Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (40 page)

Guttmacher was chief medical officer for the Baltimore crimi nal courts. His chilling passing observation that rapists might be sexually well-adjusted youths was a reflection of his Freudian belief in the supreme rightness of male dominance and aggression, a common theme that runs through Freudian-oriented criminologi cal literature. But quickly putting the "sexually well-adjusted youths" aside, Guttmacher dove into clinical studies of two rapists

;
put at his disposal who were more to his liking. Both were nail

.
i

I·
biters and both had "nagging mothers." One had an undescended

!
testicle. In his dreary record of how frequently they masturbated

and wet their beds, he never bothered to write down what they thought of women.

Perhaps the quintessential Freudian approach to rape was a

1954
Rorschach study conducted on the
wives
of eight, count 'em, eight, convicted rapists, which brought forth this sweeping indict ment from one of the authors, the eminent psychoanalyst and criminologist Dr. David Abrahamsen:

The conclusions reached were that the wives of the sex offend ers on the surface behaved toward men in a submissive and maso chistic way but latently denied their femininity and showed an aggressive masculine orientation; they unconsciously invited sexual aggression, only to respond to it with coolness and rejection. They stimulated their husbands into attempts to prove themselves, at tempts which necessarily ended in frustration and increased their husbands' own doubts about their masculinity. In doing so, the wives unknowingly continued the type of relationship the offender had had with his mother. There can be no doubt that the sexual frustration which the wives caused is one of the factors motivating rape, which might be tentatively described as a displaced attempt to force a seductive but rejecting mother into submission.

In the nineteen sixties, leadership in the field of criminology passed to the sociologists, and a good thing it was.* Concerned

*
Transitions are never clean. In 1965 a 900-page volume called
Sex Offenders
by Paul Gebhard and other members of the Institute for Sex Research founded by the late Alfred C. Kinsey put in an appearance. The Gebhard volume forms a sort of missing link between the idiosyncratic Freudians and the sociological approach. Suffering from the racial bias that marred the work of Dr. Kinsey, Gebhard,s group tried to find meaningful differences-or similarities-among convicted rapists, child molesters and homosexuals but arbitrarily excluded blacks from their study because "their sexual behavior and attitudes differ to some degree." The spirit of Kinsey floats over this work. Gebhard tells us, "As Dr. Kinsey of ten said, the difference between a 'good time' and a 'rape' may hinge on whether the girl's parents were awake when she finally arrived home." Elsewhere Gebhard divines that the reason there are so few female sex offenders is because "the average woman has a weaker 'sex drive' than the average male." Perhaps the most usable observation to come out of this comparison study (of nocturnal emissions, masturbatory be havior, animal contact, and incidence of premarital, extramarital and post marital coitus ) is a remark that "the heterosexual adjustment" of rapists "is quantitatively well above average" when compared to a control group of

with measuring the behavior of groups and their social values, instead of relying on extrapolation from individual case studies, the sociologists gave us charts, tables, diagrams, theories of social rele vance, and, above all, hard, cold statistical facts about crime. ( Let us give credit where credit is due. The rise of computer technology greatly facilitated this kind of research.)

In
1971
Menachem Amir, an Israeli sociologist and a student of Marvin
E.
Wolfgang, America's leading criminologist, published a study of rape in the city of Philadelphia, begun ten years before. Patterns in Forcible Rape, a difficult book for those who choke on methodological jargon, was annoyingly obtuse about the culturally conditioned behavior of women in situations involving the threat of force, but despite its shortcomings the Philadelphia study was an eye-opener.
It
was the first pragmatic, in-depth statistical study of the nature of rape and rapists. Going far beyond the limited vision of the police and the Uniform Crime Reports, or the idiosyncratic concerns of the Freudians, Amir fed his computer such variables as
modus operandi,
gang rape versus individual rape, economic class, prior relationships between victim and offender, and both racial and interracial factors. For the first time in history the sharp-edged profile of the typical rapist was allowed to emerge. It turned out that he was, for the most part, an unextraordinary, violence-prone fellow.

Marvin Wolfgang, Amir's mentor at the University of Penn sylvania's school of criminology, deserves credit for the theory of "the subculture of violence," which he developed at length in his own work. An understanding of the subculture of violence is criti cal to an understanding of the forcible rapist. "Social class," wrote Wolfgang, "looms large in all studies of violent crime." Wolf gang's theory, and I must oversimplif y, is that within the domi nant value system of our culture there exists a subculture formed of those from the lower classes, the poor, the disenfra_nchised, the

church members and union men, which says as much about Gebhard's stan dards of heterosexual adjustment as it does about rapists. Another usable ob servation, but one that the reader must make, is that the incidence of noc turnal emission, masturbation, animal contact, and premarital, extramarital and postmarital coitus has no relevance whatsoever to the study of why men rape. And perhaps a 900-page volume was necessary to prove it.

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST \ 181

black, whose values of ten run counter to those of the dominant culture, the people in charge. The dominant culture can operate within the laws of civility because it has little need to resort to violence to get what it wants. The subculture, thwarted, inarticu late and angry, is quick to resort to violence; indeed, violence and physical aggression become a common way of life. Particularly for young males.

Wolfgang's theory of crime, and unlike other theories his is soundly based on statistical analysis, may not appear to contain all the answers, particularly the kind of answers desired by liberals who want to excuse crimes of violence strictly on the basis of social inequities in the system, but Wolfgang would be the first to say that social injustice is one of the root causes of the subculture of violence. His theory also would not satisfy radical thinkers who prefer to interpret all violence as the product of the governmental hierarchy and its superstructure of repression.

But there is no getting around the fact tha t most of those who engage in antisocial, criminal violence ( murder, assault, rape and robbery ) come from the lower socioeconomic classes; and that because of their historic oppression the majority of black people are contained within the lower socioeconomic classes and contribute to crimes of violence in numbers disproportionate to their population ratio in the census figures but not disproportionate to their posi tion on the economic ladder.

We are not talking about Jean Valjean, who stole a loaf of bread in Les
Miserables,
but about physical aggression as "a demonstration of masculinity and toughness" -this phrase is Wolf gang's-the prime tenet of the subculture of violence. Or, to use a current phrase, the
machismo
factor. Allegiance or conformity to
machismo,
particularly in a group or gang, is the
sine qua non
of status, reputation and identity for lower-class male youth. Sexual aggression, of course, is a major part of
machismo.

The single most important contribution of Amir's Philadel phia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence. The rapist, it was revealed, had no separate identifiable pathology aside from the individual quirks and personality disturb ances that might characterize any single offender who commits any sort of crime.