Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics Read online

  These reforms will not empty mental institutions of women

  put into them by male relatives who hate them for rebelling

  against the limits of the female role, or against the conditions

  of female servitude. They will not empty prisons filled with

  women who, in order to survive, whored; or who, after being

  raped, killed the rapist; or who, while being beaten, killed the

  man who was killing them. These reforms will not stop men

  from living off exploited female domestic labor, nor will these

  reforms stop men from reinforcing male identity by psychologically victimizing women in so-called “love” relationships.

  And no personal accommodation within the system of

  patriarchy will stop this relentless gynocide. Under patriarchy,

  no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother

  children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past,

  present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present, and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

  Before we can live and love, we will have to hone ourselves

  into a revolutionary sisterhood. That means that we must stop

  supporting the men who oppress us; that we must refuse to

  feed and clothe and clean up after them; that we must refuse

  to let them take their sustenance from our lives. That means

  that we will have to divest ourselves of the identity we have

  been trained to as females—that we will have to divest ourselves of all traces of the masochism we have been told is synonymous with being female. That means that we will have

  to attack and destroy every institution, law, philosophy, religion, custom, and habit of this patriarchy—this patriarchy that feeds on our “dirty” blood, that is built on our “trivial”

  labor.

  Halloween is the appropriate time to commit ourselves to

  this revolutionary sisterhood. On this night we remember our

  dead. On this night we remember together that nine million

  women were killed because men said that they were carnal,

  malicious, and wicked. On this night we know that they live

  now through us.

  Let us together rename this night Witches’ Eve. Let us together make it a time of mourning: for all women who are victims of gynocide, dead, in jail, in mental institutions, raped,

  sterilized against their wills, brutalized. And let us on this

  night consecrate our lives to developing the revolutionary

  sisterhood— the political strategies, the feminist actions—

  which will stop for all time the devastating violence against

  us.

  4

  The Rape A tro city

  and the Boy N ext Door

  I want to talk to you about rape— rape—what it is, who does

  it, to whom it is done, how it is done, why it is done, and what

  to do about it so that it will not be done any more.

  First, though, I want to make a few introductory remarks. *

  From 1964 to 1965 and from 1966 to 1968, I went to Bennington College in Vermont. Bennington at that time was still a women’s school, or, as people said then, a girls’ school. It

  was a very insular place—entirely isolated from the Vermont

  Delivered at State University of New York at Stony Brook, March 1, 1975;

  University of Pennsylvania, April 25, 1975; State University of New York

  College at Old Westbury, May 10, 1975; Womanbooks, New York City,

  July 1, 1975; Woodstock Women's Center, Woodstock, New York, July 3,

  1975; Suffolk County Community College, October 9, 1975; Queens College,

  City University of New York, April 2 6 , 1976.

  *

  These introductory remarks were delivered only at schools where there

  was no women’s studies program.

  community in which it was situated, exclusive, expensive.

  There was a small student body highly concentrated in the

  arts, a low student-faculty ratio, and an apocryphal tradition

  of intellectual and sexual “freedom. ” In general, Bennington

  was a very distressing kind of playpen where wealthy young

  women were educated to various accomplishments which

  would insure good marriages for the respectable and good

  affairs for the bohemians. At that time, there was more actual

  freedom for women at Bennington than at most schools— in

  general, we could come and go as we liked, whereas most

  other schools had rigid curfews and controls; and in general

  we could wear what we wanted, whereas in most other schools

  women still had to conform to rigid dress codes. We were

  encouraged to read and write and make pots, and in general

  to take ourselves seriously, even though the faculty did not

  take us seriously at all. Being better educated to reality than

  we were, they, the faculty, knew what we did not imagine—

  that most of us would take our highfalutin ideas about James

  and Joyce and Homer and invest them in marriages and volunteer work. Most of us, as the mostly male faculty knew, would fall by the wayside into silence and all our good intentions and vast enthusiasms had nothing to do with what would happen to us once we left that insulated playpen. At the time I

  went to Bennington, there was no feminist consciousness there

  or anywhere else at all. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique concerned housewives— we thought that it had nothing to do with us. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics was not yet published. Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex was not yet published. We were in the process of becoming very well-educated women— we were already very privileged women—

