by Anne Summers
Few women have learnt to view rape as a political act – in the way that it has been portrayed in this chapter – and they can only interpret it in terms of the patriarchal myths that lessen or remove the culpability of the rapist and implicate his victim. But a political consciousness is not necessary to feel degradation and humiliation and this is what every rape victim feels. Her body has been violently invaded; she has usually been subjected to, or forced to perform, sexual acts which she might enjoy with her lover but which with a violent stranger are repugnant and perverse. Most rape victims report that they feel soiled and dirty after the attack. Many wash themselves compulsively, shower up to a dozen times a day for weeks or months afterwards, trying to wash away the memory and the taint. For many women their sexual behaviour is irreparably altered. Some become absolutely frigid and cannot endure a sexual advance; for them rape and sex are inseparably associated and sex takes on all the horrors of rape. Other women become self-destructively promiscuous, consciously or otherwise reckoning that the guilt imputed to them by the myths must be justified and they therefore embark on proving it a prophecy.
Women who have been raped are also made to feel tainted, to feel that they bear a stigma. Again a court experience will heighten this because the woman’s shame and guilt will become public knowledge, reported upon in the newspapers and listened to by prying crowds in the public gallery. But the stigma is still there even if the woman does not press charges. Her family and friends have internalised the myths too and however much sympathy they feel for her, they will find it almost impossible not to secretly believe that she did not somehow invite the attack. She will thence-forward be known as a ‘rape victim’, a status that invites prurient and speculative curiosity. The association of sex and violence – a best-selling combination as every Sunday newspaper proprietor knows – incites a curiosity of mingled horror and excitement. People want to know all the details and will often feign extreme sympathy for the woman to prise them from her and then use this knowledge to condemn her. When a rape is reported in the newspapers, most people react almost instinctively with a combination of pity and a ‘but she must have asked for it’ response. They regret what she was forced to endure, but they nevertheless still suspect that somehow she invited the attack. Any woman who is known as a rape victim bears this stigma. If the woman becomes pregnant or contracts venereal disease as a result of the rape, the stigma is even worse because a testament to what happened remains. Even after the disease is cured, and pregnancy aborted or the child given up for adoption, the woman’s memory and her reputation are seared with shame.
Rape Crisis Centres, which have been established in the US and more recently in Australia, report that a large percentage of their calls are from women who were raped as long as ten years previously and who still live with the horror of the memory. In April 1974 the American feminist Elizabeth Gould Davis wrote a letter of testimony to a seminar on rape in which she described in the third person her ever-present memories and reactions to a violent rape she had endured, while aged in her late 50s, three years earlier:
It was two or three days before the shock wore off and the full impact of the experience hit her. She became very ill, and now, nearly three years later, she has not yet recovered. The police told her she was lucky not to have been murdered. But that remains an unanswered question in her mind. Simple murder would not have involved the horror, the insulting degradation, the devastating affront to the dignity, and the sensation of bodily filth that time has not washed off. Nor would it have led to years of startled awakenings from sound sleep, the cold sweats at noises in the dark, the palpitations of the heart at the sound of a deep male voice, the horribly repeated image of two large muscular hands approaching her throat, the rumbling voice that promised to kill her if she struggled or tried to scream, the unbearable vision of being found on the floor of her own home, lying half naked and dead with her legs ridiculously spread. What was lucky about it was that it happened nearer the end of her life than the beginning. What torture it must be to young women who have to live with such memories for fifty years! This older woman’s heart goes out to them …
The stigma does not exist merely in the raped woman’s mind; it also has a tangible social existence. But it is one that is rarely articulated. It is like a prejudice, which is alluded to, and which everyone recognises, but which is rarely upheld for rational examination. Women are very aware of its existence and if they, or a member of their family, are raped they will try and hush up what happened, will try to preserve their reputation behind a mask of silence. While this is their only resort if they want to avoid being labelled Damned Whores, such reticence means they internalise the horror of the experience. Much of it could be exorcised from their memories if they could externalise and discuss it, express their anger and their outrage. But to do so invites condemnation. Secondly, their silence disguises the extent of rape in our society. It is acknowledged by police and by criminologists that probably 90 per cent of illegal rapes are not reported. The comparatively small number reported, which are on public record, can lead apologists for patriarchy to dismiss women’s outcries about rape. They are likely to retort that rape is a rare occurrence and that women are more likely to be run over by motor cars than to be raped – so why all the fuss?
While women themselves are afraid to shout loud and clear about their rape experiences – and there are few women who have not endured at least one of the four forms of rape – then its ubiquity and its political nature can remain hidden. And while they are hidden, the extent of women’s oppression by rape – and the other ways in which they are denied control over what happens to their bodies – is also disguised.
