of women, when asked, “Have you ever been raped?” answered, “I don’t know.”11

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  What is rape?

  Rape is the first model for marriage. As such, it is sanctioned by the Bible and by thousands of years of law, custom, and habit.

  Rape is an act of theft—a man takes the sexual property of another man.

  Rape is, by law and custom, a crime against men, against the particular owner of a particular woman.

  Rape is the primary heterosexual model for sexual relating. Rape is the primary emblem of romantic love.

  Rape is the means by which a woman is initiated into her womanhood as it is defined by men.

  Rape is the right of any man who desires any woman, as long as she is not explicitly owned by another man. This explains clearly why defense lawyers are allowed to ask rape victims personal and intimate questions about their sexual lives. If a woman is a virgin, then she still belongs to her father and a crime has been committed. If a woman is not married and is not a virgin, then she belongs to no particular man and a crime has not been committed.

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  These are the fundamental cultural, legal, and social assumptions about rape: (1) women want to be raped, in fact, women need to be raped; (2) women provoke rape; (3) no woman can be sexually forced against her will; (4) women love their rapists; (5) in the act of rape, men affirm their own manhood and they also affirm the identity and function of women—that is, women exist to be fucked by men and so, in the act of rape, men actually affirm the very womanhood of women. Is it any wonder, then, that there is an epidemic of forcible rape in this country and that most convicted rapists do not know what it is they have done wrong?

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  In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly says that as women we have been deprived of the power of naming.12 Men, as engineers of this culture, have defined all the words we use. Men, as the makers of law, have defined what is legal and what is not. Men, as the creators of systems of philosophy and morality, have defined what is right and what is wrong. Men, as writers, artists, movie makers, psychologists and psychiatrists, politicians, religious leaders, prophets, and so-called revolutionaries have defined for us who we are, what our values are, how we perceive what happens to us, how we understand what happens to us. At the root of all the definitions they have made is one resolute conviction: that women were put on this earth for the use, pleasure, and sexual gratification of men.

  In the case of rape, men have defined for us our function, our value, and the uses to which we may be put.

  For women, as Mary Daly says, one fundamental revolutionary act is to reclaim the power of naming, to define for ourselves what our experience is and has been. This is very hard to do. We use a language which is sexist to its core: developed by men in their own interests; formed specifically to exclude us; used specifically to oppress us. The work, then, of naming is crucial to the struggle of women; the work of naming is, in fact, the first revolutionary work we must do. How, then, do we define rape?

  Rape is a crime against women.

  Rape is an act of aggression against women.

  Rape is a contemptuous and hostile act against women.

  Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to self-determination.

  Rape is a violation of a woman’s right to absolute control of her own body.

  Rape is an act of sadistic domination.

  Rape is a colonializing act.

  Rape is a function of male imperialism over and against women.

  The crime of rape against one woman is a crime committed against all women.

  Generally, we recognize that rape can be divided into two distinct categories: forcible rape and presumptive rape. In a forcible rape, a man physically assaults a woman and forces her, through physical violence, threat of physical violence, or threat of death, to perform any sexual act. Any forced sexual act must be considered rape—“contact between the mouth and the anus, the mouth and the penis, the mouth and the vulva, [contact] between the penis and the vulva, [between the] penis and anus, or contact between the anus or vulva” and any phallic substitute like a bottle, stick, or dildo.13

  In a presumptive rape, we are warranted in presuming that a man has had carnal access to a woman without her consent, because we define consent as “meaningful and knowledgeable assent; not mere acquiescence.”14 In a presumptive rape, the constraint on the victim’s will is in the circumstance itself; there has been no mutuality of choice and understanding and therefore the basic human rights of the victim have been violated and a crime has been committed against her. This is one instance of presumptive rape, reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape:

  The woman is seventeen, a high school student. It is about four o’clock in the afternoon. Her boy friend’s father has picked her up in his car after school to take her to meet his son. He stops by his house and says she should wait for him in the car. When he has pulled the car into the garage, this thirty-seven-year-old father of six rapes her.15

  This sort of rape is common, it is contemptible, and needless to say, it is never reported to the police.

  Who, then, commits rape?

