Rape: Hysteria and Civil Liberties
A review of Susan Brownmiller's book,
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
Copyright 1976/2001 by John Lauritsen
[This essay-review was written in the spring of 1976, and about half of it was published in the Gay Liberator
(Detroit). The entire essay was published in the form of a mimeographed
pamphlet in 1976. Despite my discomfort with some of the rhetoric I
used a quarter of a century ago (e.g., “bourgeoisie”), I have made no
changes in the text. I hereby give permission to print out this
document and to photocopy it. However, it may not be published
commercially without my permission.
[In
the fall of 1976 I gave a talk, “Dangerous Trends in Feminism”, at the
Gay Academic Union Conference IV, held in New York City. That talk was
also published as a mimeographed pamphlet, and is now available
electronically. My current views on Gay Liberation are found in my
book, A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love (Provincetown 1998). — John Lauritsen, 28 September 2001]
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. By Susan Brownmiller, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
RAPE:FEAR:FEAR:RAPE:RAPE:FEAR:FEAR:RAPE:RAPE:FEAR:FEAR:RAPE
Rape, considered one of the most terrifying of major crimes, is unique
in several respects: for the complexity of psychological issues
involved; for the disproportion between perceived and actual danger;
for the great severity of the penalties relative to the concrete
consequences of the act; for the real danger of convicting innocent men
through false accusations or misidentification, with innumerable
documented cases of such injustices; for the use of rape stories in
political propaganda, especially during wartime; and finally, for the
historic use of rape laws in the oppression of black people in the
United States.
In fact, rape is a comparatively rare event; women face infinitely
greater dangers from such things as automobile accidents, accidents in
the home, cancer, alcoholism, obesity, and so on. The distinguished
criminologist, Marvin E. Wolfgang, puts rape in perspective in his
foreword to the book, Patterns in Forcible Rape, by Menachem Amir. Wolfgang writes:
“Statistically, among all crimes, or even among all major crimes, rape
is a relatively infrequent phenomenon. Only about one percent of the
FBI's annual number of serious crimes are classified as forcible rape.
But what is viewed as important by a society is not judged only by
frequency of occurrence....
“Forcible rape is judged by many as the most serious crime, after
murder [1]. Eleven states, all of the South, still retain the death
penalty for rape. And perhaps the fear of being raped has a greater
disparity with the reality of the probability of victimization than any
other offense.... The crime is not common, but the fear is genuine and based on the gravity attributed to its consequences.” (Emphasis added.)
Prof. Wolfgang's understated phrase, “the fear is genuine and based on
the gravity attributed to its consequences”, gets to the core of the
problem, for in a real sense, the phenomenon of rape is less the act
itself than the attitudes revolving around it: the central fear of
sexuality in a superstitious and sex-negative culture. For historical
perspective, we must recall that in Victorian times, being raped was
thought to be a “fate worse than death”, and many women literally felt
obliged to be prepared to choose “death before dishonor”. We might also
remember that the judge who sentenced Oscar Wilde to prison believed
that all-male sex was a crime more horrible than murder.
No doubt much of the fear of rape derives from the popular notion that
rape victims are often severely injured or even murdered. This is not
the case. In his book, Patterns of Forcible Rape,
Amir exposes as a myth the idea that “Rape is always a violent crime in
which brutality is inflicted upon the victim.” Amir found in his
study, “In a large number of cases (87 percent), only temptation and
verbal coercion were used initially to subdue the victim....” And
as far as rape-murder is concerned, this is so infrequent that the
average woman is as likely to die from being struck by lightning.
I am not defending rape. Let me be clear: I regard it a horrible thing
for any person to interfere violently with another's
self-determination, sexual or otherwise. I am in favor of human
evolution and therefore appalled whenever the force of violence
prevails over the force of logic, whenever brute strength and
unprincipled savagery prevail over ethics and intelligence, whenever
mob passion prevails over reason, and whenever uncouth two-legged
atavisms prevail over their natural superiors. I do not discount the
suffering of rape victims, which may be real and heart-rending —
suffering due, it often seems, as much to the insensitivity and
intolerance of family and community as to the experience of the act
itself. I only insist that we must scrupulously separate fact from
fantasy, and that we must carefully scrutinize the political
implications of the current obsession with rape.
