Loose Women, Lecherous Men (45 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
11.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 180
to diffuse their harassment by joking about it or appearing to be flattered have been regarded by some judges as making the kinds of suggestive remarks that purportedly show that they were not in fact harassed. Some harassers threaten countersuits for defamation of character, which often also succeed in reducing the harassed to silence or in rehumiliating her.
84
Catharine MacKinnon has referred to sexual harassment as "economic coercion, in which material survival is held hostage to sexual submission," and as "economically enforced sexual exploitation."
85
While such coercion may be true in cases of quid pro quo harassment, some philosophers and feminists have wanted to make a distinction between quid pro quo and hostile environment harassment on the basis that the former, but not the latter, is actually coercive.
86
Others have contended, however, that sexually harassed working women are often less able to work as productively and efficiently as they might if they were not working in a sexually hostile environment. Their inefficiency may then be used as an excuse to lay them off, pay them less, or fail to promote them. The environment may become so untenable that rather than risk further alienating her coworkers with a harassment report, a harassed woman may quit her job or request a transfer. Such transfers can result in virtual job segregation by gender, which can perpetuate lower wages and middle-management glass ceilings for women. While hostile environment harassment does not imply forcing a woman to perform sexually, some feminists charge that this kind of harassment is coercive because it forces women to perform their work under conditions unfairly adverse to their success on the job.
87
Hostile environment harassment at colleges and universities is also perceived as coercive. Campus peer harassment can be manipulative of a female student's attention and performance in the classroom. Unsolicited sexual advances from students do not carry the weight of professorial power behind them, but they can nevertheless undermine a young woman's efforts to concentrate on her studies or simply to live a campus life free of unwelcome sexual intrusion. Nancy Tuana argues that a professor's sexist remarks or sexual ogling in class can carry the implicit, even if unintended, threat that unless his female students allow him to continue to speak and act this way, their grades will suffer. A hostile environment created by such a professor becomes coercive in virtue of his power position. If sexual harassment is part of a system of sexual intimidation reinforced by economic and social discrimination against women, then both quid pro quo and hostile environment harassment can be said to coerce women oppressed by such a system into sexual compliance.
88
The traditional English common law definition of rape is coercive sex: "illicit carnal knowledge of a female by force against her will." Just as rape is considered to be more physically violent than sexual harassment, so the rapist may display more physical force as well. However, there is notoriously wide disagreement among legal theorists, sociologists, feminist activists, philosophers, and lay people alike over what is to count as "against her will." For example, John Bogart notes that coercive sex may not capture every case of rape, since a woman may be raped not by being forced to have sex but by being too intoxicated to be able to give her consent. On the other hand, if "forcible sex" and "sex without one's consent" are regarded as synonymous expressions for rape, all rape is sex against one's will to resist.
89
Until fairly recently,
 
Page 181
one of the difficulties rape victims have had in pressing legal suits against rapists has been to prove lack of consent. Unnecessary in other criminal assault cases, such evidence at one time required proving the kind of resistance that caused serious bruises, internal injuries, or lacerations, sometimes in addition to showing that the rapist had a gun or knife. A majority of states still require victims to show "reasonable" resistance in order for the event to be considered rape, lest vindictive women falsely accuse tiresome or unacceptable partners, or willing women later blame their partners for their lost virtue. However, as Robin Abcarian has pointed out, many women are taught to say no to a rapist, then not resist further for fear of being killed. She notes that women who are raped by their friends, acquaintances, or dates often do not physically resist because women think that such men will listen to them. Moreover, it is argued that what may appear to be reasonable resistance for a man may not be so for a woman, and rape prosecutions are so emotionally harrowing that few women would submit to them for the sake of simple revenge. In fact, the percentage of false charges of rape is reported to be no higher than the percentage of false charges for other crimes.
90
The traditional legal requirements for proving sexual coercion appear to be based on the beliefs that men are naturally sexually aggressive and women naturally resistant and in the stereotype of the woman as liar and temptress, so that only an inordinate amount of verifiable resistance would constitute nonconsensual sex. Moreover, the feeling persists among many people that a truly virtuous woman would fight to the death to retain her chastity or would never have gotten herself in such a situation in the first place. This feeling is consistent with the common rationalization that prostitutes and black women cannot be raped, since their purported promiscuity "proves" that they really want all the sex they can get. If men and women continue to believe that even stranger rape is brought on by the woman herself, then the more intimate the rapist and the more voluntary the setting, the less the sex will look like rape. Yet as Rosemarie Tong points out, boyfriends can be just as forceful or violent as strangers, and husbands can use even more clever methods of deception or manipulation
because
the victim is well-known to them. Indeed, acquaintance rape can be more psychologically devastating than stranger rape, since a divorced spouse or spurned lover may rape out of hatred or vindictiveness directed at
this
victim.
91
The myth that women want to be raped is matched by the belief that rapists are suddenly overcome with uncontrollable lust in the presence of a seductive and tantalizing woman. From this view, such lust is thought naturally to reside in men, all of whom are potential predators against whom women must take appropriate precautions or be ready to accept the consequences. The fact that most rapes are planned and that fifteen-month-old babies are raped do not seem to make much headway in dispelling such myths. Many feminists argue that women are blamed for rape so that men, particularly educated or affluent white men, can be absolved of responsibility for their own violence; and men justify rape by claiming that women "want it."
92
Feminists encourage women to prosecute their rapists because women's silence or unwillingness to file charges is regarded as unwitting collaboration in the elaborate deception notoriously referred to under the general heading "blame the
 