  The fact is that rape is not committed by psychopaths. Rape is committed by normal men. There is nothing, except a conviction for rape which is very hard to obtain, to distinguish the rapist from the nonrapist.

  The Institute for Sex Research did a study of rapists in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In part, the researchers concluded that “… there are no outstandingly ominous signs in [the rapists’] presex-offense histories; indeed, their heterosexual adjustment is quantitatively well above average.”16

  (…)

  Who are the victims of rape? Women—of all classes, races, from all walks of life, of all ages. Most rapes are intraracial—that is, white men rape white women and black men rape black women. The youngest rape victim on record is a two-week-old female infant.17 The oldest rape victim on record is a ninety-three-year-old woman.18

  (…)

  Now, I could read you testimony after testimony, tell you story after story—after all, in 1974 there were 607, 310 such stories to tell—but I don’t think I have to prove to you that rape is a crime of such violence and that it is so rampant that we must view it as an ongoing atrocity against women. All women live in constant jeopardy, in a virtual state of siege. That is, simply, the truth. I do however want to talk to you explicitly about one particularly vicious form of rape which is increasing rapidly in frequency. This is multiple rape—that is, the rape of one woman by two or more men.

  In Amir’s study of 646 rape cases in Philadelphia in 1958 and 1960, a full 43 percent of all rapes were multiple rapes (16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes).19 I want to tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape. A twenty-five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town. She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity. These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she was raped by approximately forty men. These men also tried to force intercourse between her and a dog. These me
n also put bottles and other objects up her vagina. Then, they took her to a police station and charged her with prostitution. Then, they offered to drop the charges against her if she was institutionalized. She was institutionalized; she discovered that she was pregnant; then, she had a complete emotional break down.

  One man who had been a participant in the rape bragged about it to another man. That man, who was horrified, told a professor. A campus group confronted the fraternity. At first, the accused men admitted that they had committed all the acts charged, but they denied that it was rape since, they claimed, the woman had consented to all of the sexual acts committed. Subsequently, when the story was made public, these same men denied the story completely.

  A women’s group on campus demanded that the fraternity be thrown off campus to demonstrate that the university did not condone gang rape. No action was taken against the fraternity by university officials or by the police.20

  The second story that I want to tell was reported by Robert Sam Anson in an article called “That Championship Season” in New Times magazine.21 According to Anson, on July 25, 1974, Notre Dame University suspended for at least one year six black football players for what the university called “a serious violation of university regulations.” An eighteen-year-old white high school student, it turned out, had charged the football players with gang rape.

  The victim’s attorney, the county prosecutor, the local reporter assigned to cover the story, a trustee of the local newspaper—all were Notre Dame alumni, and all helped to cover up the rape charge.

  Notre Dame University, according to Anson, has insisted that no crime was committed. It was the consensus of university officials that the football players were just sowing their wild oats in an old-fashioned gang bang, and that the victim was a willing participant. The football players were suspended for having sex in their dormitory. The President of Notre Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, a noted liberal and scholar, a Catholic priest, insisted that no rape took place and said that the university would produce, if necessary, “dozens of eyewitnesses.” I quote Anson:

  Hesburgh’s conclusions are based on an hour-long personal interview with the six football players, along with an investigation conducted by his Dean of Students, John Macheca, a … former university public relations man … Macheca himself will say nothing about his investigation… Various campus sources close to the case say that, throughout his investigation, no university official spoke either to the girl [sic] or her parents. Hesburgh himself professes neither to know or to care. He says testily, “It’s irrelevant…. I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.”22

  According to Anson, had Dr. Hesburgh talked to “the girl” he would have heard this story: after work late on July 3, she went to Notre Dame to see the football player she had been dating; they made love twice on his dormitory bunk; he left the room; she was alone and undressed, wrapped in a sheet; another football player entered the room; she had a history of hostility and confrontation with this second football player (he had made a friend of hers pregnant, he had refused to pay for an abortion, she had confronted him on this, finally he did pay part of the money); this second football player and the woman began to quarrel and he threatened that, unless she submit to him sexually, he would throw her out the third-story window; then he raped her; four other football players also raped her; during the gang rape, several other football players were in and out of the room; when the woman finally was able to leave the dormitory she drove immediately to a hospital.