The Current Obsession With Rape
The bourgeoisie is beating the drums for rape-hysteria, for censorship,
for Law & Order, for bringing back the death penalty, and for a
reversal of the gains made in this century for sexual freedom.
According to the New York Times,
rape has become the number one issue of the feminist movement,
eclipsing such former concerns as legal abortions and equal pay for
equal work. “Rape” is everywhere. The Ministry of Propaganda has
flooded the marketplace with books, articles, radio and television
shows on rape; with pamphlets, posters, badges, special newsletters,
and bumper stickers on rape. The Federal Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA), a CIA/FBI type organization, has published a
book on rape and made rape a major concern. According to an article in The Nation
of 16 August 1975, “In Portland, Oregon a Rape Victim Advocate Program,
funded by $124,132 from the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration, has contributed to the quadrupling of rape reports in
the area.” All over New York City, the walls and sidewalks are
stencil spray-painted with such slogans as, ”CASTRATE RAPISTS!“.
At one time I should have thought it paranoid to imagine these items as
anything more than the work of sincere zealots. No more. I have learned
about the deliberate employment of rape-hysteria in wartime — a weapon
already highly developed by World War I — and about the psychological
campaigns of the various secret police agencies. In his expose, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Philip Agee describes techniques of a CIA propaganda campaign:
“ECJOB. A team of Catholic university students directed by ECJOB-1 is
used to distribute the station handbills... The team is also used for
wall-painting, another major propaganda medium in Ecuador. Usually the
team works in the early hours of the morning, painting slogans on
instruction by the station or painting out and mutilating the slogans
painted by communist or pro-communist groups.”
And now, riding the crest of the wave, comes Susan Brownmiller with her
book on rape. The book's success is amazing, considering that on its
merits alone it deserves little more than a toss into the nearest
circular file. Against Our Will
(hereafter AOW) has received favorable reviews in major publications;
it is being promoted to the hilt in the bourgeois media; Brownmiller is
appearing on talk shows all over the United States and Canada; the book
is being hailed as a feminist classic and the “definitive work on all
aspects of rape” (a claim made on the book's jacket); and it has been
chosen as a Book of the Month club selection. Even more amazing is the
promotion of Brownmiller by two gay papers; her photograph appeared on
the front cover of the 21 February 1976 Gay Community News (Boston), which reviewed AOW favorably, and two full pages of interview and review appeared in The Advocate of 10 March 1976. I say, “amazing”, because Brownmiller, as we shall see, is an enemy of gay liberation.
A Shoddy Piece of Work
AOW is a shoddy piece of work from start to finish: ludicrously
inaccurate, reactionary, dishonest, and vulgarly written. On the very
first page of Chapter 1, one is impressed by the obnoxiousness of
Brownmiller's style — a smart-alecky glibness (“Krafft-Ebing ... turned
with relish to the frotteurs and fetishists of normal intelligence who
tickled his fancy.”). On the same page, she writes: “Sigmund Freud ...
was also struck dumb by the subject of rape.” — a comment as unfair as
it is ignorant; Freud was wrong about some things, but he was certainly
neither a fool nor an intellectual coward.
On the second page of the chapter (p. 12), Brownmiller claims that Marx
and Engels were “strangely silent about rape, unable to fit it into
their economic constructs.” This is typical of the loaded
language and innuendo she uses throughout the book in place of direct
statement. One must reply that Marx and Engels did not conspiratorially
decide to hide the issue of rape under the rug; that there were many
things they did not write about, including transvestitism,
stamp-collecting, vivisection, vegetarianism, and lycanthropy.
Brownmiller wants to resolve all of history into the single event of
rape, and she then finds conspiracy when others do not view life
through the same reductionist prism she does.
Still on the second page, she states: “It was the half-crazed genius,
Wilhelm Reich, consumed with rage in equal parts toward Hitler, Marx
and Freud, who briefly entertained the vision of a ‘masculine ideology
of rape’.” This is preposterous. In one sentence Brownmiller
shows that she understands absolutely nothing about Reich. Far from
being “consumed with rage” towards Marx and Freud, Reich considered
himself a follower of both of them, and the very basis of his work was
the attempt to synthesize their thought. And when Reich wrote The Sexual Revolution, from which the quote is taken, he was in full command of his powers, far saner than the society around him.
