Loose Women, Lecherous Men (41 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
4.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 164
perpetrated by a stranger, acquaintance, or lover, and stranger rape itself can be gang rape; anal, oral, or vaginal rape; rape with objects; a planned rape; or a crime of opportunity. Sexual harassment can be quid pro quo or hostile environment harassment; but a hostile environment can itself consist of comments, gestures, leers, cartoons, or photographs.
22
What this paradox implies is that even the most conceptually clear, woman-centered legislation will be ineffective if sexual intimidation case law continues to be interpreted under the aegis of a pervasive and institutionalized sexism. Feminists who believe that such structural sexism exists require instead a normative feminist framework for sorting through the variety of complaints that women make when they are sexually intimidated by mena framework that condemns the patriarchal institutions themselves. Such a framework will be intentionally redundant in order (1) to reflect the conceptual and normative overlaps in men's sexual intimidation of women; (2) to capture the pervasiveness and reiteration of men's sexual intimidation of women; and (3) to galvanize women victimized in this way into individual and collective political resistance. To this framework we can now turn.
Sexual Violation and Sexual Violence
One of the strongest arguments feminists can make against the sexual intimidation of women is that it constitutes a violation of a woman's sexual integrity and autonomy. Women who are sexually harassed, raped, battered, or sexually abused as children or teenagers all express a sense of being both emotionally and physically violated by their victimizers. Victims feel injured, invaded, and defiled in ways that linger long after any physical scars have healed. Sexual harassment is a complex and often misunderstood case of sexual violation, since unwelcome sexual jokes, comments, gestures, ogling, touching, or pinching are invasive to women yet not physically violent. Even quid pro quo harassment does not typically involve consistent verbal abuse or physical beating, although the sexually coercive nature of sexual harassment has led feminists like Marilyn French to describe it as
threatening
physical violence: "male co-workers" derogatory comments on women's sexuality, appearance, and competence express hatred: the men tacitly threaten rape or battery and appropriate the woman's sexuality to themselves."
23
Edmund Wall suggests that sexual harassment primarily involves wrongful communication that is marked not so much by the content of the harassment as by the invasiveness of the approach. In Wall's opinion, sexual harassment is simply a failure to show respect for the victim's right to privacy. Many feminists argue that such an analysis of sexual harassment is misleading because it fails to situate sexual harassment in a patriarchal context in which discrimination against women as a class is a means of establishing and maintaining institutionalized male dominance. Catharine MacKinnon argues, for example, that when they are "[u]nsituated in a recognition of the [structural] context that keeps women secondary and powerless, sexual injuries appear as incidental or deviant aberrations which arise in one-to-one relationships gone wrong."
24
The harassed woman may feel especially exposed if she reports her harassment, fearing that questions about her sexual life may arise despite grievance procedure guidelines to the contrary. Such fears cause her embarrassment
 
