Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (44 page)

*
The phrase "exhibit himself" harks back to the Freudian preoccupation with exhibitionism and the penis.

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are following the leader and studying
machismo.
They are desper ately trying to learn the way to be successful men.* When I have stood, almost mesmerized, on my Fourteenth Street 'subway plat form and watched a gang of youths methodically assault a gum machine for its pennies-in escalation of a dare-I could only think That
could be
my
body.

Male bonding stems from a contempt for women, bolstered by distrust, and it is not, per se, homosexual.
It
is also, in this culture with its forced and exaggerated male/female polarities, an easier way to get along with other human beings than a male female group bonding, such as in, say, a Vermont commune. Activ ists in the women's movement have found that female bonding eating together, socializing together,
thinking
together-works nicely too. But male bonding set the model ( a theory of matriarchy notwithstanding ) and, as usual, exaggerated the model in the form of group violence and rape. "Sharing the girl among us fellows" strengthens the notion of group masculinity and power, a distorted notion to be sure, in much the same way that an executive dining room "open to males only" strengthens the notion of group mascu linity and power, or the way an all-male climb up Mount Everest to conquer the mountain or an all-male canoe trip to shoot the rapids (listen to the language ) strengthens the notion of group masculinity and power. Corporate executive dining rooms and climbs up Mount Everest are not usually accessible to those who form the subculture of violence. Access to a female body-through force-is within their ken.

"GRATUITOUS ACTS, EXTRAVAGANT DEFILEMENTS"

Hubert Selby did a brilliant fictional treatment of gang rape in Last
E xit
to
Brooklyn.
Tralala, a young bar hooker down on her luck, returns to her old familiar stamping grounds in Brooklyn where she tries to hustle a customer away from two regulars. She is very drunk and more out of a spirit of competition than anything

*
I have also watched gangs of tough girls on the New York City subways take jabs or pokes at one another in what I can only call imitation machismo. The tragedy of these young girls is that they are imitating a role model that ends in disaster.

else, she offers to take on the entire bar. Set up in the back of a wrecked car on a vacant lot, Tralala is at first a willing participant in a gang bang as she swills her beer and the guys in the line fight over who is going to be first. Soon the Greeks from the luncheon ette come over, and then someone puts in a call to the Navy base and the seamen join the swelling ranks. Someone complains that the car is beginning to smell and Tralala, car seat and all, is placed on the ground. Beer is passed down the line and somebody shoves a can against Tralala's mouth.
It
splits her lip and Tralala spits out a piece of tooth. Everybody laughs. Guys who have had their turn join the end of the line for seconds. Tralala passes out.

they slapped her a few times and she mumbled and turned her head but they couldn't revive her so they continued to fuck her as she lay unconscious on the seat in the lot and soon they tired of the dead piece and the daisychain brokeup and they went back to Willies the Greeks and the base and the kids who were watching and waiting to take a tum took out their disappointment on Tralala and tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerkedoff on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying amongst the broken bottles rusty cans and rubble of the lot and Jack and Freddy and Ruthy and Annie stum bled into a cab still laughing and they leaned toward the window as they passed the lot and got a good look at Tralala lying naked covered with blood urine and semen and a small blot forming on the seat between her legs as blood seeped from her crotch . . .

As I discovered during my research into wartime rape, the ramming of a stick, a bottle or some other object into a woman's vagina is a not uncommon coup de grace. Just how frequently this occurs statistically remains a mystery, for it has never been studied. Police department m.o. sheets in Los Angeles and Denver provide blanks to be checked off next to "inserts object in vagina." The Denver form lists "inserts foreign object into rectum" as well.

A law professor with a sociological bent once tried to analyze the phenomenon of gang rape in Sydney, Australia. Gang rape in Sydney, or "pack rape," was found to be mainly a lower-class and lower-middle-class product, like the American experience.

The grouping is usually just a gang of youths who behave, for the most part, in an aimless, non-goal directed manner [the profes-

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sor wrote]. The leader tends to become the repository and epitome of the qualities highly valued in the group. All members must be have in such a way as to positively affirm these highly valued qual ities, but the leader must do so even more. . . . This might ex· plain why in certain of the pack rape cases, in addition to the actual physical penetration of the victim, there take place certain gratuitous acts and extravagant defilements which are only darkly hinted at by judges giving sentence but are often excretory in nature. Such be havior as this seems clearly aimed towards gaining or maintaining prestige within the group by overemphasizing the values of tough ness and disregard for femininity other than as a sexual tool.

Besides the well-gossiped Fatty Arbuckle Coke-bottle case, the most famous foreign-object rape in our American heritage is in William Faulkner's Sanctuary, where Popeye brutally jams a corn cob into the well-bred college girl, Temple Drake. Faulkner was mak ing the point that Popeye was impotent, a novelist's rendition of the traditional Freudian view of sexual violence. Amir deals with what he politely calls "sexual humiliation" in his Philadelphia study. Ignoring such ads as urination, ejaculation into the victim's face and hair, and other defilements-perhaps they did not appear in the Philadelphia police reports-he does deal with the incidence of forced cunnilingus, fellatio and "pederasty" or "sodomy." By these last two imprecise terms I think he was referring to anal penetration. He concludes that "these are not the acts of an 'impo tent,' which the psychiatric school so emphatically suggests."

Including repeated intercourse in his definition of "sexual humiliation" Amir found that in more than one-quarter of his cases the victim was subjected to some form of extra insult beyond the simple rape. Sexual humiliation ran higher in group rapes than in individual rapes, and the most common form of extra insult in group rape was repeated intercourse. Amir remarked, "Taking re peated turns is part of what group rape can 'offer' to the par ticipants."

As the act of intercourse itself is deliberately perverted in rape by forcing it on an unwilling participant, so, too, the purpose of any sidebar activity is to further humiliate and degrade, and not to engage in sophisticated erotics. (The purpose is never to satisfy the victim. ) At best, fringe defilements can be in the nature of clinical experiments performed by initiates who are convinced that all sex is dirty and demeaning. Not surprisingly in Amir's study, when it