Now, I have laid out the dimensions of the rape atrocity. As women, we live in the midst of a society that regards us as contemptible. We are despised, as a gender class, as sluts and liars. We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us—against our bodies and our whole lives. Our characters are defamed, as a gender class, so that no individual woman has any credibility before the law or in society at large. Our enemies—rapists and their defenders—not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists, and teachers.
What can we, who are powerless by definition and in fact, do about it?
First, we must effectively organize to treat the symptoms of this dread and epidemic disease. Rape crisis centers are crucial. Training in self-defense is crucial. Squads of women police formed to handle all rape cases are crucial. Women prosecutors on rape cases are crucial.
New rape laws are needed. These new laws must: (1) eliminate corroboration as a requirement for conviction; (2) eliminate the need for a rape victim to be physically injured to prove rape; (3) eliminate the need to prove lack of consent; (4) redefine consent to denote “meaningful and knowledgeable assent, not mere acquiescence”; (5) lower the unrealistic age of consent; (6) eliminate as admissible evidence the victim’s prior sexual activity or previous consensual sex with the defendant; (7) assure that marital relationship between parties is no defense or bar to prosecution; (8) define rape in terms of degrees of serious injury.25 These changes in the rape law were proposed by the New York University Law Clinical Program in Women’s Legal Rights, and you can find their whole proposed model rape law in a book called Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, by the New York Radical Feminists. I recommend to you that you investigate this proposal and then work for its implementation.
Also, we must, in order to protect ourselves, refuse to participate in the dating system which sets up every woman as a potential rape victim. In the dating system, women are defined as the passive pleasers of any and every man. The worth of any woman is measured by her ability to attract and please men. The object of the dating game for the man is “to score.” In playing this game, as women we put ourselves and our well being in the hands of virtual or actual strangers. As women, we must analyze this dating system to determine its explicit and implicit definitions and values. In analyzing it, we will see how we are coerced into becoming sex-commodities.
Also, we must actively seek to publicize unprosecuted cases of rape, and we must make the identities of rapists known to other women.
There is also work here for men who do not endorse the right of men to rape. In Philadelphia, men have formed a group called Men Organized Against Rape. They deal with male relatives and friends of rape victims in order to dispel belief in the myth of female culpability. Sometimes rapists who are troubled by their continued aggression against women will call and ask for help. There are vast educative and counseling possibilities here. Also, in Lorton, Virginia, convicted sex offenders have organized a group called Prisoners Against Rape. They work with feminist task forces and individuals to delineate rape as a political crime against women and to find strategies for combating it. It is very important that men who want to work against rape do not, through ignorance, carelessness, or malice, reinforce sexist attitudes. Statements such as “Rape is a crime against men too” or “Men are also victims of rape” do more harm than good. It is a bitter truth that rape becomes a visible crime only when a man is forcibly sodomized. It is a bitter truth that men’s sympathy can be roused when rape is viewed as “a crime against men too.” These truths are too bitter for us to bear. Men who want to work against rape will have to cultivate a rigorous antisexist consciousness and discipline so that they will not, in fact, make us invisible victims once again.
It is the belief of many men that their sexism is manifested only in relation to women—that is, that if they refrain from blatantly chauvinistic behavior in the presence of women, then they are not implicated in crimes against women. That is not so. It is in male bonding that men most often jeopardize the lives of women. It is among men that men do the most to contribute to crimes against women. For instance, it is the habit and custom of men to discuss with each other their sexual intimacies with particular women in vivid and graphic terms. This kind of bonding sets up a particular woman as the rightful and inevitable sexual conquest of a man’s male friends and leads to innumerable cases of rape. Women are raped often by the male friends of their male friends. Men should understand that they jeopardize women’s lives by participating in the rituals of privileged boyhood. Rape is also effectively sanctioned by men who harass women on the streets and in other public places; who describe or refer to women in objectifying, demeaning ways; who act aggressively or contemptuously toward women; who tell or laugh at misogynistic jokes; who write stories or make movies where women are raped and love it; who consume or endorse pornography; who insult specific women or women as a group; who impede or ridicule women in our struggle for dignity. Men who do or who endorse these behaviors are the enemies of women and are implicated in the crime of rape. Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.
_____
I have been describing, of course, emergency measures, designed to help women survive as atrocity is being waged against us. How can we end the atrocity itself? Clearly, we must determine the root causes of rape and we must work to excise from our social fabric all definitions, values, and behaviors which energize and sanction rape.
What, then, are the root causes of rape?
