Loose Women, Lecherous Men (49 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 196
One of Paglia's main complaints against a feminism grounding women's oppression in structural and pervasive sexual intimidation is that many affluent, sexually curious, but naive young women, armed with a renewed awareness of their own victimization, become convinced that they
can
take back the night, go anywhere, wear anything, and not be accosted. In Paglia's opinion, this attitude effectively places young women in positions of vulnerability for which they are totally unprepared. According to Paglia, when women are taught about their sexual victimization and not about their sexual power and the free-ranging lust it engenders, men get blamed for women ending up in the wrong bed, when it is up to
women
to make men keep their pants on. Such a view is echoed by Nigella Lawson, a London columnist reporting on the acquittal of a twenty-one-year-old male London University student who was accused of raping a female student: "To wake up and find yourself in bed with someone whom sober you wouldn't touch with a barge pole is not such a big deal. We've all been there, honey. It's called student life."
136
According to Paglia, when a woman accepts a date with a man, she accepts the risk that sex may be demanded of her even though she may not want it. It is her responsibility to set the tone for how she is to be treated and what lines should not be crossed; but she should not and cannot expect her date not to take advantage of any sexual opportunity that comes his way. If she is raped, her awareness of such a possibility, combined with the knowledge that she was as prepared to defend herself as she could be, will aid her recuperation much faster than what Paglia believes is revictimizing rape therapy. Such is the state of two sexes "at war."
137
Some feminists who are sympathetic to the legal difficulties in prosecuting rape described earlier also wonder whether according the rape victim special legal status over and above that of assault victim is most conducive to the cause of equal rights for women. Making too much of the trauma might only reinforce the assumption that women crack easily under stress or are not capable of dealing effectively with physical danger or violence, and that all rape is traumatizing to all rape victims. From this perspective, feminists who claim that women fear only murder more than rape are buying into the sexist assumption that women are physically vulnerable creatures in need of (male) protection. Some feminists also point out that to treat rape as a gendered category glosses over male and female homosexual rape, cases where women actually rape men, and heterosexual rapes by men in which women assist. Defining rape as a patriarchally structured problem of dominant men attacking passive women not only appears to define women as passive but also obscures the very real power struggle and emotional anguish that is also a part of less common, but no less painful, rapes. Furthermore, if patriarchal institutions effectively determine women's sexual choices, as opposed merely to impeding or constraining them, and are so ubiquitous that all heterosexual sex becomes rape, battery, or harassment, then any ability of women to liberate themselves from such conditions is effectively eliminated.
138
Realistically Assessing a Crisis of Sexual Violence
Critics also contend that "rape awareness" programs, "rape crisis" centers, psychiatric literature that describes ''rape trauma syndrome," and even self-defense programs specifically designed to defend against rape are just a few of the many examples of a
 
Page 197
feminist mindset that makes individual women sexually paranoid about men, often despite the fact that they have yet to experience being victimized. From this point of view, concentrating on helping the victim of injustice allows the perpetrator himself to go unchallenged and, self-defense classes notwithstanding, continues to typecast women as sexually vulnerable objects. Katie Roiphe argues that Take Back the Night marches on college campuses are high on canned rhetoric and group therapy and low on real analysis of what the exact nature of the local problem may be. Rape begins to lose its horror when date rape brochures suggest to campus women that they invest in rape everything they find negative about sex. According to Roiphe, false accusations of rape are the inevitable result of such messages; such brochures can also backfire on women by implying that women cannot take care of themselves, do not have a clear head when it comes to sex, and cannot withstand the verbal and emotional pressure of a heavy come-on.
139
Indeed, the Violence against Women Act recently introduced in Congress to make rape an act of gender discrimination has been described by its critics as victimizing women by not only making it harder to convict rapists but also making women appear to need special, not equal, protection under the law.
140
Furthermore, from this view, if the sexual intimidation of women is embedded in our legal institutions, then a feminist is wasting her time trying to make any changes from within. Critics like Christina Sommers agree that women who have been brutally raped should have the proper resources to overcome the real trauma they may suffer; but Sommers argues that the very communities who need social resources for combating rape are the ones least likely to receive funds. Monies are directed instead to support rape hotlines on affluent college campuses, where rapes are relatively rare but academic feminist advocacy is strongest. Sommers and Roiphe also contest the feminist claim that rape is ubiquitous and that rapists are "normal" men, since women filling out surveys do not always recognize as rape the sex that feminist researchers say they should. According to this view, when surveys designed to reveal the actual incidence of rape or battering are vague in their questions and manipulable in their responses, it is too easy for feminists to find in such surveys the data that will confirm their original beliefs. Sommers and Roiphe believe that if feminists do not want to assist a so-called oppressive patriarchy in its carefully crafted sexual intimidation of women, then we should restrict our sexual indictments to those men who commit real crimes against real victims.
141
Critics also charge that high school support groups and workshops for teens who are profiled as high-risk victims of battering or abuse tend to reinforce the view that fragile young women need protection from hostile boyfriends and fathers that overwhelm women's ability to resist. Along similar lines, the claim is made that laws specifically designed to deal with woman battering by taking into account a woman's fear of reprisal and her emotional and economic dependence on her batterer only serve to reinstantiate the view that women lack self-confidence and initiative and cannot fend for ourselves. Recognizing battered woman syndrome or what a reasonable woman finds life-threatening may have created new avenues for a woman's self-defense plea against the charge of willfully murdering her batterer. Nevertheless, some researchers are concerned that without expert testimony in the courtroom to explain a battered woman's feelings of both dependency and fear, juries will simply
 
