Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (91 page)

This sudden upsurge of interest in female athletics is more than a matter of giving girls who like sports a chance to fully explore their potential.
It
is based on a new female recognition

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(something men have always known ) that there are important lessons to be learned from sports competition, among them that winning is the result of hard, sustained and serious training, cool, clever strategy that includes the use of tricks and bluffs, and a positive mind-set that puts all reflex systems on "go." This knowl edge, and the chance to put it in practice, is precisely what women have been conditioned to abjure.

It
is no wonder, then, that most women confronted by physi cal aggression fall apart at the seams and suffer a paralysis of
will.
We have been trained to cry, to wheedle, to plead, to look for a male protector, but we have never been trained to fight and win.

Prohibitions against a fighting female go back to the Bible. In one of the more curious passages in Deuteronomy it is instructed that when two men are fighting and the wife of one seeks to come to his aid and "drag her husband clear of his opponent, if she puts out her hand and catches hold of the man's genitals, you shall cut off her hand and show her no mercy." When the patriarchs wrote the law, it would seem, they were painfully cognizant of woman's one natural advantage in combat and were determined to erase it from her memory.

Man's written law evolved from a rudimentary system of re taliatory force, a system to which women were not particularly well adapted to begin with, and from which women were deliberately excluded, ostensibly for our own protection, as
time
went by. Com bat has been such a traditional, exclusionary province of man that the very idea of a fighting woman often brings laughter, distaste or disbelief and the opinion that it must be "unnatural." In a con fusion partially of their own making, local police precincts put out contradictory messages: they "unfound" a rape case because, by the rule of their own male logic, the woman did not show normal resistance; they report on an especially brutal rape case and an nounce to the press that the multiple stab wounds were the work of an assailant who was enraged be.cause the woman resisted.

Unthinkingly cruel, because it is deceptive, is the confidential advice given from men to women (it appears in
The
Reader's Digest article) , or even from women to women in some feminist literature, that a sharp kick to the groin or a thumb in the eye will work miracles. Such advice is of ten accompanied by a diagram in which the vulnerable points of the human anatomy are clearly marked-as if the mere knowledge of these pressure spots can

WOMEN FIGHT BACK
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translate itself into devastating action.
It
is true that this knowl edge has been deliberately obscured or withheld from us in the past, but mere knowledge is not enough. What women need is systematic training in self-defense that begins in childhood, so that the inhibition resulting from the prohibition may be overcome.

It
would be decidedly less than honest if at this juncture I did not admit that my researches for this book included a three-month training program in ju jitsu and karate, three nights a week, two and a half hours a night, that ended summarily one evening when I crashed to the mat and broke my collarbone. I lost one month of writing and the perfect symmetry of my clavicular structure, but I gained a new identifica tion with the New York Mets' injury list, a recognition that age thirty-eight is not the most propitious time in life
to
begin to learn how to kick and hit and break a stranglehold, and a new and totally surprising awareness of
my
body's potential to inflict real damage. I learned I had natural weapons that I didn't

know I possessed, like elbows and knees. I learned how to kick backward as well as forward. I learned how to fight dirty, and I learned that I loved it.

Most surprising to me, I think, was the recognition that these basic aggressive movements, the sudden twists, jabs and punches that were so foreign to my experience and ladylike existence, were the stuff that all little boys grow up learning, that boy kids are applauded for mastering while girl kids are put in fresh white pinafores and patent-leather Mary Janes and told not · to muss them up. And did that early difference in rearing ever raise its draconic head! At the start of our lessons our Japanese instructor freely invited all the women in the class, one by one, to punch him in the chest. H was not a foolhardy invitation, for we discovered that the inhibition against hitting was so strong in each of us that on the-first try none of us could make physical contact. Indeed, the inhibition against striking out proved to be a greater hindrance to our becoming fighting women than our pathetic underdeveloped muscles. ( Improvement in both departments was amazingly swift.)

Not surprisingly, the men in our class did not share our inhibi tions in the slightest. Aggressive physical grappling was part of their heritage, not ours. And yet, and yet . . . we women dis covered in wonderment that as we learned to place our kicks and jabs with precision we were actually able to inspire fear in the men.

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We could hurt them, we learned to our astonishment, and hurt them hard at the core of their sexual being-if we broke that Biblical injunction.

