Loose Women, Lecherous Men (40 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
5.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 160
nation maintain and reinforce men's power over and control of women. Thus, when a feminist argues that women are sexually victimized by men, she has in mind a victimization circumscribed by an oppressive framework that I refer to as
institutionalized
intimidation. Marilyn Frye describes such a framework as "a network of forces and barriers which are systematically related and which conspire to the immobilization, reduction and molding of women and the lives we live."
8
From this view, any woman is oppressed in that she belongs to an oppressed group whose members are other women, all of whom live in a patriarchal society in which women are devalued, marginalized, or silenced by oppressive social institutions. Because these institutionslaw, government, education, religion, medicine, media, culture and the arts, the familyare regulated and controlled at the highest administrative levels by men, it is contended that men effectively dominate women's daily lives, specifically women's sexual and reproductive lives. According to this view, the sexual intimidation of women is central to consolidating male advantage under patriarchy. Thus, when some feminists argue that social and economic institutions support a "rape culture" or that woman battering has been "normalized'' under patriarchy, they refer to the power of these institutions to determine the terms and conditions of women's sexuality. While not all feminists contend that every man is a potential rapist, many do believe that sexual harassment, battery, and rape lie on a continuum of violence against women and that all men benefit from the sexual intimidation engendered by some men's rape.
9
From this perspective, sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls are designed so effectively to intimidate women that women become dependent
on men
for protection
from men
. Mae West's comment about men's urge to protect her captures the irony and the frustrating paradox of this situation: men maintain their institutional superiority over women by sexually intimidating women, only to reinforce male dominance by convincing women that we need a man's protection from
other
men's abuse but not his own.
10
In the following pages I will review much of the evidence and many of the arguments that feminists offer in support of the claim that men's sexual intimidation of women maintains and reinforces cultural, political, and economic institutions that are oppressive to all women. My aim is to show how and why many feminists have come to believe that sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls have common normative features that bind them together in a pervasive system of sexual intimidation that facilitates men's control over women's sexuality and rationalizes men's unconditional access to women's bodies. This is not to deny that male children are common objects of adult neglect or emotional or physical abuse, although studies suggest that sexually abused girls far outnumber sexually abused boys. My primary concern in this chapter is to examine how
women's
sexual intimidation under patriarchy manifests itself.
11
I begin this discussion with some indication of the conceptual overlap between sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls and suggest that this overlap is consistent with the feminist argument offered earlier that such treatment of women is part of a larger, overarching effort aimed at men's sexual domination and control of women. I then discuss in considerable detail the normative features that feminists most often cite as common to men's sexual intimidation of women: (1) sexual violation and violence; (2) sexual terrorization; (3) sexual coercion, deception, and manipulation; and (4)
 
