Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (64 page)

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avoid future violations. Kainis the girl promptly became Kaineus the warrior, who worshiped his spear.

Zeus's rape of Leda by taking the form of a swan, which resulted in the birth of Helen, was considered by Yeats to be a myth of superheroic proportions responsible for the eventual fall of Troy: "A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead." For Helene Deutsch's interpretation of the same myth, see page
318.

Robert Graves has suggsted that Zeus's many rapes refer to the Hellenic conquest of the goddess shrines, or more simply, to the triumph of the patriarchy over the matriarchy. This is an interesting interpretation, and others have elaborated on it to sug gest that men began to rape women when they discovered that sexual intercourse was responsible for pregnancy, but I frankly do not believe that men needed to wait that long to discover the benefits that accrued to them from rape.
It
is more sensible, I think, to consider the Greek myths charming fables whose origins have been hopelessly lost and proceed to more tangible substance. Some anthropological studies of primitive societies
have
been revealing. Dr. Margaret Mead, a pioneer in so many respects, sel dom failed to inquire about the role rape played among the peoples she studied in New Guinea. Her beloved mountain-d:welling Arapesh, a mild and gentle people whose major battle in life was survival, did not rape, she categorically reported. "Of rape the Arapesh know nothing beyond the fact that it is the unpleasant custom of the Nugum people to the southeast of them," Mead wrote. "To people who conceive sex as dangerous even within a sanctioned relationship where both partners give complete acquies cence, the dangers of rape do not need to be pointed out. Nor do the Arapesh have any conception of male nature that might make

rape understandable to them."

The Arapesh had evolved an intricate survival philosophy and if a woman was not to belong to a man permanently it was "much safer never to possess her at all." However, within one hundred miles of the Arapesh lived the cannibalistic, river-dwelling Mun dugumor. Among the violent Mundugumor, "a woman of equal violence who continually tries to attach new lovers and is insatiable in her demands may in the end be handed over to another com munity to be communally raped." Iatmul headhunters, another

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river-dwelling people of New Guinea, she reported, also used com munal rape to force a recalcitrant wife into submission.

When Mead studied the remnants of Plains Indian culture, she found that in the remembered history of these dislocated native Americans, "A bad woman was fair game for any man. No discipline, no set of standards were enjoined upon the young men who, like male members of many puritan societies, regarded rape as a great adventure. . . . A woman would be taken out by a gang of men, and af ter long and brutal abuse, turned loose naked, to find shelter as best she could." A "bad" woman was defined by the Plains Indians as a divorced woman who did not have male protec tion, or a woman who was quarrelsome and vituperative.

··
.
ffihernse. of gang :rape a
-
s a. controlmechanism to keep women in line was hardly restricted . to...the ..cuJtµr
.
s
.
<4argai: t
:
Mad hap pened to study, yet anthropologists
·
who preceded or followed her professed surprise when they stumbled on it and they sometimes resolved their confusion as to its implications by treating it with

• humor. or else they dismissed it as an oddment of backward peoples. Other, wiser students in the field paid more attention. ·
  

Robert F. Murphy of the anthropology department at Colum bia University came across gang rape as a mechanism of social control when he studied the men's secret society of the Mun durucu Indians of central Brazil. Mundurucu culture was strongly male-oriented, Murphy reported, and a Mundurucu woman was "supposed to be docile and submissive, obedient and faithful to her husband." Mundurucu men hunted in groups and engaged in war fare while Mundurucu women stayed home and communally helped one another in manioc processing. In a Mundurucu village men and women lived in separate houses. The chief secret of the men's secret society was a set of sacred musical instruments closeted in the men's house that the women were not allowed to see or hear, and which the men believed contained the magical key to their own sex-role dominance.

"I was unable to obtain an actual case in which a woman spied upon the sacred instruments," Murphy wrote, "but the Mun durucu men were firm in their insistence that any such violation would be immediately punished by dragging the offender into the underbrush and submitting her to gang rape by all the village men."

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Murphy did find gang rape enforced on village women who strayed from their sex-ascribed roles. "When a woman is openly promiscuous and actually takes the initiative in sex relations," Murphy wrote of the Mundurucu, "she is then manifesting behav ior appropriate only to the male and thereby intrudes upon and threatens the masculine role. Her acts are thus a community con cern, a public delict, and her punishment becomes the proper duty of all the village men."

Gang rape by Mundurucu men was not reserved exclusively for sexual transgressions. Murphy reported that village children were sent against their will, and against their parents' will, for that matter, to a missionary school and the children usually made "every effort to escape. Now when a boy flees the school, he has universal sympathy, but when an adolescent girl runs away, she is raped by the men of the first village near which she passes. . . . By running away, she has placed herself beyond masculine protection, and she has also flouted male authority, albeit that of foreign missionaries whose objectives find limited support among the Mundurucu."

"We tame our women with the banana," an informant quipped to Murphy, using a euphemism for his penis, and the anthropologist noted that among Mundurucu men, the subject of gang rape was treated "with some hilarity. Gang rapes are carnival occasions that become the topic of endless anecdotes told in men's houses."

Institutionalized gang rape, Murphy wrote, had been per sonally observed by Charles Wagley, another prominent anthro pologist, among the Tapirape Indians of Brazil in the case of an independent young woman who refused to join the other females in manioc processing. "The woman in this case was unmarried and she was turned over to the village men for punishment by her brother. The action of the Tapirape brother suggests that the deviation of a female constitutes a crisis that requires direct and immediate action regardless of bonds of kinship."

Napoleon Chagnon, a University of Michigan anthropologist, spent nineteen months among the fierce Yanomamo of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil who lived in a state of chronic warfare. "The Yanomamo themselves," he wrote in 1968, "regard fights over women as the primary causes of their wars. . . . A captured woman is raped by all the men in the raiding party and,

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later, by the men in the village who wish to do so but did not participate in the raid. She is then given to one of the men as a wife." The bonds of kinship are apparently more immutable among the Yanomam6 than among the Tapirape, for "if the cap tured woman is related to her captors, she is not raped."

A specific anthropological study of rape, which may be the only one of its kind, was conducted among the Gusii tribes of southwest Kenya shortly before that country's hard-won indepen dence from Britain. There had been two famous mass outbreaks of rape in Gusiiland, once in 1937 and once in 1950. Robert LeVine, an anthropologist from Northwestern University, investigated and discovered that in both years the price of a bride had soared beyond the reach of Gusii young men. An exchange rate of eight to twelve head of cattle, one to three bulls and eight to twelve goats for one woman "was the highest . . . since before the great cattle plague of the 189o's," LeVine wrote of the 1937 outbreak. "Many young men could find no legitimate way of getting married, and they resorted to cattle thef t and all types of rapes." On one eventful market day, "a large group of young men gathered and decided to procure mates for themselves by abduction. They grabbed the girls in the marketplace and carried them off."

Many of the Gusii girls managed to escape and came home crying to their villages. The British colonial administration, in an effort to restore some semblance of law and order, negotiated a settlement with the male Gusii elders whereby the bride price was formally reduced to six cows, one bull and ten goats. But by 1950, prices had soared once again and the second serious outbreak of mass rape occurred, "though without the dramatic or organized qualities of the earlier one."