Here we also note Brownmiller's utter lack of scruples when quoting
others. The complete sentence of Reich's, from which she excerpted
“masculine ideology of rape”, is the very sensible statement:
“It is part of natural morality not to have sexual intercourse unless
both are in full genital readiness; this eliminates the masculine
ideology of rape and the attitude of the woman that she has to be
seduced or mildly raped.”
Now,
Brownmiller's ideology of rape is posited on absolute male guilt and
absolute female innocence, so it is understandable that she chose not
to quote the full sentence — understandable, but not honest.
Still on the second page we encounter this absurdity: “No zoologist, as
far as I know, has ever observed that animals rape in their natural
habitat, the wild.” Well, Brownmiller is supposed to have spent
four years doing research for AOW, so it is difficult to imagine that
she did not at least come across the classic and popular Patterns of Sexual Behavior
by C.S. Ford and F.A. Beach. If she had, she would have learned that in
many species of animals, the male does indeed proceed “against the
will” of the female, and with considerable violence and coercion. (It
is more likely that Brownmiller simply disregarded the book because its
data did not agree with her dogma.)
So — in merely the first two pages of her book, Brownmiller has shown
herself to be not only incompetent, but totally lacking in objectivity
and probity. The rest of the chapter is even worse. She claims that
rape occurs because of an “accident of biology”, namely, that the penis
and the vagina fit together. (Would it be better if they didn't
fit?) She speculates, “When men discovered that they could rape,
they proceeded to do it.”
In her mind's eye comes this primeval scene: “Indeed, one of the
earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one
woman by a band of marauding men.” Never, never might we imagine
that men bond together for the simple reason that they like each other.
The final paragraph of her unfortunate first chapter is the thesis for her entire book. Here it is:
“Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate
fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric
times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From
prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical
function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of
intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
Comment: the “use of fire” indeed! And if all men conspire with
each other to keep all women down by raping them, then it is strange
that for so many centuries they have rewarded each other for doing so
with the death penalty. Also, if blame is being passed out for keeping
“all women in a state of fear”, then Susan Brownmiller should take a
helping herself for fostering rape-hysteria through AOW, for
fear-mongering.
The second chapter, “In the Beginning Was the Law”, is as bad a job as
the first. Again Brownmiller engages in wild and ridiculous speculation
— for example, that women don't care for each other's company because
they are unable, helpless and delicate creatures that they are, to
protect each other from male rape. Or, in Brownmiller language:
“Disappointed and disillusioned by the inherent female incapacity to
protect, she became estranged in a very real sense from other females,
a problem that haunts the social organization of women to this very
day.”
In her review of AOW for The Nation,
Helene Schwartz points out several serious errors in Brownmiller's
treatment of ancient Hebrew and Babylonian law, and is forced to
“wonder about other statements in areas where I have no
expertise.” Well might she wonder.
A “Female Definition of Rape”
Brownmiller puts forward what she calls a “female definition of rape” (apparently speaking for all females):
“If a woman chooses not to have intercourse with a specific man and the
man chooses to proceed against her will, that is a criminal act of
rape.”
This
is vague for defining a “criminal act”. What does it mean to choose “to
proceed against her will”? Persistence? I dare say that if
every man just said, “all right then, goodbye”, as soon as a woman said
“no” to him, there would be a lot of shocked and frustrated women in
the world.
And what precisely means “against her will”? Her stated
“no”? Her conscious will? These are not idle questions, for
since the Freudian Revolution we know of the unconscious part of the
mind — dynamic, contradictory, and partly hidden. Rape fantasies play
an important part in the erotic psychic life of many women, as witness
merely the prominence of the rape theme in the “confession” magazines
and the “romance” books read by millions of them. There is a reason for
this. According to the Victorian sexual outlook (still much alive) a
decent woman may not have sexual feelings at all; only the man can take
the sexual initiative, which she is to resist to the utmost; only when
the woman is properly married may she than offer herself as a passive
victim to male assault. In reality, of course, women do have sexual
feelings; the problem is that admitting or expressing them causes guilt
feelings. And here is where the rape fantasy enters: in rape it is only
the man who craves sex, who takes the initiative; the woman just
innocently resists until she is overpowered by the brute strength of
the man. Banal? Perhaps, but it sells magazines. And feminist
books.
