Going Too Far (27 page)

The search continues. We not only define and redefine but create entirely new terms to interpret—and change—our condition as women. When I first proposed that we view women as a colonized people, the suggestion was met with incredulity, even from other feminists. But what was “going too far” yesterday inevitably becomes something already assumed, even taken for granted, tomorrow. So has the theory of women's colonization been assimilated into feminist thought. And so we go on further, from there.

A
S RADICAL FEMINIST
, I make an analogy between women and colonized peoples, a parallel which works well—inevitably, even—if one dares to examine it carefully, overcoming a sense of shock or our women's curse of guilt.

Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, as sexist as other men but considerable authorities on the process of colonization and its effects, wrote of certain basic characteristics by which that process could always be identified. Primary among these were the following: The oppressed are robbed of their culture, history, pride, and roots—all most concretely expressed in the conquest of their
land
itself. They are forced (by a system of punishment and reward) to adopt the oppressor's standards, values, and identification. In due course, they become alienated from their own values, their own land—which is of course being mined by the oppressor for its natural resources. They are euphemistically permitted (forced) to work the land, but since they do not benefit from or have power over what it produces, they come to feel oppressed by
it
. Thus, the alienation from their own territory serves to mystify that territory, and the enforced identification with their colonizing masters provokes eventual contempt both for themselves and their land. It follows, of course, that the first goal of a colonized people is to
reclaim their own land
.

Women are a colonized people. Our history, values, and
cross-cultural culture
have been taken from us—a gynocidal attempt manifest most arrestingly in the patriarchy's seizure of our basic and precious “land”: our own bodies.

Our bodies have been taken from us, mined for their natural resources (sex and children), and deliberately mystified. Five thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition, virulent in its misogyny, have helped enforce the attitude that women are “unclean.” Androcentric medical science, like other professional industries in the service of the patriarchal colonizer, has researched better and more efficient means of
mining
our natural resources, with (literally) bloody little concern for the true health, comfort, nurturance, or even survival of those resources.
²
This should hardly surprise us; our ignorance about our own primary terrain—our bodies—is in the self-interest of the patriarchy.

We must begin, as women, to reclaim our land, and the most concrete place to begin is with our own flesh. Self-and-sister-education is a first step, since all that fostered ignorance and self-contempt
dissolve before the intellectual and emotional knowledge that our women's bodies are constructed with great beauty, craft, cleanliness, yes, holiness. Identification with the colonizer's standards melts before the revelations dawning on a woman who clasps a speculum in one hand and a mirror in the other. She is demystifying her own body for herself, and she will never again be quite so alienated from it.

From education we gain higher expectations, and from there we move through anger and into the will for self-determination, to seizing power over our own lives, to reclaiming the products of our labor (our own sexual definition, and our own children), and, ultimately, to transforming the quality of life itself in society, as a whole—into something new, compassionate, and truly sane.

This is why, as radical feminists, we believe that the Women's Revolution is potentially the most sensible hope for change in history. And this is why the speculum may well be mightier than the sword.

Spring
1974

¹
Circle One—A Woman's Beginning Guide to Self Health and Sexuality
, Campbell and Ziegler, eds., P.O. Box 7211, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80933.

²
Adrienne Rich has assembled chilling documentation about this subject, with particular emphasis on medical industrialization of childbirth, in her important work
Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution
, Norton, New York, 1976.