Women are afraid to disclose that they have been raped, are timid about questioning the benefits they supposedly reap from modern medicine, are too reticent to complain about their feelings of sexual frustration or the irritating gynaecological problems they are constantly beset with. They are afraid to discuss these things with each other because of the physical barriers and the psychological space that exists between women. They are afraid to trust one another in case their confidences are betrayed and the information they have revealed is used to castigate them. While women remain divided like this, and feel they must compete with each other, they are unable to unite and realise the common oppression they share. Such a recognition is a necessary precondition to starting to fight against it, to launching a campaign for women’s liberation.
The extraction of profits
The patriarchal system has every reason to fear such unity among women, and is consequently most reluctant to listen to the demands of feminists or to heed the complaints of less politically motivated women. It has every reason to try to keep women divided and wary of each other because the profit to the system, and to individual men, from the continuation of the colonisation of the female sex is very great indeed. The way that colonisation is maintained makes it palatable to a majority of women: they can take comfort in the security and status that marriage affords them, and the code of femininity has its own inner logic and appeal to women who do not cherish independence and self-determination – or who have never been given the opportunity to taste them and thus decide their value. Were any of the fundamental demands of women’s liberation to be heeded, and women given the taste of freedom, large numbers of them might join the fight for liberation. They would refuse to perform the major task for which their sex has been colonised – the reproduction of ‘the family’ – and thus place patriarchy in jeopardy. It is unlikely that women would refuse to bear children altogether, but the possibility of large numbers of them having babies outside marriage and of refusing to name the father is not so remote. This would be a small but significant inroad into the patrilineal system and would be a symbolic assault against patriarchy. As has been stated previously, women are colonised not just so that they will continue to bear children, but to ensure that they will do so within the approved kinship pattern, which in Australia is the bourgeois, pa
triarchal family. That institution confers power on men, a power that both mirrors the relative power of men over women in society at large and compensates those men who are dominated by other men in that society. All men, therefore, derive considerable benefit from ‘the family’. In addition, they enjoy the domestic comforts and sexual benefits their wives are obliged to provide.
The colonisation of women creates other forms of profits as well. All men can take advantage of the way women are divided by the stereotypes. They can enact all of the contradictory and contrary attitudes and impulses without having to face the likely psychological stress entailed in expecting one woman to be all things. They can enjoy the services that both wives and whores are expected to give. Having two kinds of women (as they see it) available, they can simultaneously love and respect women and at the same time hate, abuse and exploit them.
The close links between patriarchy and capitalism were discussed in the last chapter, and the colonisation of women has obvious advantages to the capitalist system. In producing children, women are reproducing the labour force; in reproducing them within ‘the family’ they are ensuring that those children receive the kind of socialisation that will tend to make them compliant workers whose own family commitments and involvements will enforce their loyalty to the system. While the benefits of capitalism to individual men are clearly unequal because of class differences, all men profit from capitalism more than women do. The majority of them are exploited as workers, but at least they receive a wage. All women are exploited as women and they do not even receive the minor compensation of an income of their own. Those women who are also exploited as workers by the capitalist system are more grossly exploited than their male co-workers since they receive lower wages (or, if they receive equal pay, are more likely to be sacked in an economic recession) and they have to manage their domestic responsibilities as well as their paid job.
There are also enormous monetary profits involved in women’s colonisation. The industries that prey on the feminisation of women – the manufacturers of cosmetics, perfumery, women’s clothing (especially foundation garments, hosiery and luxury clothing such as furs) and the many other forms of frippery which are deemed to be part of femininity – all reap huge fortunes. The medical profession’s coffers owe much of their plenitude to women’s misery and to their need to consult medical advice on matters such as contraception. The drug companies, which manufacture the pills that keep women able to cope or prevent pregnancy, amass great profits from women’s colonised state. The exploitation of women is a multimillion-dollar industry. It probably provides sufficient employment to be a major sector of the economy and this, together with the multifarious benefits that each and every man derives from women’s colonisation, combine to make a compelling reason to ignore the dissatisfaction and the misery of the colonised sex.
*This statement is not intended to imply that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, or that women do not gain pleasure from intercourse. As will become clear as the argument develops, the point being made is to stress the potential for violence that the biological facts of intercourse embody. Much of what is said could also apply to homosexual intercourse, although in a society where heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is either proscribed or considered to be immoral or a deviation, then it is to be expected that homosexuality will incorporate many features of heterosexuality, including male/female power relations and the incipient violence that these possess. Thus homosexual rape also exists.