In the realm of criminal law, there is a viciousness in vagueness. It
is necessary for all definitions to be absolutely explicit, clear, and
rational. The Nazis demonstrated the evils that could result from such
mystical criminal law concepts as “phenomenological justice”,
“wholesome popular sentiment”, and “degeneracy”, which directly led to
the deaths of tens of thousands of the “men with the pink triangle”,
the homosexual men who were sent to the Nazi concentration camps. It
simply will not do to criminalize opposing the will of another without
concretely defining exactly what is meant.
A final objection to the “female definition of rape” is that it allows
for only male offenders and female victims, whereas in reality there
occur other combinations: male on male, female on female, and — yes —
female on male. According to John M. Macdonald, in his book, Rape: Offenders and Their Victims:
“Seduction of young boys by an adult woman probably occurs much more
often than crime statistics indicate. Such cases rarely come before the
courts.”
It
also happens, though rarely, that an adult man is raped by an armed
woman. Typically two or more women with weapons act together in such
cases. Understandably these cases are almost never reported to the
police; the adult man might fear he would look like a fool in
complaining, and the parents of the young boy coerced into sexual acts
by an older woman would probably not feel he had lost a priceless jewel
of chastity, as they might if a girl and an older man had been involved.
Considering the vagueness of Brownmiller's definition, I find decidedly
frightening her attitudes towards the appropriate penalty for the
“criminal act of rape”. In reviewing English law, she writes: “The
First Statute of Westminster, enacted in 1275, set the Crown's penalty
for rape at a paltry two year' imprisonment plus a fine at the king's
pleasure....” If she regards this punishment as “paltry”, I do
not (especially considering the state of English prisons in the 13th
century). She then goes on to portray as a great advance:
“An emboldened Second Statute of Westminster amended the timorous
first. By a new act of Parliament, any man who ravished ‘a married
woman, dame or damsel’ without her consent was guilty of a full blown
felony under the law of the Crown, and the penalty was death.”
Atrocity Stories
In Chapter 3, “War”, Susan Brownmiller gets into her specialty:
atrocity stories. Much of AOW's 400-page bulk consists of atrocity
stories: gruesome tales, garishly related. Stories to chill the blood
and turn the stomach. Stories to titillate the ghouls who gloat over National Enquirer centerspreads.
At first these tales have a harrowing effect upon the reader, but after
awhile he or she begins to tire, and finally becomes cynical. For me
this point was reached when the Brownmiller went from a morally
indignant recounting of a psychopathic murder spree on page 308 to a
morally indignant recounting of the Red Riding Hood story on page 309.
Questions of ethics are raised by Brownmiller's use of atrocity
stories. What was her purpose? To enlighten us? give us the
facts? Guide us to a rational course of action? I'm afraid
not — that her intent was scare-mongering, drumming up sexual hysteria.
If Brownmiller intended to give us the facts about rape — and facts are
the best way to counter hysteria — then she has failed miserably.
It is significant that she “neglected” even to mention other books on
rape, published before AOW and far superior to it. One such is John M.
Macdonald's Rape: Offenders and their Victims,
which is the most sensible and comprehensive work I have encountered.
It should be read as a corrective to the confusion and one-dimensional
intolerance of AOW. Unfortunately, Macdonald's book is hard to find
outside of libraries; he does not pipe the tune the bourgeoisie wishes
to hear piped at the moment. Then there is the serious study, Patterns in Forcible Rape,
by Menachem Amir. Brownmiller does cite this book, but only when its
findings support the delusional system she is creating; the book as a
whole she dismisses for being “annoying obtuse about the culturally
conditioned behavior of women in situations involving the threat of
force”, whatever that might mean.