Page 165
and shame in a culture ambivalent about the value of sexual privacy and, along with fear of reprisal, make rates of reporting sexual harassment low relative to its incidence. The sexually harassed woman may be required to fend off advances sustained over long periods of time, causing her not only tension, anxiety, and frustration but also physical ailments such as headaches, nausea, and insomnia.
25
Feminists have argued that these very illnesses can severely hamper her job performance-indeed, in some cases force her resignationjustifying the prejudice that women are too fragile for the stresses of the workplace. One of the difficulties in proving that a hostile working or educational environment exists for a woman is precisely the difficulty of showing that unsolicited, deliberate, or repeated sexual comments, leers, or gestures violate a woman's sexual integrity in a way comparable to the coercion of quid pro quo harassment. The subtlety, variety, and ubiquity of hostile environment harassment diffuse and normalize it, so that many women simply accept it as a fact of life. If both women and men accept the view that women trade sex for money, status, and security through commercial sex work, dating, and marriage, then sexual harassment will be understood as the intrusive but necessary price women pay for social goods.
The grievances of women of color often include complaints of sexism, racism, and classism since their harassment by white males will appear to many such women to be vestiges of colonial imperialism or slavery, threatening the livelihoods of female heads of single-parent households or poor households in ways that a more wealthy white women's harassment might not. Women of color whose sexuality is stereotypically associated in some white men's minds with promiscuity and sexual accessibility may be especially vulnerable to harassment. Furthermore, even if the courts decide to base their assessment of hostile environment harassment on what a reasonable
woman
might find offensive, as opposed to what a reasonable
man
might, such a judgment may still be biased in favor of white, middle-class women.
26
Yet many African American women may be more resistant to sexual harassment than white women because they have both everything (their livelihood) and nothing (their economic advantage) to lose by reporting it and, given their history of sexual exploitation by whites, are particularly sensitive to the structural oppression that their harassment represents. On the other hand, a white woman may be accused of being racist if she officially complains of her harassment by a man of color, appearing to castrate him for attempting to accost a white woman.
27
Lesbians harassed by heterosexual men may feel the special intrusion of a man, whose very sexual preference is invasive and presumptuous. Indeed, lesbians often suffer harassment as punishment precisely because they refuse to make men their choice of sexual partner. However, lesbians cannot sue under Title VII or IX for loss of a job or an education due to discrimination against them as homosexuals unless their claims of discriminatory harassment are also claims of gender discrimination.
28
Understanding women's sexual harassment in terms of gender discrimination means recognizing that if the harassed were not a woman, she would not be treated this way. Catharine MacKinnon has argued that the harassment is
sexual
precisely because women as a class are identified by men as their sexual subordinates; thus women's
sexual
harassment (as opposed to harassment based on women's managerial or culinary skills, such as "This memo stinks!" or "I wouldn't feed this to my dog!") constitutes the discrimination against women and becomes the source for women's
 
Page 166
exploitation and humiliation. For feminists like MacKinnon, sexual harassment is an abuse of sex as well as an abuse of educational status or economic power; otherwise we could not explain the effectiveness of coworker and peer harassment of women by men. From such a perspective, the invasiveness of sexual harassment, like all sexual intimidation, stems from the attempt to use sex to dominate and control the harassed.
29
Women as a class do not control men's employment destinies or wield economic power to the extent that men do, and women are not socialized to be the sexual initiators in the way that men are. As women move up the corporate ladder, more women are harassing men; but the man who perceives his harassment as a compliment or who feels fully justified in retaliating with a harassment report is in a better social and psychological position to resist than a woman. Such asymmetries are used by many feminists to point out the power of a Western gender role socialization that defines men as aggressive and self-confident and women as submissive and indecisive to maintain and reinforce the sexual intimidation of women.
A woman's sexual harassment has been called her "little rape" because, among other things, harassment involves an invasive sense of sexual violation. Rape, on the other hand, is invasive in its
violence
to women's sexual integrity and autonomy. In rape, a woman's body is physically appropriated and sexually used in ways only hinted at in hostile environment sexual harassment. Even quid pro quo harassment coerces with incentive: sex is offered in
exchange for
a promotion or sex
in exchange for
a good grade, and the price of refusal is rarely the threat of imminent death. In rape, a woman's sexuality is overwhelmed by an attacker uninterested in cutting deals and unfazed by women who "just say no." Whether in stranger, acquaintance, date, or marital rape, the rapist shows his victim in unequivocal terms who is in control of her sexuality. In Judith Lewis Herman's words, "In rape . . . the purpose of the attack is precisely to demonstrate contempt for the victim's autonomy and dignity. The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can
be oneself
in relation to others." Carolyn Shafer and Marilyn Frye suggest something similar when they argue that rape is the transgression of one's personal domain, in which one's body is central. John Bogart describes rape as a violation of bodily integrity. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall contends that rape and the fear of rape enforce a "bodily muting" and a ''self-censorship" that make it impossible for women to express our sexuality on free and equal terms with men.
30
For some rape victims, every sexual contact has been tainted, a constant reminder of the personal invasion that the victim would sooner forget. Catharine MacKinnon states that rape is no less than the violation of a woman's sexuality, whose control is lost to her by an attack that is "intrusive or expropriative of a woman's sexual wholeness."
31
Specifically, the violation constitutes a personal invasion or intrusion on a part of the self that is
sexual
, a paradoxically privatized and intimate part of the self given massive public exposure in Western culture, largely through depictions of women's bodies. According to Pamela Foa, since a woman's sexuality in such a culture is characteristically used to identify her, rape makes evident the essential sexual nature of woman; in rape, a woman is
sexually
assaulted, not merely robbed or beaten. Furthermore, because her sexuality has traditionally been used to brand and degrade her (as whore, adulterer, temptress, bitch), rape may be cause for her humiliation in ways that a robbery or mugging is not. The rape victim becomes the
 