Is it possible that there is some sort of metaphysical justice in the anatomical fact that the male sex organ, which has been mis used from time immemorial as a weapon of terror against women, should have at its root an awkward place of painful vulnerability? Acutely conscious of their susceptibility to damage, men have pro tected their testicles throughout history with armor, supports and forbidding codes of "clean," above-the-belt fighting. A gentleman's agreement is understandable-among gentlemen. When women are threatened, as I learned in my self-defense class, "Kick him in the balls, it's your best maneuver." How strange it was to hear for the first time in my life that women could fight back, should fight back and make full use of a natural advantage; that it is in our interest to know how to do it. How strange it was to understand with the full force of unexpected revelation that male allusions to psychological defeat, particularly at the hands of a woman, were couched in phrases like emasculation, castration and ball-breaking because of that very special physical vulnerability.

Fighting back. On a multiplicity of levels, that is the activity we must engage in, together,
if
we-women-are to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves.and men of the ideology of rape.

'«pe·scan' be eradicated, not merely controlled or. avoided on ' an individual basis, but the approach must be long-range and co-' operative, and must have the understanding and good will of many

;n1en as well as women.i

My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
‌

In the four years from the day I made the firm decision to write a book about rape to the day I turned the manuscript in to my publisher, I incurred many debts: ideological, emotional and financial. These categories did not remain separate and distinct; they crisscrossed and overlapped in friendship and support.

An ideological debt is something that only another movement per son can truly understand. I was there when we in the women's movement first began to explore the many aspects of rape, and I listened to those ( Diane Crothers, Sara Pines, Lilia Melani) who understood the issues far better than
I.
The movement also made my book possible by its courage and imagination, and by its contribution of personal testimony that opened up the subject of rape from a woman's point of view for the first time in history. Three events deserve specific mention, and I am proud that they were organized by a group to which, I am fond of saying, "I gave my life's blood." These were: The New York Radical Feminist Speak-Out on Rape, January
24, 1971;
The New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape, April
17, 1971;
and the joint New York Radical Feminist-National Black Feminist Organization Speak-Out on Rape and Sexual Abuse, August
25,
1974.

To piece together the current picture and at the same time to try to reconstruct rape's history required a vast intake of research materials. People who knew me casually and people who knew me well didn't wait to be asked. They supplied leads, sources, citations and newspaper clip pings that I never could have amassed on my own. At one point I drew up a list of what I had begun to think of as my private journalists-and feminists rape network. Among my contributors were: Ann Lane, Louise

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thompson, Doris O'Donnell, Gloria Steinem, Betsy Steuart, Ben Brad lee, Bill Leonard, Waltraut Eschenbach, Ann Blackman, Mary Anne Krupsak, David Gurin, Jackie Bernard, Vivien Leone, Kay Schurr, James Aronson, Minda Bikman, Alix Kates Shulman, Lucy Komisar, Shelley Clayman, Kirsten Grimstad, Susan Rennie, Roslyn Fliegel, Elizabeth Evans, Irene Mahoney, Ruth Gross, Noemie Emery, Barbara Mehrhof, Pam Kearon, Mary Orovan, Holly Forsman, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Sue Davis, Helene Silverstein, Evan Morley, Howard Meyer, Mary-Helen Mautner, Karen Kollias, Allan M. Siegal, Al McCullough, Ann Pollan, Joan Goulianos, Jane Jacobs, Marta Vivas, Grace Lichtenstein, Len Sandler, Nora Ephron, Fran Goldin, Jonathan Goldberg, Signe Hammer, Barbara Janes, Jo Roman, Arthur Rubine, Vicky Schultz, Linda Farin.

Several libraries proved essential. A field trip to the New York State Library in Albany introduced me to abstracts and indexes I didn't know existed. The month I camped out at the
A.
A. Brill Collection of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute gave me access to the best collection of Freudian literature in the nation, and a chance to read it in a most pleasant setting. The days and nights that turned into weeks when I roamed the subterranean stacks of the NYU Law Library as a "non student with special privileges" made me indeed
feel
privileged. Colum bia University's International Law Library and the National Archives in Washington held documents unavailable elsewhere.

But how can I adequately thank that great institution, the New York Public Library, that became ·my work space and psychologic home for most of the writing of this book? More than anything else, my book is a product of the research collections of the New York Public Library. During the three years I daily walked its marble halls, became acquainted with its awesome facilities and leaned on the expertise of the librarians in the special collections ( most particularly, American History and the Jewish Division ) , got to know the guards, clerks and book retrievers and ate lunch in the employees' cafeteria, my identification with "The New York Public" became so complete that if someone asked me what I did for a living I'd absent-mindedly answer, "I work in the Forty-second Street library," which was literally true.