Fabricated Sexual Atrocity Stories in War Propaganda
Brownmiller describes how rape-atrocity stories are fabricated for war
propaganda (p. 41 et seq.) and the then goes on to swallow a number of
such stories, hook, line, and sinker. Her mind works this way;
everything gets jumbled together, and there is no clear line between
fact and fantasy. (Indeed, one of her more annoying tricks is to treat
trashy movies and avant-garde novels as though they constituted
empirical evidence.) For example, she treats as fact the myth
that during the war in the Congo in the 1960s, Lamumba's supporters
were conducting mass rapes of Belgian nuns. Brownmiller's main source
for the nun-rape stories was a “white paper” commissioned by King
Baudouin of Belgium, hardly a nonpartisan in the struggle. Actually,
reporters covering the war at the time wrote back that the stories were
without factual basis — they were concocted to inspire racial
antagonism and to justify the involvement of U.S. forces.
Brownmiller's treatment of rape in wartime goes wrong in two main ways.
First, she uncritically accepts sexual atrocity stories which were only
the products of military propaganda or wartime hysteria; for instance,
she seems to believe the stories about German sexual atrocities in
Belgium in World War I — stories which postwar investigations
determined to have been fabricated by the British. Second, her single
issue rape obsession blinds her to the far greater atrocities of war.
These mistakes were not made by Magnus Hirschfeld and his associates in their book, Sexual History of the World War,
which was based on reports collected by the Institute for Sexual
Science following World War I. They found that, owing to the
over-stimulated erotic atmosphere of the war and the suggestive effects
of propaganda, “Whenever enemy soldiers appeared there were immediately
women and girls who claimed they had been raped.” In the vast
majority of cases, they were found to be either “conscious liars
desirous of concealing a sexual dereliction, and to be regarded as
martyrs to the enemy rather than fallen women”, or they were subject to
hysteria.
Hirschfeld and his associates in the Institute for Sexual Science found
that women derived a certain erotic satisfaction from discussions about
rape — a phenomenon which undoubtedly plays a large part in the popular
success of AOW. The following account appears in The Sexual History of the World War:
“Although rape was in most cases not even investigated, much less
established, practically all the warring nations engaged in
controversies that lasted for years on what was to be done with ‘war
children’, the fruits of the acts of rape carried out by enemy soldiers
upon native women. It is characteristic that these discussions were
incited by women and carried out by them with the greatest enthusiasm.
One cannot help harboring the rather ungallant suspicion that this
problem, whose practical solution was exercising these ladies so much,
must have brought a certain satisfaction, for while they were
theorizing about it, they were able to wallow in descriptions of
violations that were supposedly carried out.”
It is odd that in her vaunted four years of research Susan Brownmiller did not discover Hirschfeld's Sexual History of the World War, possibly the most important study of wartime sexual behavior done to date.
Neo-Victorianism
In reviewing AOW, Helene Schwartz comments, “At one point I wrote in
the margin of the book, 'Doesn't she ever think of men as sources of
pleasure?'” Good point. I don't remember a single passage in all
of AOW that even hinted that human beings might be sources of pleasure
to each other — pleasure of any kind.
Victorianism well characterizes the Brownmiller outlook: all men are
brutes; all women, hapless victims. Whatever enjoyment men are capable
of experiencing comes from bullying women into submission. Women are
helpless, passive, brittle creatures into whose pure and innocent minds
comes never a suggestion of anything so dirty as sex.
In the chapter, “Women Fight Back”, Brownmiller goes into page after
page of diatribes against the evils of prostitution, pornography, and
by implication, the erotic in toto. Sample: “There can be no ‘equality’
in porn, no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of
bawdy fun.... the staple of porn will always be the naked female body,
breasts and genitals exposed....”
Brownmiller heatedly attacks those “critics of the women's movement”
who “often profess to see a certain inexplicable victorian primness and
anti-sexual prudery in our attitudes and responses.” I can only
say that such critics, whoever they are, have hit the nail on the head.
Susan Brownmiller may protest, but her true soul mates are Anthony
Comstock, Carrie Nation, Mary Whitehouse, and the members of the Legion
of Decency and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
The Brownmiller's true colors emerge only too clearly in the numerous
cheap potshots she takes at Freud and Kinsey, such as: “I believe she
[Helene Deutch] has caused real — and incalculable — damage to the
female sex, as has, it goes without saying, Freud.” Well, not
only does this not “go without saying”, but it is viciously untrue. One
wonders if Brownmiller has any notion of what Freud's contributions to
modern thought were, or what were the pre-Freudian and anti-Freudian
attitudes towards women. Though Freud and Kinsey may be enemies to some
feminists, they are heroes to us in the gay liberation movement; they
are among the handful of people who have done most to rid the world of
sexual superstition and prudery.