THEORY AND PRACTICE: PORNOGRAPHY AND RAPE

The following article is based on what to my horror got termed in hard-boiled organizer's jargon “The Rape Rap.” I must have communicated some version of it hundreds of times, with a ripening anger as women came forward with their own experiences of rape and I realized how far-reaching and quintessentially patriarchal the crime was. There was a time when rape and pornography were embarrassing issues even in the Women's Movement: such things were deplorable, to be sure, but they had to be deplored with a sophisticated snicker—not with outspoken fury. Today, there are Rape Crisis Centers in major cities all over the nation, and feminist Rape Prevention Brigades. Many metropolitan police departments have special anti-rape squads run by women officers and new rape-reporting procedures devised by women; and self-defense classes for women are no longer seen as passing strange. When
Against Our Will
, Susan Brownmiller's comprehensive book on the subject from a feminist perspective, was published, it immediately became a best-seller, which it well deserved, and which also indicated that the general public's awareness of rape as a political issue has been greatly heightened. Feminist sorties against the attendant issue—pornography—are still somewhat more awkwardly conducted, but women are every day becoming less concerned with being graceful and more bent on being free.

T
HERE IS PERHAPS
no subject relevant to women so deliberately ditorted as that of rape. This is because rape is the perfected act of male
sexuality in a patriarchal culture—it is the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession.
¹

But the most insidious aspect of rape is the psychological fiction that accompanies it—with which all women are besieged until, for survival's sake, we even pretend to believe that what we
know
is a lie. The fiction has many versions. We can look at a few representative examples.

There is the Pity the Poor Rapist approach. This version tells us that we must be sorry for our attacker. He is sick, he cannot help himself, he needs help.

He decidely does need help (if he can be apprehended), but his victim needs it more—and first. She is not even supposed to defend herself, for fear of being unwomanly. I find it educative that a woman who, for instance, notices her child being molested by a dirty old (or young) man on the playground, and who shampoos the man with a brick—she is considered a proper mother, “the tigress defending her cubs.” Yet should the same man molest
her
, she ought to, in society's view, welcome him and admit that she relishes being pawed, or if she must, plead winningly with him to stop. It is acceptable to defend one's child but not oneself because it is considered the epitome of selfishness for the female to place her own concerns first. We are supposed to wipe the noses of all humanity before we dare think about ourselves. Well, we must learn to mother those
selves
, and defend them at least as valiantly as we do our children.

The Spontaneity Lie is an offshoot of Pity the Poor Rapist. It informs us that he was just an average guy walking along the street (the lamb), who was positively seized with the urge to attack a woman. Sudden lust. In combating the spontaneity approach, one should remember that more than half of all rapes occur in breaking-and-entering situations—which do require, one would think, a modicum of premeditation.

There is always the basic Every Woman Loves a Rapist / All Women Want to Be Raped / Good Girls Never Get Raped / It's Always the Woman's Fault cliché. This is frequently carried to ludicrous extremes. Thus, if she wears slacks, that's obviously meant as a challenge; if a skirt, it's an incitement. If she glowers as she strides down the street it's meant as an attention-getter; if she looks pleasant it's a come-on.
Et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum
. And besides, what was she doing out walking all alone by herself anyway at eleven o'clock in broad daylight? Doesn't she know her place?

Knowing our place is the message of rape—as it was for blacks the message of lynchings. Neither is an act of spontaneity or sexuality—they are both acts of political terrorism, designed consciously
and
unconsciously to keep an entire people in its place by continual reminders. For that matter, the attitudes of racism and sexism are twined together in the knot of rape in such a way as to constitute
the
symbolic expression of the worst in our culture.
²
These “reminders” are perpetrated on victims selected sometimes at random, sometimes with particular reason. So we have the senseless rape murders of children and of seventy-year-old women—whom
no
one can salaciously claim were enticing the rapist—and we also have the deliberate “lesson-rapes” that feminist students have been prey to on their campuses for the past four years—acts based on the theory that all these frustrated feminists need is a good rape to show 'em the light.

Thus the woman is rarely unknown to her attacker, nor need the rapist be a stranger to his victim—although goddess help her deal with the more-than-usual scorn of the police if she reports rape by a former jealous boyfriend, or an ex-husband, or her faculty advisor or boss or psychiatrist. Many policemen already delight in asking the victim sadistic and illegal questions such as, Did you enjoy it? Consequently, any admission on her part, whether elicited or volunteered, that the rapist was actually an acquaintance seems to invite open season on
her
morals.