Page 161
sexual dehumanization. Such normative categories are not conceptually discrete or independent, since they circumscribe common features of interrelated types of sexual intimidation. Nevertheless, these categories are helpful in illuminating the variety of complaints individual women make when they are sexually victimized by men; and they are helpful in situating women's sexual intimidation within the socially constructed context of male dominance and control on which many feminists base their condemnation of the sexual oppression of women. Furthermore, while such categories point out the ways in which the variety of forms of sexual intimidation may be linked, they also reveal some of the finer distinctions between sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and child sexual abuse. Thus, my analysis both draws from and contributes to contemporary feminist theorizing on the sexual victimization of women. My goal in this section is to provide a normative framework for thinking and talking about women's sexual intimidation that is consistent with the feminist claim that such intimidation maintains, and is facilitated by, men's institutionalized dominance and control of women. I can then proceed to explicate and evaluate the critical responses to such a claim, which counter that conceiving of women's lives as pervaded by male heterosexual dominance only serves to reinforce and legitimize men's sexual victimization of women.
Conceptual Confusion
There is wide disagreement among political theorists, moral philosophers, mental health professionals, and legal authorities as to what counts as a clear case of either sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, or the sexual abuse of girls. Because each form of sexual intimidation involves some type of sexual violation, questions typically arise as to how to identify its occurrence. For example, Ellen Frankel Paul feels that we should define sexual harassment sufficiently to exclude the "merely trivial" sexual innuendo yet not equate all sexual harassment with a serious injury like rape. While sexual harassment is a serious violation, Paul, like Rosemarie Tong, believes that merely offensive or annoying sexual behavior must be differentiated from the extreme violation of bodily integrity that is at the heart of rape.
12
On the other hand, to say simply that sexual harassment is
unwanted
sexual behavior condemns all accidental or unintentional slights and includes offenses taken by the sexually paranoid or vindictive person.
13
Both sexual harassment and rape share the feature of being unwelcome sexual overtures that are not asked for and not returned, but this means that the two forms of sexual intimidation also share the ambiguity of the word "unwelcome." Quid pro quo sexual harassment in which sex is made a condition for employment or promotion may be a relatively straightforward case of coercion, but what about a request for a date by a supervisor? In her discussion of harassment within the academy, Nancy Tuana believes that actions count as sexually harassing if a professor or thesis adviser
should have known
that those actions would be construed as an implied threat;
14
yet what may be construed as threatening to one graduate student may seem ludicrous to another or a harmless flirtation to a third. On the other hand, if the harasser's
intent
is the sole criterion of harassment, then sexual harassment claims will deflate in the face of unverifiable excuses like ''I didn't
mean
to upset her. I was just . . . [horsing around, trying to flatter her, impress the boys, etc.]," when dis-
 
Page 162
cernible harm has been done in contradiction to company or educational policy guidelines. This is why the conduct of the harasser and the effects on the harassed, not the intent of the harasser, are the criteria for determining sexual harassment specified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines.
15
An intruder's violation of a woman in her own bedroom may be a more obvious case of an unwelcome advance than the successful pressure placed on a date to "put out" after an expensive dinner; but a woman who feels manipulated into having sex when it is late and her date is her only ride home feels the sexual violation nevertheless. Feminists are also deeply divided over how a woman's responsibility for her own conduct and choice of male companionship should figure in any moral assessment of his sexual violation of her. John Bogart suggests that raping a woman who is intoxicated makes sense because rape can be both voluntary and nonconsensual, an observation typically overlooked in favor of the more common assumption that a woman's rape always constitutes a sexual assault against her will.
16
These are the very kinds of "hard" cases that have made sexual harassment and rape so difficult to prosecute successfully, a fact made especially painful given the statistics showing that the vast majority of sexual harassers and rapists are men that the victim knows and often knows well. Despite the fact that sexual harassment is a form of gender discrimination that is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, local and federal judges in sexual harassment cases are notorious for their inconsistent interpretation of what constitutes a "hostile environment" for women in the workplace; what an employer ''could or should have known" about the harassment; what is "severe or pervasive" treatment of an offensive sort; or what a "reasonable person" would be offended by.
17
For the purposes of my own discussion,
sexual
harassment will be distinguished from
gender
harassment in which the sexuality of the harassed is absent from a description of the gender discrimination against her.
Woman battering can be a form of
sexual
intimidation among teen and adult intimates, because physical abuse or psychological abuse (attacks on self-esteem, scare tactics, or threats) can be used to enforce sexual compliance, and because a woman's breasts, pregnant abdomen, and genitals are often the focus for her abuser's physical attacks. While Rosemarie Tong notes that such sexual battering ideologically links sexual harassment and rape to woman battering, other feminists warn that since it is still legal in some states for a man to rape his wife, a wife's rape and her battering should be kept conceptually separate for the purpose of successfully filing assault charges that can distinguish rape from the beating that may or may not accompany it.
18
On the other hand, if Catharine MacKinnon and others are right that sex is the weapon of choice for men because of its effectiveness in violating women, how do we determine which batterings are "sexual" and which are not? Sex and aggression are not easily parsed out; the slap that is, for some, a sexual turn-on is not easily differentiated from a "merely violent" punch. When some social scientists declare that they do not include sexual aggression in their assessment of violent behavior, they only succeed in biasing their own data with presumptions about the nature and legitimacy of the distinction.
19
Diana Russell also notes the lack of agreement among researchers as to which sex acts constitute the sexual abuse of children, as well as the researchers' confusion over
 