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see her as a mentally unstable woman who should have walked out on her husband long before she chose to retaliate.
142
Similarly, to many ears, a battered woman's learned helplessness is not a reasoned and active response to a life-threatening situation perceived to be out of her control but a pathological retreat to a defenseless feminine passivity that only makes a bad situation worse. Camille Paglia would prefer that feminists both admit the psychological truth that some women stay in abusive relationships because they like them, and quit denying women's free will with epithets that refuse to recognize her power to goad her partner into violence and to be complicit in her own abuse.
143
From this perspective, expressions like "domestic violence" or "spousal abuse" do less harm to women than expressions like "wife beating" or "woman battering'' simply because the less gendered expression does not leave the impression that all and only women are beaten by our partners. Indeed, Christina Sommers contends that men are far more victimized by violence than women and that women do as much minor battery to men as men do to women. Like her complaints about the gathering of rape statistics, Sommers argues that surveys to reveal the incidence of woman battering enlarge on the number of cases by making minor domestic skirmishes equivalent to full-blown physical attacks. She suggests that less biased studies reveal that the great majority of batterers are not "normal" men but criminals with prior records and that battery among noncriminals is a pathology of intimacy, not patriarchy. Sommers decries the violence that men do to women by arguing that without credible and trustworthy information on the incidence and severity of woman battering, feminists will fail to procure the legislation, public funding, and community support necessary to address the problem.
144
Indeed, Sommers is convinced that "gender feminists," the name she gives to feminists who claim that all women are oppressed by institutionalized male dominance, put the most degrading or humiliating face on women's relations with men. She finds it patronizing and parochial to think that because not all women have the hostility toward men that she believes may be at the foundation of gender feminism, such women must somehow be reeducated
not
to want what men have told them to want, which cannot be what women
really
want anyway. Not only, she says, do gender feminists betray a profound and unmitigated hatred of men, but such feminists also reveal a deep disdain for women who enjoy the feminine traditions that such feminists assert are so oppressive. What results, according to Sommers, is a feminism that is apparently so antimale and antiheterosexual sex that it is no surprise to Sommers that many women are turned off by it.
145
Rene Denfeld echoes this view when she complains that an entire generation of twenty-something women are rejecting feminism in the wake of its apparent condemnation of men as oppressive brutes from whom helpless women have no hope of escaping. According to Denfeld, this so-called antiphallic campaign is so anti-heterosexual sex as to appear to advocate a return to the Victorian values of moral refinement, chastity, sexlessness, and spiritual purity that have historically been so oppressive to women. Indeed, the current feminist campaign appears to Denfeld to allow individual women no means to redefine their socialized submissiveness, dooming them to a life of unmitigated victimhood. Both Sommers and Denfeld would like to see feminism return to its liberal democratic roots, with a platform demanding
 
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such basic goods for women as pay equity, political parity, and reproductive rights. According to both women, feminists' self-preoccupation with spiritual transformation and sexual alienation has taken all of the truly political dialogue out of feminist activism and left it with an overly personalized agenda maimed by feelings of resentment and hurt.
146
Developing Pro-Active Strategies of Resistance
Critics have also charged that men and women of color will continue to suffer from racism, classism, and sexism if they persist in seeing themselves as nothing more than members of a race on the defensive from the horrors of white, bourgeois oppression. Many African American women already endure sexual and emotional abuse from men they feel must be nurtured when a white world turns its back on them. Evelyn White suggests that black women and men together must stop the cycle of domestic violence that reverberates from, and continues into, the streets by creating their own programs for resistance and prevention targeted to their individual families and communities.
147
Indeed, critics do not contest the need for pro-active as well as defensive strategies to combat the real problems of woman battering. They would applaud the tactic in some Peruvian shanty towns, for example, of women blowing whistles when they are beaten or abused, drawing a cadre of volunteer women who march to the battered woman's defense. They would not contest Indian women banging pots and pans outside the houses of the most abusive men in their communities, literally humbling their abusers into desisting. Rather, critics' concern is that community programs and services with their seminars and brochures on the ubiquity of woman battering may so undermine a woman's confidence that she comes to expect or resign herself to her abuse, despite such programs' efforts at promoting legal and practical resistance.
148
Critics further contend that a young girl who is fed a steady diet of scathing indictments about power-driven adult men who sexually exploit young girls will grow up as unsure of herself sexually and as paranoid of men as if she had actually been abused. From this perspective, children need to be protected from adult abuse by being given the tools to resist temptation and the credibility to report their abuse, not more horror stories about "boogie men" who are hiding behind the mask of the friendly next-door neighbor or family friend. Some might charge that the stability of the family unit itself is unnecessarily threatened by inculcating in young girls the suspicion, based on a belief in the ubiquity of an oppressive patriarchy, that her own beloved patriarch is in fact an incestuous monster. Furthermore, from this view, referring to women who were sexually abused as children as "survivors" stamps them with a moniker of the walking wounded that will make the trauma that much more difficult to overcome.
Sonia Johnson contends that part of what it means to be a victim of an enslaving patriarchy is to believe that for women to be liberated, we must get men to change their minds about women. According to Johnson, if women can be convinced that men can and must be "fixed," we will wait forever expecting men to respond to our demands when they never will. Therefore, if advocating freedom from oppressive

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