Rape is the direct consequence of our polar definitions of men and women. Rape is congruent with these definitions; rape inheres in these definitions. Remember, rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms. In this male-supremacist society, men are defined as one order of being over and against women who are defined as another, opposite, entirely different order of being. Men are defined as aggressive, dominant, powerful. Women are defined as passive, submissive, powerless. Given these polar gender definitions, it is the very nature of men to aggress sexually against women. Rape occurs when a man, who is dominant by definition, takes a woman who, according to men and all the organs of their culture, was put on this earth for his use and gratification. Rape, then, is the logical consequence of a system of definitions of what is normative. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these definitions remain intact—that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity—men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.
In this society, the norm of masculinity is phallic aggression. Male sexuality is, by definition, intensely and rigidly phallic. A man’s identity is located in his conception of himself as the possessor of a phallus; a man’s worth is located in his pride in phallic identity. The main characteristic of phallic identity is that worth is entirely contingent on the possession of a phallus. Since men have no other criteria for worth, no other notion of identity, those who do not have phalluses are not recognized as fully human.
In thinking about this, you must realize that this is not a question of heterosexual or homosexual. Male homosexuality is not a renunciation of phallic identity. Heterosexual and homosexual men are equally invested in phallic identity. They manifest this investment differently in one area—the choice of what men call a “sexual object”—but their common valuation of women consistently reinforces their own sense of phallic worth.
It is this phallocentric identity of men that makes it possible—indeed, necessary—for men to view women as a lower order of creation. Men genuinely do not know t
hat women are individual persons of worth, volition, and sensibility because masculinity is the signet of all worth, and masculinity is a function of phallic identity. Women, then, by definition, have no claim to the rights and responsibilities of personhood. Wonderful George Gilder, who can always be counted on to tell us the dismal truth about masculinity, has put it this way: “… unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity…. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.”26 And so, what are the actions that validate and express this masculinity: rape, first and foremost rape; murder, war, plunder, fighting, imperializing and colonializing—aggression in any and every form, and to any and every degree. All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
As women, of course, we do not have phallic identities, and so we are defined as opposite from and inferior to men. Men consider physical strength, for instance, to be implicit in and derived from phallic identity, and so for thousands of years we have been systematically robbed of our physical strength. Men consider intellectual accomplishment to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are intellectually incompetent by their definition. Men consider moral acuity to be a function of phallic identity, and so we are consistently characterized as vain, malicious, and immoral creatures. Even the notion that women need to be fucked—which is the a priori assumption of the rapist—is directly derived from the specious conviction that the only worth is phallic worth: men are willing, or able, to recognize us only when we have attached to us a cock in the course of sexual intercourse. Then, and only then, we are for them real women.
As nonphallic beings, women are defined as submissive, passive, virtually inert. For all of patriarchal history, we have been defined by law, custom, and habit as inferior because of our nonphallic bodies. Our sexual definition is one of “masochistic passivity”: “masochistic” because even men recognize their systematic sadism against us; “passivity” not because we are naturally passive, but because our chains are very heavy and as a result, we cannot move.
The fact is that in order to stop rape, and all of the other systematic abuses against us, we must destroy these very definitions of masculinity and femininity, of men and women. We must destroy completely and for all time the personality structures “dominant-active, or male” and “submissive-passive, or female.” We must excise them from our social fabric, destroy any and all institutions based on them, render them vestigial, useless. We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws; we must eradicate from consciousness and memory all of the images, institutions, and structural mental sets that turn men into rapists by definition and women into victims by definition. Until we do, rape will remain our primary sexual model and women will be raped by men.
As women, we must begin this revolutionary work. When we change, those who define themselves over and against us will have to kill us all, change, or die. In order to change, we must renounce every male definition we have ever learned; we must renounce male definitions and descriptions of our lives, our bodies, our needs, our wants, our worth—we must take for ourselves the power of naming. We must refuse to be complicit in a sexual-social system that is built on our labor as an inferior slave class. We must unlearn the passivity we have been trained to over thousands of years. We must unlearn the masochism we have been trained to over thousands of years. And, most importantly, in freeing ourselves, we must refuse to imitate the phallic identities of men. We must not internalize their values and we must not replicate their crimes. In 1870, Susan B. Anthony wrote to a friend:
So while I do not pray for anybody or any party to commit out rages, still I do pray, and that earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women of this nation into a self-respect which will compel them to see the abject degradation of their present position; which will force them to break their yoke of bondage, and give them faith in themselves; which will make them proclaim their allegiance to woman first; which will enable them to see that man can no more feel, speak, or act for woman than could the old slaveholder for his slave. The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it. O, to compel them to see and feel, and to give them the courage and conscience to speak and act for their own freedom, though they face the scorn and contempt of all the world for doing it.27
Isn’t rape the outrage that will do this, sisters, and isn’t it time?