Page 163
how to define the term "child." Some researchers distinguish the vaginal or anal rape of children from their "mere" sexual abuse; others refer only to the abuse of a child by an adult but do not consider abuse by peers or younger children to be in the same category. Physical or emotional assault or neglect accompanying the sexual assault of children presents the same problems of identification and differentiation as those concerning woman battering. Legal statutes vary: what is "forcible rape in one jurisdiction is "impairing the morals of a minor" in another. While focusing on father-daughter incest acknowledges the special power dynamics involved in such an assault, many assume the incestuous father to be the biological father, although there is good reason to think that stepfathers and legal guardians are much more common perpetrators of the sexual abuse of children than biological fathers. The question then arises as to whether or not the sexual abuse of a child by an adoptive parent constitutes incest, and what social inhibitions are minimized if it does not.
20
The sexual abuse of a four-year-old girl and the physical battering of a teenage girlfriend can both constitute rape; a stepfather's threatening demands for the sexual compliance of his young stepdaughter or the psychological battering of his wife constitute the unwelcome sexual overtures definitive of sexual harassment; a foster father's verbal and sexual abuse of a mature teenager is as much a case of woman battering as child abuse; a rubber penis thrown into a woman's lap at the office is as much psychological battery as sexual harassment. In light of such conceptual overlap, any attempt to draw hard and fast distinctions between cases would be misleading. Indeed, this conceptual overlap in the forms of sexual intimidation mirrors the ways in which the correlative normative concepts of violation, terrorization, coercion, and dehumanization are related: for example, a woman who is battered by her husband is sexually
terrorized
by his threats to her well-being, which are
coercive
and in
violation
of her sexual autonomy and integrity, which in turn
dehumanizes
her to the status of mere object for her husband's sexual consumption.
What I suggest is that the conceptual and normative overlap between various forms of sexual intimidation has instructive, if paradoxical, political implications for feminists. On the one hand, if the systematic sexual intimidation of women is most successful when it is not exposed for public scrutiny and, when exposed, only confuses many women and men by its complexity and variety, then it will behoove feminists not only to call for fairer legislation of men's sexual intimidation of women but also to make fine distinctions between cases. Such distinctions would also help in sure that feminist surveys conducted to gather data on various forms of sexual intimidation would not be open to charges of vagueness, self-serving interpretations of the data, or the making of mountains out of molehills. On the other hand, when some feminists make a point of noting the overlap between casesthat sexual harassment looks like woman battering, that rape is a form of sexual battery, that sexual abuse is often rape, and so onthey can more persuasively argue that there exists a continuum of sexual intimidation that pervades women's lives at home, at the workplace, in campus dormitories, in parking lots, in public bars: in a word,
everywhere
. As Sandra Lee Bartky points out, "To apprehend myself as victim in a sexist society is to know that there are few places where I can hide, that I can be attacked almost anywhere, at any time, by virtually anyone."
21
The variety of any one form of sexual intimidation only appears to offer further evidence of its pervasiveness: rape can be

Other books

Illicit Passions (Den of Sin) by Ambrielle Kirk, Den of Sin Collection
Perfecting Patience by Tabatha Vargo
Death Line by Maureen Carter
Full Circle by Collin Wilcox
Positive/Negativity by D.D. Lorenzo
The Lewis Chessmen by David H. Caldwell
Omega Virus (Book 2): Revisited by Mendonca, D. Manuel
Dancer's Heart by R. E. Butler