Loose Women, Lecherous Men (51 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 204
whose male bias is part of their existing structure. From this perspective, gender blindness in such areas is itself a prejudice from the "view from nowhere" discussed in chapter 1, in which ignorance of individual social location can induce the false belief that standards of neutrality and objectivity will eviscerate gender bias. Furthermore, community speak-outs, support groups, educational seminars, and films are essential for empowering women with the knowledge that woman battering is a function of a system of reinforced male dominance that we can and must take responsibility for transcending, not for merely covering over or coping with. In response to both Rene Denfeld and Christina Sommers, I would argue that it is not antisex or paranoid to gain a realistic assessment of being a woman in a world often hostile and degrading to women, nor is it antimale to suggest that our social institutions advantage men in ways that make it easy for men to convince women that women's sexual harassment and abuse is natural or deserved. Feminists do not need overwhelming statistical evidence to make the claim that men's sexual violence against women is too common and too severe to be tolerated; and legal, economic, and marital institutions can be clearly identified as traditionally conforming to
men's
versions of what counts as the sexual harassment and abuse of women. If women do not identify forcible or abusive sex because this is the only sex they know, then surveys designed to reveal the incidence of rape or battering that do not take this into account will themselves be biased against women. Moreover, without identifying behaviors like battered woman syndrome or learned helplessness, many women are regarded as paranoid hysterics whose emotional state remains psychologized out of its gendered context and so uninterpreted as rational mechanisms for helping a woman survive a subordinating sexual ideology supported by patriarchy.
From this perspective, it is no less important for young girls and their mothers to know of whom they should be wary and why. Certainly
not
knowing has kept the sexual abuse of girls an embarrassing and dirty family secret and has often convinced mothers that they are primarily responsible for their husbands' incestuous abuse of their daughters. Many feminists argue that if female children are disempowered by their age as well as their sex, and if many of them are further victimized by race or poverty, making appeal to the legal system especially difficult, then this is all the more reason to provide public resources advertising their special role in protecting children from adult abuse. The overriding concern by many feminists, including myself, is that unless we continue to voice our opposition to the institutional nature, social pervasiveness, and gender discrimination of women's sexual intimidation by men, then sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls will continue to keep women from transcending our sexual victimization and moving toward a new vision of individual sexual agency and self-definition for all women.
Sexual Intimidation from the "View from Somewhere Different"
Feminists remain deeply divided over the issue of the nature, extent, and ramifications of women's sexual victimization by men. Some feminists regard hostile environment sexual harassment as an insidious reminder of patriarchal control of the workplace. Others regard it as indicative of overly sensitive and easily offended fem-
 
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inists who are hostile to men in the first place. Some feminists regard speak-outs against rape as vital to women's self-conscious sexual liberation. Others regard such gatherings as tedious and unnecessary rape hype that only widens the increasing gap between the sexes. Some feminists regard battered woman syndrome as essential for legally arguing self-defense cases against the batterer. Others see the syndrome as reinvigorating the stereotype of the hysterical woman who cannot maintain self-control. Some feminists think protecting young girls from adult male sexual abuse requires recognizing the potentially debilitating hierarchy within the traditional nuclear family. Others think that such gender politics divides otherwise close families by suspicion and false accusation.
My claim is that we can use the "view from somewhere different" to negotiate the tensions among such disparate perspectives. By interpreting women's sexuality as a dialectic between gender and sexuality, we can characterize women's sexual intimidation by men as reflective of men's pervasive and institutionalized dominance over women's sexual lives yet as also carrying within it the seeds of women's growth toward a sexuality more fully defined in our own terms. The "view from somewhere different" asks us to recognize patriarchy's claim on women's sexuality yet at the same time to resist women's sexual intimidation by men, so that women may claim our sexuality as our own. In this sense, progress toward women's sexual pleasure and agency can be a
feminist
goal precisely because it is also progress away from women's sexual victimization. In the remainder of this section I will describe how regarding women as
survivors
of sexual intimidation can allow us to think and talk about women as both the active and responsible subjects of our sexual experience and the victimized objects of men's dominance and control. As in my discussion of sex work in the previous chapter, my aim is to use such a dialectic to negotiate the tensions between those feminists who require that we recognize women's victimization under patriarchy and those who fear that such a recognition diffuses women's sense of sexual responsibility and agency. If women's sexuality under patriarchy is dialectical in the way I suggest, then both sexual victimization and sexual agency have a stake in defining women's sexual preferences and sexual desires.
Suppose, for example, that a woman interprets her sexual intimidation under patriarchy not only as an assertion of male dominance at home and at work but also as a reaction to, and fear of, women's sexual power over men. Traditional psychoanalytic literature is rife with imagery of a punitive and powerful mother whose perceived ability to disempower her son causes him to distance himself from her and align himself with his father. Feminist "backlash" theories claim that women are the increasing targets of men's sexual harassment and abuse precisely because feminism is empowering women in ways that severely threaten men's sexual dominance over them. Under such theories, women are both the unconditional sexual objects of men and the defining sexual subjects of men's experience of their own sexuality. Instead of perceiving herself as a mere victim, a woman may thus begin to see herself as
surviving
victimization by being the defining subject of how men perceive themselves in the world. In doing so, she may begin to gain a sense of her own agency as a woman whose sexual power is to be reckoned with, which in turn helps embolden her to stop tolerating her harassment or to report her date rape or battering. Even the behavior of her rapist or batterer can be interpreted from this perspective as an admission of
 