Page 182
woman." Women's silence also encourages men to continue to rape in the belief that women who value their femininity will quietly submit to it and encourages in women a stereotypic passivity that itself encourages rape.
According to Catharine MacKinnon, myths about rape also undermine women's ability to see or admit how much "normal" sex is coercive or unwanted, obscuring the extent to which rape has been defined in terms of what
men
perceive as forced sex. From this view, separating rapists from "normal" men encourages women to believe (falsely) that we can protect ourselves by associating only with the "right" men.
93
Py Bateman notes that many young women as well as men consider a certain amount of forced sex to be an acceptable part of a date: when he initiates the date, pays for it, and takes her back to his apartment for coffee and she
still
says no, he may feel justified in taking the sex he thinks he deserves. Thus, his control over the context of the date encourages his belief that he has control over
the person
who is his date as well. Diana Russell speculates that men will continue to extort the sex they want if they resent the price they have to pay for it: money, status, and security for women.
94
What Susan Rae Peterson calls the "social coercion" of rape refers not only to rape's restriction of the freedom of individual women's bodily movement by individual men; the expression also refers to the structural coercion of all women that presents ubiquitous barriers to women in our pursuit of equal participation in both public and private life. From this view, a woman's social coercion through rape exists whether or not she is conscious of it, because she is unable to express herself or go almost anywhere without moderating her behavior in response to unknown sexual danger.
95
Accordingly, rape is punishment for transgression of the sexual double standard that rewards chaste girls with moral virtue while denying them social mobility and rewards promiscuous men with sexual virility and social independence. As Marilyn Frye points out, "[T]o coerce someone into doing something, one has to manipulate the situation so that the world as perceived by the victim presents the victim with a range of options the least unattractive of which (or the most attractive of which) in the judgment of the victim is the act one wants the victim to do."
96
Indeed, according to some feminists, raping a woman is part of the masculine ideal for at least some men. Diana Russell quotes Norman Mailer, who has written, "A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul," and Ogden Nash, who writes, "Seduction is for sissies; a he-man wants his rape."
97
Yet according to this view, since no woman is exempt from unconditional sexual accessibility to men, heterosexually inactive women must be raped tooindeed, must
want
to be rapedsince they are deeply repressed from having been taught to say no when they really mean yes.
98
The traditional psychoanalytic description of women's unconscious masochism has only contributed to such beliefs, as have romance novels and soap operas that depict the heroine falling in love with her ravisher. Thus, it is no surprise that estimating the incidence of rape is troubling for some feminists, since not all women characterize forcible sex by someone they know as rape. Julie Allison and Lawrence Wrightsman observe that many women believe that women enjoy men's use of force in sex, that relationships between men and women are normally manipulative and adversarial, and that many women say no initially so as not to appear too eager, when they have every intention of having sex. If (1) men continue to be socialized to believe that men
 
Page 183
know what women really want out of sex, (2) women continue to be socialized simultaneously to guard our "reputations" yet encourage, indeed
want
, a sexually aggressive response, and (3) women submit to men's sexual advances only when we have been sufficiently "paid" with money, status, security, or a good time, then the possibility for misinterpretation, miscommunication, and forced sex among sexual partners will remain high.
99
The battering of women is regarded as an especially complex case of coercion, as it often involves a combination of isolation, mental manipulation, and physical violence that succeeds in narrowing the victim's choices of action to those defined by the batterer. As in the pimp's seasoning of his prostitutes, the strategy of the woman batterer is to capture and attach his partner to him.
100
A battered woman is often made to think she cannot survive without her batterer's protection, yet his verbal and physical abuse tell her that she may be killed or abandoned if she displeases him. Her total enslavement requires that her own interests actually become the batterer's interests. Her enslavement is only partial when she regards doing whatever her batterer wants as the best means to her own survival. Her belief in her own responsibility for the abuse, her conviction that things will not get better, and the unpredictable nature of her violation often induce in her what I referred to earlier as a learned helplessness that paralyzes her into inaction.
101
As in rape, many women, particularly young women, often do not regard battering as coercive, since the violence against them signifies attention, affection, even love. Such beliefs are consistent with the claim of some feminists that violence against women is so normalized and institutionalized that women themselves often fail to recognize its coercive and manipulative quality.
Several feminists point out that myths surrounding the battered woman parallel those of the rape victim: a battered woman wants, needs, or deserves her abuse, and if she will not take responsibility for her battering, then it simply did not happen. Such myths reinforce accusations that battered women always choose violent men, have a history of repeated sexual abuse as children, and are never seriously harmed (otherwise they would always have their partners arrested). Some feminists have contended that the very language of woman battering contributes to such myths by failing to identify the perpetrator: "woman battering" by
whom
? "spousal abuse"
by whom
? "The wife was beaten with a hose until unconscious"
by whom
? This linguistic analysis also suggests that the expression "domestic violence" succeeds in obfuscating the identity of the victim as well as the abuser, while "domestic situation'' obscures that any violence occurred at all. Just "
slapping
a woman around a little" might be condoned by some (unfortunately), until it is revealed that such
hits
can be so hard that some women's jaws have to be wired shut.
102
As in rape, such myths make it difficult for women to establish credibility during police investigations and in the courtroom. If the battered woman is a woman of color, she may confront white police officers or judges who believe such violence to be normal and inevitable among a people many of whose members reside in a racial or ethnic ghetto. Yet because of the general lack of privacy and heightened police presence in such communities, people of color tend to become statistics more readily than whites.
Battered women can become susceptible to myths about themselves, since beliefs in their inferiority and blameworthiness for abuse are often reinforced by the very

Other books

Slob by Ellen Potter
All Jacked Up by James, Lorelei
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story by Ant McPartlin, Declan Donnelly
Mike's Election Guide by Michael Moore
Counterspy by Matthew Dunn