*Professor Carey’s prescribed remedy to counter these side-effects is to ‘tailor-make’ a Pill for each individual woman who wishes to use this form of contraception. By charting a woman’s daily temperature levels and correlating these with her known medical history and other details such as her weight, it is possible for a doctor to calculate the exact compound necessary to prevent ovulation. By contrast, commercially mass-manufactured pills contain often vast overdoses of either or both of the main ingredients of oral contraceptives and it is this dosage beyond the amount required to prevent ovulation that is responsible for many of the side-effects. Both doctors and the manufacturers of mass-produced contraceptive pills are reluctant to inform women that individually tailored pills are a possibility. To prescribe them requires a doctor to spend more time and care with a woman than most are prepared to do, while the manufacturers undoubtedly see reduced profits as a result of women eschewing a product that, while manufactured in mass numbers, can be produced cheaply.
*I am indebted to Judy McLean from the Leichhardt Women’s Community Health Centre for this observation.
**In the last year (1974) several abortion clinics have opened in Sydney and Melbourne and while they usually insist that a woman be counselled about her reasons for wanting an abortion, they are far more inclined to cooperate with a woman who has already formed her opinion on the matter than are most general practitioners. They do not of course throw the woman off their premises for asking for an abortion – as some doctors still do – and they do not subject the woman to severe cross-examination about her motives as many supposedly ‘sympathetic’ doctors do.
PART TWO
Sexist stereotypes past and present
The origins, development and consolidation of the ‘Damned Whore’ and ‘God’s Police’ stereotypes of women.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Damned whores’
[T]he damned whores the moment that the[y] got below fel a fighting amonst one a nother and Capt Meridith order the Sergt. not to part them but to let them fight it out.
– Lt Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, The Journals and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark 1787–1792
Though how many [of the female convicts] were prostitutes will never be known, almost all contemporaries regarded them as particularly ‘abandoned’; and even if these contemporaries exaggerated, the picture they presented is a singularly unattractive one!
AGL Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, 1966
The social and economic conditions of the first 50 years of white colonisation of Australia fostered whores rather than wives. The traditional Judaeo-Christian notion that all women could be categorised as being exclusively either good or evil – with the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene being the prototypes of each kind – was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. But its application to the women in this country was totally lopsided. From 1788 until the 1840s, almost all women were categorised as whores – or ‘damned whores’ – as Lt Ralph Clark called them. This categorisation was initially based on the fact that virtually all of the white women to come here in the first two decades of colonisation were transported convicts, but it was continually reinforced by the social structure that evolved in the penal colony. Thus even female convicts who had served their sentences had little chance of having their status redefined, and the stereotype came to be applied to many other women in the colony who had not been transported.
The First Fleet consisted of 1480 people, more than half of whom were convicts. There were 586 male and 192 female convicts as well as a large number of seamen, marines, servants and officials.1 Only a tiny fraction of these were accompanied by their wives and children. Governor Arthur Phillip hoped he was to be the first superintendent of a new outpost of British civilisation. He wanted free settlers to be encouraged to migrate and he wrote, ‘As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison and other settlers that may come from Europe’.2 The British Home Office had other ideas, however, and intended New South Wales to be little more than a dumping ground for the excess of convicts whom British jails could not accommodate. Within this penal colony, women were assigned only one main function – they were there primarily as objects of sexual gratification. The main difficulty, as far as the British authorities were concerned, was to find a sufficient number of women convicts, and to do this they had to impose preponderantly harsher sentences on women: ‘Whereas only the more hardened male offenders under sentence of transportation
were actually transported to the Colonies, all women under sentence, provided they were healthy and under forty-five were transported’.3 Even this measure could not secure enough women and Governor Phillip’s instructions included the following order:
And whereas, as from the great disproportion of female convicts to those of the males who are put under your superintendance, it appears advisable that a further number of the latter should be introduced into the new intended settlement, you are, whenever the Sirius or the tender shall touch at any of the islands in those seas, to instruct their commanders to take aboard any of the women who may be disposed to accompany them to the said settlement.4
Phillip declined to obey this instruction but he did not disagree with its underlying assumption about women’s role in the penal settlement. Four months after landing at Port Jackson he wrote to Lord Sydney in England: ‘The very small proportion of females makes the sending of an additional number absolutely necessary, for I am certain your Lordship will think that to send women from the Islands, in our present situation, would answer no purpose than that of bringing them to pine away in misery’.5
The sexual abuse of female convicts began on the ships. Although after 1811 the women travelled on separate ships from the male convicts, they had the crews to contend with. WHR Brown told the Select Committee on the State of Gaols in 1819 that:
These women informed me, as well as others of their shipmates, that they were subject to every insult from the master of the ship and sailors; that the master stript several of them and publickly whipped them; that one young woman, from ill treatment, threw herself into the sea and perished, that the master beat one of the women that lived with me with a rope with his own hands till she was much bruised in her arms, breasts, and other parts of her body. I am certain, from her general good conduct, she could not have merited any cruelty from him.6