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his own weakness, his own pathos, his own dependence on her to satisfy his own complex emotional needs.
On the other hand, actively reporting her abuse may result in reprisals or humiliation that reaffirm in her mind her own victimization. Actively resisting a rapist or batterer carries real risks: he may desist in search of someone more passive, or he may overcome her resistance and be made even more hostile or excited by it.
151
Alternatively, a woman may simply be so overwhelmed by the male sexual hostility she confronts on a daily basis that any sense that
she
is powerful or fearsome in the eyes of any man remains illusive. Therefore, from the "view from somewhere different," being a
survivor
of sexual intimidation in a patriarchal world where women and men are in constant contact means both
living with
and
living through
the sexual risks of being a woman in a society oppressive to women. Under such conditions, women forge sexual lives in terms circumscribed by patriarchy and also in terms not bound exclusively by patriarchy. The feminist consciousness implicit in the "view from somewhere different" is a consciousness of women's sexual oppression under social institutions that reinforce a cultural ideology of male superiority and enforce a politics of male dominance. I claim, however, that the dialectical relation between the politics of gender and the possibilities of sexual experience that defines women's sexuality from the ''view from somewhere different" also implies a consciousness of women's potential for sexual exploration and sexual passion. This consciousness can transform a woman's victimization under patriarchy into something she lives
with
and
through
, but not something she is
defined by
. When she reassesses her life from the dialectical perspective implicit in the "view from somewhere different," her sexual victimization can become a source for her liberation, a lens through which she may see in less distorted fashion the possibilities for, and limitations of, her own sexual agency and self-definition.
From such a dialectical perspective, a woman may begin to understand how some men see her as both a sexual object of their harassment and abuse and a sexual subject wanting, needing, or deserving her attack. From this perspective, she may realize that
her
agency is in fact circumscribed by
his
wants and needs, so that she will be blamed for her partner's abuse, charged with "making" him hit her. She may later reflect that her own learned helplessness was an active decision to comply with the abusive demands of her batterer, a decision that ultimately afforded her the opportunity to gather her children and few possessions and leave her abuse for good. From a dialectical point of view, a woman may begin to recognize how her socialization to empathize with the troubles of others ironically militates against the very act of resistance to rape that would reduce the likelihood of long-term emotional trauma, despite the risks of such resistance. A woman may also understand why no matter how successful
her
career track, how careful
her
choice of date, how perfect
her
housekeeping, she can nevertheless feel and be violated, terrorized, coerced, or dehumanized, and sometimes all of these at once. By the same token, she may understand her own harassment as the objectifying abuse of a woman whose mere presence may be powerful enough to inspire hostility, fear, or anger. On the other hand, a woman who says she does not recognize or experience her oppression in any way is not the object of patronizing feminist derision but a woman who has simply not experienced herself as a sexual survivor in a patriarchal world. To say that she
should
so experi-
 
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ence herself is to foist upon her a "view from somewhere better" that is antithetical to the task of credibly listening to the diversity of women's voices recommended by the ethic of care respect from the "view from somewhere different."
By viewing herself as a survivor from the "view from somewhere different," however, a woman can tell other women about her own sexual intimidation and share with them what she feels are the risks of not also seeing themselves as self-determining subjects in dialectical relation to their own sexual objectification. From this perspective, she may be motivated to learn self-defense, join therapy groups, or become a rape crisis counselor after her own rape as a way of seeing herself as the defining agent of her own victimization and as helping other women do the same. Even if she must change jobs, addresses, or lifestyles simply to avoid further abuse, as a survivor seeing herself from the "view from somewhere different," she may regard such changes as positive steps toward her sexual dignity and autonomy as well as steps away from her abuser.
On the other hand, as I noted earlier, a woman's sexual agency under patriarchy is an agency at risk. She may find that confronting or chastising her harasser, when she knows that sexual harassment is not about being flattered or being "nice," still leaves her feeling humiliated and used. Sharing her history of child abuse with a therapist may cause her to reexperience the violation at the same time that she begins, perhaps for the first time, to see herself as a self-confident and self-defining subject in the world. Surviving, therefore, from the "view from somewhere different," is not about moving blithely forward as a sexually autonomous agent without a consciousness of one's own and others' victimization; surviving means using that consciousness as a way of forming personal and communal strategies for liberation in a world where the sexual intimidation of women by men is a fact of contemporary life. Robin Morgan captures the subject/object dialectic implicit in this perspective when she describes what happens to a woman who, having acquiesced to her abuse in the past, finds it impossible to continue to live a victimized life: "At last she begins to fear her own silence as much as or more than the violence he visits upon her if she speaks. Her silence is within her own power to break, even if his violence is not. Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.''
152
But that shattering is also frightening, for it requires women to rely on ourselves to give meaning and value to our lives and to appreciate the different ways each woman may wish to define her life for herself. Many women in such situations both want and do not want to be the defining subjects of their sexual experiences with men. They want the freedom to define the terms and conditions of their heterosexual relationships, but they know that with such freedom comes the shared responsibility for making those relationships successful. They know that the personal agency requisite for such responsibility has often been used to blame them for their own abuse but that without the recognition of such agency, they remain no more than sexual objects to be exploited by self-serving men. Being a survivor of sexual intimidation from the "view from somewhere different" means acknowledging that a woman's victimization provides the context and the rationale for her sexual liberation and that her resistance to that victimization is a way of beginning to define her sexuality in her own terms. This dialectic is reflected in Marilyn Frye's observation that "[t]he forces which we want to imagine ourselves free of . . . mark the shape

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