The Horror of Prison: Homosexuality = Rape!
A portion of Chapter 8, “Power: Institution and Authority”, deals with
“Prison Rape: The Homosexual Experience”. Brownmiller might well have
made the last colon an equals sign, for there is no clear distinction
in her mind between consensual homosexual acts and homosexual rape;
both seem to be equally horrible. I believe that the current surfeit of
prison rape stories, being spewed out in the mass media, derives from
the myth: Homosexuality is so unnatural and disgusting that no normal
man would engage in it unless coerced by violence and threat of death.
With her characteristic vagueness, Brownmiller uses such phrases as
“sexual approach” and “sexual ‘abuse’” in such a way that one is never
sure whether rape or consensual homosexuality is meant — the two begin
to blur into each other. This section is distorted and inaccurate; it
is profoundly antigay; it is based on the most dubious sources, at the
same time that the classic works on sex in prison are not even
mentioned. As before, one must ask whether Brownmiller is her four
years of “research” simply failed to discover the most relevant and
important works, or whether she disregarded them because she didn't
like their evidence. One suspects the latter. Such works would include
Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Donald Cressey's The Prison, Donald Clemmer's The Prison Community, and Joseph Fishman's Sex in Prison.
The last two authors are extremely antigay, but it doesn't matter:
Clemmer and Fishman provide facts, which speak for themselves.
Susan Brownmiller begins her prison section with a synopsis of a trashy movie, Fortune and Men's Eyes,
and even this she can't do accurately. She writes, “there are certain
advantages to being the girl of a punk like Rocky....” This is
wrong: in prison argot, “punk” refers to a “passive” partner, and is a
synonym of sorts for “girl”, though without the connotations of
effeminacy. She should have written, “wolf”, or “top-man”, or just
“man”.
The conclusion of her synopsis of Fortune provides a typical example of her anti-sexual confusion. She writes:
“Smitty's first act as victor is to command his gentle friend and
cellmate, Jan-Mona, to smear himself with the Vaseline. Jan-Mona
pleads, ‘You have power now, Smitty — do you need sex, too?’ But Smitty
does ‘need sex’. How else within the confines of prison can he exercise
his hard-won power?”
This
is as good a place as any to ask it: All right, Susan Brownmiller, do
you or do you not think that men “need sex”? What is your
answer? Here's the situation. There are two healthy,
good-looking, and sexually experienced young men in a cell together.
Just the two of them. Alone. Now, what are they supposed to do for
month after month? Sublimate? Masturbate? Nothing?
Brownmiller's antihomosexual bigotry surfaces in no uncertain terms when she writes:
“Homosexual rape in prison could not be primarily motivated by the need
for sexual release, Davis observed, since autoerotic masturbation to
orgasm is ‘much easier and more normal’.”
Comment: The hell it is!
Brownmiller's warped vision completely blanks out the erotic in prison
life. Normal men simply couldn't have real sexual desires towards each
other. Therefore, all homosexual acts in prison are really rape, and
rape is not really a form of sex, just the bully hierarchy of the
strong over the weak.
To the contrary, the prison world revolves around the homoerotic:
courtships; intrigues; pathetic little presents; favors; letters;
thousands of lines of love poetry; and sex, when possible.
I myself have done work in a maximum security prison as part of a
psychology project in college, and my impression was that the younger,
better-looking prisoners — far from being the hapless prey to sexual
assault that Brownmiller portrays — were in complete command of the
situation. They made no effort to hide their attractiveness, but
confidently flaunted it, basking in the admiration of the older
prisoners and enjoying the perquisites of the sexual desirable.
