Loose Women, Lecherous Men (44 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 176
ing of black men for uncommitted crimes against white women had the intended effect of terrorizing white women into dependency on white men. Lynching thus served to convince white women that they were "ever threatened by black men's lust, ever in need of white men's protection.
70
Some feminists have pointed out that just knowing that she can be raped in a public place can make a woman constantly wary, sometimes incapable of venturing out alone or in groups of women. A rape in her own home may terrorize her into moving to another city or retaining an unlisted phone number or post office box. As Kathleen Barry notes, "In the face of terrorism people reorganize their lives."
71
Men who are raped in prison may feel some of this kind of terrorization, since they live in the kinds of controlled environments where men are the sole available instruments to express sexual conquest and to validate masculinity. However, many heterosexual and gay men may also display a well-socialized machismo in prison that motivates outrage and offense rather than resignation and submission. Indeed, without the adoption of a masculine stereotype on both sides of the attack, we could not make sense of the heterosexual male prisoner's claim that "[a] male who fucks a male is a double male."
72
As with sexual harassment, a woman often does not report her rape out of fear of reprisal. In many cases, the man whom she may be living with or going to classes with or who is the father of her children is the perpetrator, and his capacity for reprisal terrorizes his victim into silence. The trauma of reliving the event in the police station and the courtroom makes this fear even more real. Publicity about rape or attempted rape can have deleterious effects on women's reporting, when women read about or see the agony, humiliation, sexual publicity, and alienation of women who prosecute the men who raped them. In one study it was found that almost one in five victims of rape attempted suicide, indicating for many feminists that the power of the rapist to terrorize his victim extends far beyond the rape itself.
73
Ann Jones calls rapists and woman batterers within the family "domestic terrorists" whose tactics of physical and verbal abuse are designed to enable the terrorist to dominate and control the terrorized, to destroy any sense of autonomy or authority, "to erase identity" through careful manipulation of her practical and emotional life. Ola Barnett and Alyce LaViolette regard battering as the creation of an atmosphere of fear informed by a variety of abuse increasing in frequency and intensity over time. That fear is intensified by the unpredictable nature of the violence, which forces a woman to worry about the time, place, or reason for the next attack. From the batterer's perspective, the more frightened and humiliated a battered woman is, the easier it is to control her. The batterer may threaten his partner with murder or his own suicide if she tries to leave him, and his prior physical abuse may convince her that he means what he says. Ironically, a woman threatened in this way must also fear state retribution in the form of extended prison sentences if she kills her threatening partner in self-defense.
74
A battering husband may threaten to stop payment on his wife's checks, take the children, or lock her out. An abusive boyfriend may obsessively follow his girlfriend to school or work, harass her friends, monitor her phone calls. A battered girlfriend is often too embarrassed and confused to ask her parents for help, afraid that they will forbid her to see a boy she still cares about or fears too much to leave. A battered wife
 
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knows that her batterer will come looking for her at the homes of family or friends. Living in motels and moving her family from place to place may severely deplete her already limited financial resources. She has been told by police that they can arrest him on assault charges but cannot physically restrain him prior to sentencing with anything more that a court order. Her fear of reprisal may keep her from reporting her abuse at all. Simply not knowing when he will appear or what he will do next may undermine her will to resist his presence in her life. Judith Lewis Herman remarks that what mental health professionals have called a battered woman's "learned helplessness" should be understood not as passive submission in the face of danger but as an active decision to comply with her batterer, a decision marked by a profound wariness based on the legitimate belief that every action is watched and transgressions paid for dearly.
75
Her terrorizer may so dominate a woman's life that she perceives escape as impossible. If he shows any signs of affection or reprieve, she may come to believe that she can secure her safety only by becoming hypervigilant and attentive to her batterer so that he will refrain from abusing her. In her efforts to survive, she may then begin to identify his wants and needs as her own. In this way she imitates the psychological profile of terrorized hostages and concentration camp victims, who adopt the behavior patterns or values of their aggressors as a means of staying alive.
76
This identification, combined with a socialization that may compel her to stay to try to "make things better" and a fear of being alone in a world unfriendly to single women, conspire to undermine any determination she may have to make a better life for herself or her children outside the confines of her battering.
Even if a battered woman escapes her abuse, she may be terrorized by old fears. A playful hand on the neck or face, a sudden outburst by an otherwise sensitive lover, can recreate painful and paralyzing images. She may struggle with the nightmares and overreaction of battered woman syndrome in a way that reinvigorates the feeling of being out of control of her life. Feminists remind us, however, that such feelings are not misplaced. As Ola Barnett and Alyce LaViolette point out, the terrorism in woman battering is that "[a] woman cannot know with complete certainty that the man she loves and plans to marry will not eventually abuse her. A battered woman could be any woman or
every woman
" (Barnett's and LaViolette's italics).
77
If a woman can be convinced that aggression against women is an acceptable expression of masculinity and proof of it, she will live in a state of constant fear of what men will do and resign herself that women must accept what is done to them. Therefore, even men who do not abuse their partners may benefit from the dominance or authority conferred by their gender but bear the burden of being regarded with either suspicion or fear by their female partners.
Young girls who are the victims of sexual abuse may be terrorized most of all, since as children they are even more vulnerable than battered women to the sexual dominance and control of adult men. A sexually abused girl often does not understand what is happening to her. If she does, she may fear that her own reluctant complicity or lack of resistance will destroy her credibility. She may also fear what will happen to herself or her family if she tells anyone. The trauma of having her life or bodily integrity threatened at such a young age is sufficient to inspire in her feelings of terror and helplessness. Incest survivors recall the fear of knowing that their abusers
 
