Loose Women, Lecherous Men (46 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 184
men from whom they have received love and support in the past. A battered woman may feel total responsibility for the emotional health of her family because of her gender role socialization, which is then manipulated by the batterer into absolving him of any blame for a violent household. She may still want to believe that her home is a safe haven, a loving, happy place protected from the ravages of the outside world, instead of the beleaguered place descriptive of so many homes divided by traditional gender hierarchies. She may be made to believe that good women stay no matter what and that she can love him if she tries hard enough. Thus, if she stays, she is blamed for her own abuse. If she leaves she is accused of having no commitment or concern for the welfare of her family. This may be especially true in African American communities, where black women have often felt obligated to protect black men from whites' stereotypes of intraracial violence.
If a battered woman does not complain the first time she is beaten, she may find it increasingly difficult not to blame herself for continued abuse. In addition, any financial or emotional dependence on her batterer is exploited to attach her to him at the same time that he abuses her. ("I'll always take care of you, darling," "You know I would never hurt you," or "That was all in the past.") Women are more apt to consult clergymen than any outside source other than the police. Yet many women are told simply to forgive, be patient, and remain committed, even in the face of visible evidence of serious abuse. Psychiatrists are much less apt to label battered women paranoid or hysterical today than in the mid-1970s, yet many physicians still prefer prescribing painkillers, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills to helping a battered woman prevent her abuse from continuing, especially if she shows any ambivalence about separating from her partner. Many feminists have argued that unless we provide battered women with access to food, clothing, shelter, job training, child care, and feminist psychological counseling, legal resources, and health services, all of which also recognize the special needs of battered women of color, women will not be in a free and informed position to take action against their abusers.
103
In many cases, the frequency and severity of a woman's abuse increase over time. Some women succeed in adjusting to the escalating violence by making the former into the new baseline, so that a punch or slap is "just nothing really." Other women who see themselves trapped in a pattern of repeated violence by men physically stronger than they are may resort to violence themselves. Yet because quite often their retaliatory violence has been in anticipatory self-defensekilling their battering husbands in the certainty that they would be killed themselves in the foreseeable future if they did not do sojudges and juries have been wary of acquitting such cases. The law has also traditionally been hesitant to acquit battered women who kill battering husbands who brandish no weapon other than their own fists. As with rape, however, more courts are becoming sensitized to what a reasonable woman would consider imminent danger or justifiable force in defense of her life. Such sensitivity is largely the result of feminists determined to write domestic assault case law from a woman's point of view.
104
Some feminists remark that young girls can be coerced into sex even more easily than adult women, since young girls tend to be less sexually experienced, less strong, and more trusting and dependent on adults for their emotional and material well-being than mature women. Young girls may have been successfully taught not to take
 
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candy from strangers but not taught to be wary of the sexual advances of adults they know and love. These girls may be more impressed by threats of bodily harm or sexual exposure than mature women, more vulnerable to incentives offered by adult men, and more easily forced into retractions or denials of sexual abuse they do report. A typical scenario is that the abused girl is taken from her home to the local youth authority or juvenile hall, while the perpetrator is out on bail. One or both of her parents then say that if she wants to come home, she must recant her story.
105
Some professionals believe that issues of consent to sex are meaningless with regard to very young children, since they are unable to alter or understand what is happening to them. Children often have even less credibility than adult women: young girls must confront both sexism and the bias of age when they report their abuse by adult men who may be otherwise respected members of their community. If sexually abused girls sustain no discernible physical injuries, their reports may be dismissed out of hand. The pressure on girls to keep silent is even greater when their abuse is within their own families, often perpetrated by the very men to whom they would turn if they were abused by strangers. Disbelieving mothers may unwittingly contribute to their daughters' sexual coercion by failing to comprehend what their husbands or boyfriends are doing. Others who are themselves battered or economically dependent on their husbands may believe they have no choice but to allow the abuse to continue. Some may fear social stigma strongly enough to look the other way or remain passive in their perceived role as subordinate to their husbands. Still others simply never hear of the abuse, when fear of reprisal or of witnessing her mother's emotional breakdown may maintain a young girl's silence.
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The causal claim that victimized children become victimizing adults must be seriously questioned, when it is acknowledged that the vast majority of perpetrators are men but the vast majority of victims are women.
107
Many feminists contend that insisting on accusing mothers of incest victims of being primarily responsible for their daughters' abuse, by being failed wives and spiteful, competitive, "unfit" mothers, is yet another example of blaming women for men's violence. The claim by some feminists that rape is normal sex for many men is consistent with men's claims that they did no harm to the girls they molested. ("She needed to be taught the facts of life," or "She needed to be protected from other men.") If injury is obvious, then little girls are turned into temptresses and tarts who brought their abuse upon themselves. Such rationalizations are invoked to justify young girls' use in pornography as something they enjoy and to encourage men who view such pornography to assume the same. Young girls running away from abusive households are sometimes accused of wanting a faster life, when they may be at the mercy of coercive pimps and indifferent law enforcement officials who appear interested only in returning them to their original incestuous abusers.
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If young girls and adult women alike are made to believe that men's unbridled lust makes violence against women inevitable, justified by both biology and gender hierarchy within the family, then they will fail to see any legitimate line of defense against their abuse. "Family" therapy too often manipulates both mother and daughter into feeling compelled to admit some complicity in the crime. According to some feminists, Dr. Benjamin Spock has misleadingly overemphasized the relatively rare occurrence of the lonely, confused, and socially inadequate pedophile confronted
 