Donald Clemmer's chapter, “Sexual Patterns in the Prison Culture”, in his book, The Prison Community,
is still regarded as the classic treatment of the subject. Though
Clemmer is quite antigay, the picture of prison eros emerges clearly
enough from the prisoners' testimony and letters. The following
passage, from an “advisor” who had spent eleven years in prison,
describes some of the details of prison courtship:
“From the time he starts to speculate as to what pleasures are in store
for him once he ‘snares’ the kid, your homosexualist-in-the-making
finds himself going about making a conquest with the same glib-tongued
tactics he would employ with a woman. If the kid works in some other
shop than his own, the would-be ‘jocker’ begins writing ‘kites’ to his
new-found love. These kites, when there are signs that the kid is
‘susceptible’, sometimes attain a passionate tone that really puts them
on an equal with the “scorching” letters received by a woman from some
Don Juan type of suitor. Once the kid has been won over, nothing,
whether it be rare tidbits of food, money, or tailor-made prison
clothes, is too good for him.”
According to Brownmiller, young men in prison yield their favors only
because the “threat of rape, expressed or implied, would prompt an
already fearful young man to submit.” She got that quote from
Alan J. Davis, the same fool who thought masturbation was “much easier
and more natural” than sex with another male. And if the young men
yield their favors without coercion? Well, concluded Davis, whom
she quotes approvingly, “Prison officials were too quick to label such
activities 'consensual'.”
Of course rape does occur in prisons, as do robbery, assault, murder,
drug abuse, and prostitution. The question is whether it is the rule,
or rather an atypical aspect of prison sex life. I believe the evidence
favors the latter. The following excerpt is also from Clemmer's The
Prison Community:
“To say that this lad was handsome, judged by masculine standards of
beauty, would be putting it mildly. His was a sort of full-blown
effeminate beauty, which made not a few cons just stare and stare in
wonder. He stood about five feet nine. His eyes, large, clear, and
expressive, radiating a glow that had a womanly appeal, made those
staring cons just a bit dizzy. And it didn't take the more curious cons
very long to find out ‘how he stripped down’. They made the most of the
opportunity presented on bath day. One look was enough. they stared and
stared at the nude figure of this lad and raved about him from that
time on....
“Cons who consummated their sexual desires with this boy usually went
into ecstacies whenever they launched into a glowing account of his
woman-like qualities.... It is doubtful if any woman, regardless of the
degree to which she had refined the art of eroticism, was raved over as
much as he. they were indeed bewitched by the prison siren's charms.”
Rape Penalties, Due Process, and the Rights of Defendants
Brownmiller considers present rape laws to be too lenient, in spite of
the fact that they are second in severity only to those for murder in
most states. She believes the evidentiary requirements for conviction
should be lessened virtually to the point where a woman's
unsubstantiated testimony alone, not subject to cross-examination,
would suffice for conviction. This in spite of the fact that many men,
now known to have been innocent, paid with their lives after having
been falsely accused and convicted of rape.
She recounts the case of Willie McGee, a black man falsely accused of
rape, convicted, and electrocuted, and she almost sneers at his
defence. Not a hint of outrage at the injustice of the case. She tells
the story of Emmett Till, a 14 year old black youth murdered for the
crime of whistling at a white woman, and then says in effect that he
had it coming to him. Brownmiller is so totally lacking in ordinary
human qualities of compassion and fairness, that she qualifies for the
19th century term, “moral insanity”.
Ms. Brownmiller probably felt she was being terribly clever when she wrote this about Caryl Chessman:
“The appeal of the sexual outlaw has always been profound. I am certain
that part of the mystique attached to Caryl Chessman, and why he became
an international rallying point for the fight against capital
punishment in 1959-1960, had to do with his legend as the Red Light
Bandit, who preyed on women in lovers' lanes.”
To
those of us who demonstrated to save the life of Caryl Chessman, and
who remember his execution, the cynicism and intolerance of the above
passage truly qualify as obscene.
Pornography, Censorship, and Civil Liberties
Towards the end of AOW, Susan Brownmiller goes into a several-page
diatribe against pornography. She is calling for censorship, though as
usual she employs innuendo, rather than straightforwardly saying what
should be censored, or who should do the censoring, or what the
standards should be. Apparently she does not feel only the kinkier
stuff should be suppressed, for she writes: “The graphic depictions,
the meat and potatoes of porn, are of the naked female body and of the
multiplicity of acts done to that body.”