_______________
* These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there was no women’s studies program.
153 Bridge street
Northampton, Mass 01060
June 15, 1978
Dear Mom and Dad,
I have published articles in the past years that I havent mentioned, because there is no particular reason to. Or, for instance, when a piece appeared in Ms. quitexxxxxx awhile ago, I mentioned it, but there was no particular reason to go into it.
Now I have just published a piece which I want to tell you about. Since I told you about my “Lesbian pride” lecture before Our Blood appeared, it has been quite difficult for me to talk about my work with you. I am sure you can understand that.
In the July issue of Mother Jones, a leftist xxxxx magazine published in San Francisco but distributed nationally--quite, a fine magazine--I have an essay of which I am very proud, but which I am afraid will upset you and cause you pain. They have titled it “The Bruise That Doesn’t Heal,” a rather silly title I think. I called it “A Battered Wife Survives.” It is first person, nonfiction, about the fact that I was a battered wife.
The fact that I managed to write this, after so many years of not being able to, is something of which I am proud. I wrote it because I want to help the literally millions of women who are in the situation I was in. Because I have the talent to write, I also have a responsibility to write the truth about many things that many people do not want to x face, or cannot x face.
The piece mentions you in passing, but does not blame you. I do not go into what happened in Amsterdam, when you came to visit. It is not a piece about particulars, but about the general experience.
I wrote the piece around my last birthday, when I turned 31. The piece should not embarrass you, but I am afraid that it will, since my work has so often in the past.
There are many kinds of pain one can feel. One kind is empathy for the sufferings of another. Another kind of pain comes from feeling embarrassed or humiliated because something bad has happened, and one doesn’t want others to know. I am hoping that, if you read this piece, you will feel the first kind of pain, not the second. Once Gloria Steinem and I had a conversation about “Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia,” the first essay in Our Blood. She loves that piece very much. In the course of our conversation, she told me that she often feels sorry for the families of writers because they so often feel exposed by the work of the writer in the family, and so often suffer from the prejudices of those around them. She told me that her own mother changed her last name, so as not to be identified with the notorious “Gloria Steinem.” (Her father is dead.) Needless to say, this hurt her very much, but she did understand it. It reminded me of when Uncle Leon teases we about why I didnt change my name before I started writing. “It’s my name,” I told him.
I have always been proud of both of you, even though sometimes you have not thought so. I hope that if you read this piece you will be proud of me--of the strength that I found, of my power as a writer, and of my commitment to helping other women.
Grace Paley told me when I was 18 I think that I should not show you my work. She has found it impossible to show her parents and sisters her work, because it disturbs them profoundly. But I have felt in the past, and feel now, that since others may read this, and it may have an effect on you, you should know about it.
Now that I am really a professional writer of some stature, I d
ont generally think of sending you my work. I cant keep track of what is published and where. But since this is liable to have a farreaching impact, I feel responsible to tell you about it. Also, because I wrote it and it is true. I cant write to you about the things other people write about me, for instance. I feel that by now you have had ample opportunity to see how things are distorted. Most of what is written about people is rumor at best, often pure fabrication. So if someone writes something dreadful about me, I am not going to (nor have I in the past) bring it to yr attention. Why? For what reason?
But this is different. It strikes the same deep chords as the House of Detention situation, or the Lesbian Pride essay. I hope that you will stand with me in this, because being able to write this essay has been one of the finest achievements of my life.
As far as I know, the magazine is not on the newsstands yet. When it was accepted for publication many months ago, the magazine was not distributed on newsstands, just to subscribers. Publication of the essay was postponed many months, and I was not certain when it would appear. In these months, the circulation of Mother Jones has increased greatly, and it is on newstands, as far as I know, in most places.
So rather than have this come at you from someone else, I am writing to tell you about it. I hope that yr response will he one of support, not of anger.
The essay, read so far on a small scale, has elicited much response, all of it thus far extremely positive. Women extremely grateful to me for writing it. Perhaps knowing that, and that that is likely to be its main reception in the larger world, will mean something to you.
I have told you often, and said in my books, that whatever courage I have, or ability to realize my talent, I owe to the both of you. I am saying that again here. I am hoping that if you encounter pettiness or stupidity on the part of family and friends, you will not see that as more important than what I have done.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 9