But radical feminists see the issue of rape as even more pervasive than these examples. For instance, I would define rape not only as the violation taking place in the dark alley or after breaking into and entering a woman's home. I
claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire
. This last qualifier is important, because we are familiar with the cigarette commercial of the “Liberated Woman,” she who is the nonexistent product of the so-called sexual revolution: a Madison Avenue-spawned male fantasy of what the liberated woman should be—a glamorous lady slavering with lust for his paunchy body. We also know that many women, in responding to this new pressure to be “liberated initiators” have done so
not
out of their own desire but for the same old reasons—fear of losing the guy, fear of being a prude, fear of hurting his fragile feelings,
fear
. So it is vital to emphasize that when we say she must be the initiator (in
tone
if not in actuality) we mean because
she
wants to be. Anything short of that is, in a radical feminist definition, rape. Because
the pressure is there
and it need not be a knife-blade against the throat; it's in his body language,
his threat of sulking, his clenched or trembling hands, his self-deprecating humor or angry put-down or silent self-pity at being rejected. How many millions of times have women had sex “willingly” with men they didn't want to have sex with? Even men they loved? How many times have women wished just to sleep instead or read or watch the Late Show? It must be clear that, under this definition, most of the decently married bedrooms across America are settings for nightly rape.

This normal, corn-fed kind of rape is less shocking if it can be realized and admitted that the act of rape is merely the expression of the standard, “healthy,” even encouraged male fantasy in patriarchal culture—that of aggressive sex. And the articulation of that fantasy into a billion-dollar industry is pornography.

Civil libertarians recoil from linking the issues of rape and pornography, dredging out their yellowing statistics from the Scandinavian countries which appear to show that acts of rape decline where pornography is more easily procured. This actually ought to prove the connection. I am not suggesting that censorship should rule the day here—I abhor censorship in any form (although there was a time when I felt it was a justifiable means to an end—which is always the devil's argument behind thought control, isn't it?). I'm aware, too, that a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or books containing lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with
See Him Tear and Kill Her
or similar Spillanesque titles. Nor do I place much trust in a male-run judiciary, and I am less than reassured by the character of those who would pretend to judge what is fit for the public to read or view. On the contrary, I feel that censorship often boils down to some male judges sitting up on their benches, getting to read a lot of dirty books with one hand. This hardly appears to me to be the solution. Some feminists have suggested that a Cabinet-level woman in charge of Women's Affairs (in itself a controversial idea) might take pornography regulation in her portfolio. Others hearken back to the idea of community control. Both approaches give me unease, the first because of the unlikeliness that a Cabinet-level woman appointee these days would have genuine feminist consciousness, or, if she did, have the power and autonomy from the administration to act upon it; the second because communities can be as ignorant and totalitarian in censorship as individual tyrants. A lot of education would have to precede community-controlled regulation to win that proposal my paranoid support. Certainly this is one problem to which simple solutions are just nonexistent, rhetoric to the contrary.

But women seem to be moving on the issue with a different strategy, one that circumvents censorship and instead is aimed at hurting the purveyors themselves, at making the business less lucrative by making
the clients less comfortable. In one Southern town, women planned their action with considerable wit; they took up positions on their local porn strip and politely photographed each man as he entered or left the bookstores and movie houses. They used a very obvious camera—the large, newspaper-photographer type—sometimes chasing the man for a block as he fled in chagrin. One group of women who used this tactic deliberately worked with cameras that had no film—scaring and embarrassing the men was their aim. Another group, however, did use film, and developed the shots. They then made up Wanted Posters of the men which they plastered all over town—to the acute humiliation of the porn-purchasers, some of whom turned out to be influential and upstanding citizens of the community. In Seattle, women's anti-pornography squads have stink-bombed smut bookstores—and the local papers were filled with approving letters to the editors. In New York, three porn movie houses have been fire-bombed.