If one can make sense out of hysterical nonsense, she seems to believe
that if men are allowed to look at pictures of naked women, they will
feel they have a right of access to female bodies, and will be inspired
to commit rape upon such bodies.
There is not an iota of evidence for such a belief, and there is
considerable evidence against it. The President's Commission on
Obscenity and Pornography concluded, to Nixon's chagrin, that there was
not the slightest evidence to suggest that pornographic material is a
causative factor in crimes of sexual violence. Many psychologists
believe that pornography actually acts as a safety valve to potential
sex offenders, a hypothesis which agrees with the fact that there was a
dramatic drop in the sex crime rate in Denmark immediately following
the full legalization of pornography in that country.
Brownmiller must realize her case is weak, for she writes:
“But does one need scientific methodology in order to conclude that the
anti-female propaganda [i.e., pornography] that permeates our nation's
cultural output promotes a climate in which acts of sexual hostility
directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically
encouraged?”
One must reply that, yes, one does need scientific methodology. One
does need to base the determination of truth on evidence, not on papal
authority, rumor, revelation, or hysterical emotion.
In her ravings Brownmiller raises the spectre of Hitler's Third Reich,
lumping together anti-Semitic caricatures, “nigger” jokes, and of
course, erotic books and movies, so she can insinuate that there are
some things that do not fall under the protection of the Constitution.
But here she is dead wrong, for it is she who is in the camp of the
Nazis with regard to pornography. It is Susan Brownmiller who has the
fascist sexual outlook, with its extreme sex-negativism, its demand for
“sexual purity” (an official Nazi slogan), its intolerance of sexual
nonconformity, its use of rape hysteria as a justification for
political repression.
On 23 February 1933, as one of the first acts of the Nazi government, a
decree banned pornographic literature of every description. At the same
time, the Nazis banned all public activity of the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee, the most important homosexual rights
organization in the world. And on 6 May 1933, young Nazis, intending to
cleanse Germany's libraries of “filthy” and “un-German” books, raided
the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, headquarters of the world
sexual reform movement; they confiscated more than 10,000 volumes from
the Institute's special library, and publicly burned these volumes in
Opera Square.
Once censorship gets going, it will tend to attach the most progressive
ideas, because these are the most threatening to the people in power.
John Milton made this point in 1644 in this Areopagitica: A Speech for
the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, as true now as it was then:
“There is not aught more likely to be prohibited that truth itself;
whose first appearance to our eyes bleared and dimmed with prejudice
and custom, is more unsightly and implausible than many errors.... And
though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth,
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and
prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple.”
When pornography is demystified, it is hard to find anything wrong with
it, much less any grounds for abolishing the Bill of Rights in order to
do away with it. The distinguished British writer, Brigid Brophy, gets
to the heart of the matter:
“If pornography influences you, it will influence you to masturbate. I
think it might sway your brand-loyalty about the type of fantasy you
use as an accompaniment: it might persuade you to try the effect of a
cast of thousands in oriental slave costume, rather than whatever your
usual stand-by may be. I think it might persuade you to masturbate this
week rather than next week. But because the act to which it tends to
influence people is masturbation, there are very reasonable grounds for
saying that pornography is the least harmful of all types of
reading-matter. Masturbation is one of the very few human activities
that absolutely cannot do any harm to anyone. By comparison, buying
chocolate is perilous.” (From “The Longford Threat to Freedom”, a
pamphlet put out by the National Secular Society of Great Britain.)
From the very beginning, sex reformers have had to fight an uphill
battle against censorship, and we in the gay liberation movement had
better believe that we will need all the civil liberties we can get.
Conclusion
A serious threat to the gay liberation movement, and to other
progressive movements, is posed by the current wave of rape-hysteria,
with the concomitant demands for censorship and denial of due process
and civil liberties. Some of our worst enemies are posing as gay
liberationists or feminists, and we have got to unmask and repudiate
them.
Susan Brownmiller is exactly such an enemy.
# # #I write books and am
proprietor of Pagan Press, a small book publisher. Each of our books
is unique and well produced. Please check out the Pagan Press BOOKLIST — John Lauritsen