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by a sexually precocious and seductive child. It is argued that Spock, a highly regarded child psychologist, has also overplayed the image of the benevolent and unsuspecting baby-sitter who is approached for sex by his charge. The myth of the seductive child persists when children respond to adults' approval of their charm, popularity, or physical attractiveness or when they imitate what they see their parents do. Yet children become frustrated and confused when they are inconsistently punished for a seductiveness that they are told is never to be used "that way." Parents often teach their children that child molesters are not responsible for their behavior, because molesters are emotionally deprived or "friend-sick." However, this lesson only encourages children to think that
they
are responsible for their abuse. Upwardly mobile parents are also notorious for painting a picture of incest as something that happens in
other
families, when such abuse does not confine itself to one class, race, nationality, or religion. The Freudian legacy that teaches analysts to regard reports of women's sexual abuse as girls as mere fantasy, revealing a search for resolution of their own Oedipal conflicts, has been difficult to dispel among psychiatrists unfamiliar with feminist criticism of traditional psychoanalysis. Florence Rush notes that such a legacy has led contemporary professionals to believe not only that many women's reports are false but also that their fantasies encourage the abuse that does occur. Thus, Rush calls a young girl's sexual abuse "a system of foolproof emotional blackmail," the exposure of which would incriminate herself as well as her abuser. In this way incest remains ''the best kept secret in the world."
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Moreover, the fact that middle-class incest often remains in the privacy of a physician's or therapist's office means that its occurrence may fail to be recorded as a significant social statistic in the way that sexual abuse documented in public hospitals and police stations among the poorer classes is recorded. Coerced into sex they do not want, betrayed by adults they have been taught to trust, if not love, deceived by myths about girls' and women's sexuality that confuse and frustrate them, and manipulated by men into sexual activity that can have severe consequences for their emotional and sexual life for years after the abuse has ended, women who are survivors of child sexual abuse are confirming evidence to many feminists of an entrenched and pervasive sexual ideology that encourages the sexual intimidation of women by men.
Sexual Dehumanization
A woman who has experienced a man's sexual insensitivity and sense of propriety will often assert that she feels as if she were nothing more than a
sex object
to serve his own sexual needs. Her complaint is one of being treated as if her sexuality made her something less than a man's equal in power, authority, or dignity and that her own needs and interests were insignificant compared to his own. This sexual
dehumanization
of woman from active subject to expendable object captures the feeling many women have of being degraded, humiliated, and exploited in their sexual relationships with men. From this perspective, sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls reduce women to sexual toys, tools, props, and pets that men can appropriate and control. Some feminists claim that one of the primary ways men can assert their superiority and dominance is through their pervasive and institutionally sanctioned sexual dehumanization of women.
110
 
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Quid pro quo sexual harassment is degrading to many women in the workplace and academia, because it sends them the message that they are primarily valued not for their professional or practical skills but for their sexuality. Women who are subjected to this form of harassment often begin to question their own job or intellectual performance and wonder whether they were ever hired, promoted, or evaluated on any basis besides their sexuality. Hostile environment sexual harassment lets a woman know that she is not respected as a fellow worker or student but used as the brunt of sexual jokes, comments, cartoons, or photographs that reveal how men prefer women: as ready and willing sexual objects of male desire. An especially interesting case of sexual harassment as sex objectification appeared in a 1991 sexual harassment suit filed by five women against Stroh's Brewing Company. The women alleged that Stroh's sexually provocative beer commercialsshowing bikini-clad Swedish girls bearing six-packs and parachuting into a male campsiteencouraged Stroh's male workforce to treat the women who worked at Stroh's as sexually available and exploitable objects.
111
Thus, quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual harassment both express the attitude that women are to be identified in terms of their sexual attractiveness (or unattractiveness) to men.
The question immediately arises: what is
wrong
with being valued primarily, if not solely, for one's sexuality? First, some feminists argue that when sexually harassed women complain about being treated as sex objects at work or in academia, they are typically complaining not about being found sexually attractive by the men in the office but about being
dominated and controlled
through sex, or about being
humiliated and degraded
through sex, as though their own feelings or desires were of no consequence. When sexually harassed women are accused of lacking a sense of humor or misinterpreting the intent of sexual jokes or sexual touching, they are accused of politicizing sexuality by the very men whose gender dominance defines what counts as a sexual joke and what does not. Sexually harassed women are not just being reduced to their sexuality; their sexuality is being exploited by men whose expression of appropriate masculinity begins with the presumption of sexual propriety.
112
Women's complaints about feeling victimized by sexual harassment are considered by some feminists to bolster the view that as a form of institutionalized sexual intimidation, sexual harassment is about power and control over women, about imposing an inferior status on a person otherwise deserving of respect as an equal, and about reinforcing that status with the message that a natural inferior should expect no better. Furthermore, from this view, men will resent and resist being exposed as perpetrators of sexual harassment at the same time that they take advantage of the opportunity.
Second, because of the often public nature of hostile environment harassment, a woman bears the added humiliation of being sexualized in a culture that teaches her that "good" girls put a premium on sexual privacy and discretion. Sexual harassment often makes a woman feel embarrassed or ashamed, because her sexuality is made part of a public domain that she would prefer to keep private, or that she knows that
others
would prefer to keep private. And third, because women as a class are socialized to identify ourselves primarily in terms of our heterosexual attractiveness, often to the exclusion of other aspects of our character or abilities, when a man attempts to exploit a woman's sexuality, that exploitation may strike at the very core of how she

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