  Both the police investigator on the case and a source in the prosecutor’s office believe the victim’s story—that there was a gang rape perpetrated on her by the six Notre Dame football players.

  All of the male university authorities who investigated the alleged gang rape determined that the victim was a slut. This they did, all of them, by interviewing the accused rapists. In fact, the prosecutor’s character investigation indicated that the woman was a fine person. The coach of the Notre Dame football team placed responsibility for the alleged gang rape on the worsening morals of women who watch soap operas. Hesburgh, moral exemplar that he is, concluded: “I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.” The Dean of Students, John Macheca, expelled the students as a result of his secret investigation. Hesburgh overruled the expulsion out of what he called “compassion”—he reduced the expulsion to one year’s suspension. The rape victim now attends a university in the Midwest. Her life, according to Anson, has been threatened.

  The fact is, as these two stories demonstrate conclusively, that any woman can be raped by any group of men. Her word will not be credible against their collective testimony. A proper investigation will not be done. Remember the good Father Hesburgh’s words as long as you live: “I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys.” Even when a prosecutor is convinced that rape as defined by male law did take place, the rapists will not be prosecuted. Male university officials will protect those sacrosanct male institutions—the football team and the fraternity—no matter what the cost to women.

  The reasons for this are terrible and cruel, but you must know them. Men are a privileged gender class over and against women. One of their privileges is the right of rape—that is, the right of carnal access to any woman. Men agree, by law, custom, and habit, that women are sluts and liars. Men will form alliances, or bonds, to protect their gender class interests. Even in a racist society, male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding.

  It is very difficult whenever racist and sexist pathologies coincide to delineate in a political way what has actually happened. In 1838, Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and feminist, described Amerikan institutions as “a system of complicated crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood, sweat, and tears of my sisters in bonds.”23 Racism and sexism are the warp and woof of this Amerikan society, the very fabric of our institutions, laws, customs, and habits—and we are the inheritors of that complicated system of crimes. In the Notre Dame case, for instance, we can postulate that the prosecutor took the woman’s charges of rape seriously at all because her accused rapists were black. That is racism and that is sexism. There is no doubt at all that white male law is more amenable to the prosecution of blacks for the raping of white women than the other way around. We can also postulate that, had the Notre Dame case been taken to court, the rape victim’s character would have been impugned irrevocably because her lover was a black. That is racism and that is sexism. We also know that had a black woman been raped, either by blacks or whites, her rape would go unprosecuted, unremarked. That is racism and that is sexism.

  In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim’s life to absolute zero. In the Notre Dame case, the woman’s lover allowed his fellows to rape her. This was a male bond. In the course of the rape, at one point when the woman was left alone—there is no indication that she was even conscious at this point—a white football player entered the room and asked her if she wanted to leave. When she did not answer, he left her there without reporting the incident. This was a male bond. The cover-up and lack of substantive investigation by white authorities was male bonding. All women of all races should recognize that male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding except in one particular kind of rape: that is, where the woman is viewed as the property of one race, class, or nationality, and her rape is viewed as an act of aggression against the males of that race, class, or nationality. Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice has described this sort of rape:

  I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto … and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately
, willfully, methodically …

  Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.24

  In this sort of rape, women are viewed as the property of men who are, by virtue of race or class or nationality, enemies. Women are viewed as the chattel of enemy men. In this situation, and in this situation only, bonds of race or class or nationality will take priority over male bonding. As Cleaver’s testimony makes clear, the women of one’s own group are also viewed as chattel, property, to be used at will for one’s own purposes. When a black man rapes a black woman, no act of aggression against a white male has been committed, and so the man’s right to rape will be defended. It is very important to remember that most rape is intraracial—that is, black men rape black women and white men rape white women because rape is a sexist crime. Men rape the women they have access to as a function of their masculinity and as a signet of their ownership. Cleaver’s outrage “at the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman” is wrath over the theft of property which is rightly his. Similarly, classic Southern rage at blacks who sleep with white women is wrath over the theft of property which rightly belongs to the white male. In the Notre Dame case, we can say that the gender class interests of men were served by determining that the value of the black football players to masculine pride—that is, to the championship Notre Dame football team—took priority over the white father’s very compromised claim to ownership of his daughter. The issue was never whether a crime had been committed against a particular woman.

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