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were
always there
when they came home from school, when their mothers were working or away. A young incest victim's terror of her abuse becomes the overriding preoccupation of her life. She wonders not only when the abuse will end but why it is happening at all. When her abuse does not stop, she often blames herself, since she cannot believe that someone she has loved and trusted would choose to treat her this way.
78
Even if her image of her abuser is too fragmentary to be one of love or trust, she may simply be unable to sort out why someone with so much power over her would subject her to such violation.
A young girl abused by a stranger may remain fearful of adult men for many years afterward, indoctrinated into sex by way of insecurity, confusion, and terror. Some survivors fear their own sexual arousal, as its heightened state may be associated with real physical pain and emotional chaos. A survivor's capacity for intimacy may be irreparably damaged by oscillating feelings of need and fear. Judith Lewis Herman documents the terrorizing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that many survivors of sexual abuse feel: a state of hyperarousal in which the survivor believes that danger could return at any moment; intrusion, in which survivors continue to relive the event, never sure when some reminder of the trauma will reactivate painful memories; and constriction, a state of surrender or dissociation in which the survivor tries desperately to block the traumatic event off from conscious memory.
79
Mothers of incest victims fear for their children's safety when abusive fathers continue legal visitation. If mothers flee with their children from such visits, they are often hounded by their husbands and by the police, held in contempt of court, or jailed. Mothers contemplating intervention often fear family division, community stigma, or what may appear to be an overwhelming legal bureaucracy. When mothers do interfere in their children's abuse, they are often beaten or abused themselves. Thus, they may harbor deep feelings of guilt for allowing the abuse to happen or for having ignored it for so long. Young girls who attempt to run away from their abusers at home often end up being reterrorized by pimps whose livelihood is threatened by young prostitutes who think or act too independently. Indeed, Kathleen Barry compares the pimp's abduction, seasoning, and criminalization of young girls to the sexual intimidation of battered women.
80
Such intimidation communicates to many of these young women that sexual danger is inescapable and sexual victimization inevitable.
Sexual Coercion, Deception, and Manipulation
Several feminists have noted that the violation and terrorization of women would be unsuccessful if women were not physically forced or psychologically threatened to have sex we would not otherwise choose. Such sexual coercion captures the sense that women often feel betrayed and trapped by men into sexual compliance, misunderstood by deceptive myths about women's sexual needs and desires, and manipulated by economic and legal institutions that appear to facilitate the sexual violation of women by men. Feminists who argue that sexual intimidation is an institutionalized part of women's lives under patriarchy claim that sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls are each special cases of a pattern of systematic and pervasive sexual coercion, deception, and manipulation.
 
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Ellen Frankel Paul refers to quid pro quo sexual harassment as a form of extortion of property in which a woman's body is appropriated using the leverage of fear for her job.
81
Many feminists have argued that women are vulnerable to sexual harassment precisely because women's job opportunities are limited and our work devalued, suggesting structural or institutional inequities that individual women have little power to overcome.
82
Indeed, before the success of Title VII lawsuits, women were often fired for not acquiescing to quid pro quo harassment. Some feminists suggest that female graduate students are well advised not to become sexually involved with their professors, noting young women's vulnerability to male abuses of academic power and to accusations of "asking for it." Many institutions officially condemn such liaisons to protect both students and faculty from defamation and false accusation. According to Rosemarie Tong, sexual offers ("Sleep with me and I will promote/hire you") that are not overt threats (''If you don't sleep with me I'll flunk/fire you") are equivalent not to seduction but to coercion, given the charged hierarchical contexts of the workplace or the academic office. Tong suggests that while the seducer's goal is ultimately to win over a willing (and equal) partner, the sexual coercer's goal is ultimately to satisfy his own sexual needs whether or not the object of his coercion really wants to sleep with him. If a woman refuses her senior's sexual offer, she must face the possible repercussions of her refusal. If she accepts, she must face the possibility that her supervisor will not follow through with the promised employment or promotion or that her professor will not give her the promised grade or academic rank. She may wonder whether she will in fact please him or if others of his professional status will get a similar idea. Edmund Wall contends that sexual threats are too often confused with sexual offers. He contends that not all offers of promotion in exchange for sex
in fact
promise harm to the employee if she does not accept nor are they seen by all women as placing their situations in jeopardy. I would argue that an employee or student's standing
is
compromised by her superior's sexual offers, because she cannot confidently predict their outcome, nor can she participate equally in defining the terms and conditions of the relationship, given her less dominant position in the company or academic hierarchy. The coerciveness of such offers, whatever the outcome, lies not in their likelihood of being injurious to women nor in women understanding such offers as implicit threats; their coerciveness lies in their success at turning requests, which in more egalitarian relationships can be freely refused, into issues of dominance and control.
83
A sexually harassed woman may feel coerced into not reporting her abuse out of a perceived loss of privacy or fear of retribution. It may cause her extreme hardship to look for another job or change classes or advisers, much less leave school. If she reports her harassment, she often feels manipulated by a harasser who charges that she either provoked his advances or asked for them and whose social status and assumption of superiority may protect his credibility and insure his safety from reprisal. A harassed woman may be made out to be a spurned and vindictive lover, an employee dissatisfied with her salary, or a student whining for a better grade. Some students reluctantly but successfully short-circuit their professors' harassment by dropping classes, switching majors, or leaving school rather than risk matching their credibility against their professors. Such avoidance, however, has the unintended consequence of leaving other students vulnerable to the same fate. Women who try

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