Page 167
transgressor of sexual mores, not simply an unfortunate victim of brutal assault.
32
This analysis matches the fate of the raped Muslim wife I described in chapter 2, who was socially ostracized as punishment for her "promiscuity."
Ironically, rape was originally conceived as a violation of a
man's
right to his daughter's or wife's body. According to this tradition, a rapist has either robbed the father of his daughter's marketable virginity or robbed the husband of his certainty of paternity and stigmatized a prized possession. So conceived, a rapist is always a stranger or an enemy to the family, never a friend or acquaintance and
never
a husband or father. Thus, from this view, the proverbial unknown rapist lurking in the bushes for an unsuspecting victim relieves men of the burden of responsibility for the rapes of women by their friends, lovers, and spouses that some surveys suggest comprise 85 percent or more of all rape incidents.
33
The tradition of a marital exception rule to rape stems from the belief that a man cannot violate that to which he already has total and legitimate access. If an extramarital rapist is found innocent in court, the victim herself is often condemned as an adulterer. While feminism has made legal headway in dispelling the notion that women are men's property, and women can now file
assault
charges against their husbands, marital rape exemption rules still exist in some states in the fear that vindictive wives will falsely cry rape for better divorce settlements or in order to justify not having sex with their husbands.
34
The violation of rape is not confined to penile entry or vaginal penetration: objects, fingers, and tongues can penetrate, and rape can be oral or anal. The rapist can be motivated by rage, a strong need to control, and/or by an obsessive and sadistic aggressiveness that has perpetuated the myth of the rapist as the rare but dangerous madman. The psychological violation of rape, the humiliation, embarrassment, and sense of personal invasion, are often not confined to the incident itself but continue for many rape victims through the process of reporting and prosecuting their rape. One reason why many rape victims do not press formal charges is to avoid the ordeal of the courtroom. Feminists have succeeded to a large extent in sensitizing police, prosecutors, judges, and juries to the psychological injury often done to the rape victim by the criminal justice systemfor example, by insisting on rape shield laws that make the victim's prior sexual history inadmissible as evidence in court in most states. Nevertheless, such a history can still come out in the course of questioning the victim for evidence of her credibility or in private hearings to determine whether such history is crucial evidence in the case.
35
Such an intrusion is especially galling when victims of robbery or mugging are not routinely asked such questions as "Have you ever been robbed before?," "Why didn't you take precautions?" ''What did you do to resist?," or "Were there any witnesses?" Julie Allison and Lawrence Wrightsman observe that "[r]ape is the only crime in which the credibility of the victim is considered relevant to the issue of whether the defendant's behavior constitutes rape." The authors also point out that according to prosecutors, the rapist's use of a weapon makes rape more credible, since a weapon is independent corroboration of the victim's inability or unwillingness to resist. Yet a majority of states still require that the victim put forth "reasonable" resistance in order for the event to be considered rape. Under feminist pressure, judges in California have stopped routinely advising jurors that the accusation of rape is easy to make but difficult to prove. A victim's habit of drinking or drug use has also been

Other books

Luster by Rowan, Tessa
September Tango by Jade, Scarlett, the 13th, Llerxt
Darla's Secret Wish by Selena Kitt
Iron and Blood by Auston Habershaw
Appleby Talks Again by Michael Innes
Johanna's Bridegroom by Emma Miller
P. G. Wodehouse by The Swoop: How Clarence Saved England
This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon
...And the Damage Done by Michael Marano
Argos by Ralph Hardy