  and yet not many of us had ever heard the story of the movement for women’s suffrage in this country or Europe. In the Amerikan history courses I took, women’s suffrage was not

  mentioned. The names of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, or

  Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were never

  mentioned. Our ignorance was so complete that we did not

  know that we had been consigned from birth to that living

  legal and social death called marriage. We imagined, in our

  ignorance, that we might be novelists and philosophers. A rare

  few among us even aspired to be mathematicians and biologists. We did not know that our professors had a system of beliefs and convictions that designated us as an inferior gender

  class, and that that system of beliefs and convictions was virtually universal—the cherished assumption of most of the writers, philosophers, and historians we were so ardently

  studying. We did not know, for instance, to pick an obvious

  example, that our Freudian psychology professor believed

  along with Freud that “the effect of penis-envy has a share. . .

  in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value

  their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. ”1 In each field of study, such convictions were central, underlying, crucial. And yet we did not know that they meant us. This was true everywhere where

  women were being educated.

  As a result, women of my age left colleges and universities

  completely ignorant of what one might call “real life. ” We did

  not know that we would meet everywhere a systematic de-

  spisal of our intelligence, creativity, and strength. We did not

  know our herstory as a gender class. We did not know that we

  were a gender class, inferior by law and custom to men who


  were defined, by themselves and all the organs of their culture,

  as supreme. We did not know that we had been trained all our

  lives to be victims—inferior, submissive, passive objects who

  could lay no claim to a discrete individual identity. We did not

  know that because we were women our labor would be exploited wherever we worked—in jobs, in political movements

  —by men for their own self-aggrandizement. We did not

  know that all our hard work in whatever jobs or political

  movements would never advance our responsibilities or our

  rewards. We did not know that we were there, wherever, to

  cook, to do menial labor, to be fucked.

  I tell you this now because this is what I remembered

  when I knew I would come here to speak tonight. I imagine

  that in some ways it is different for you. There is an astounding feminist literature to educate you even if your professors will not. There are feminist philosophers, poets, comedians,

  herstorians, and politicians who are creating feminist culture.

  There is your own feminist consciousness, which you must

  nurture, expand, and deepen at every opportunity.

  As of now, however, there is no women’s study program

  here. The development of such a program is essential to you as

  women. Systematic and rigorous study of woman’s place in

  this culture will make it possible for you to understand the

  world as it acts on and affects you. Without that study, you

  will leave here as I left Bennington— ignorant of what it

  means to be a woman in a patriarchal society— that is, in a

  society where women are systematically defined as inferior,

  where women are systematically despised.

  I am here tonight to try to tell you as much as I can about

  what you are up against as women in your efforts to live decent, worthwhile, and productive human lives. And that is why I chose tonight to speak about rape which is, though no

  contemporary Amerikan male writer will tell you so, the dirtiest four-letter word in the English language. Once you understand what rape is, you will understand the forces that systematically oppress you as women. Once you understand what rape is, you will be able to begin the work of changing the

  values and institutions of this patriarchal society so that you

  will not be oppressed anymore. Once you understand what

  rape is, you will be able to resist all attempts to mystify and

  mislead you into believing that the crimes committed against

  you as women are trivial, comic, irrelevant. Once you understand what rape is, you will find the resources to take your lives as women seriously and to organize as women against the

  persons and institutions which demean and violate you.

  The word rape comes from the Latin word rapere, which

  means “to steal, seize, or carry away. ”

  The first definition of rape in The Random House Dictionary is still “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”

  The second definition, with which you are probably familiar,

  defines rape as “the act of physically forcing a woman to

  have sexual intercourse. ”

  For the moment, I will refer exclusively to the first definition of rape, that is, “the act of seizing and carrying off by force. ”

  Rape precedes marriage, engagement, betrothal, and courtship as sanctioned social behavior. In the bad old days, when a man wanted a woman he simply took her—that is, he abducted and fucked her. The abduction, which was always for sexual purposes, was the rape. If the raped woman pleased the

  rapist, he kept her. If not, he discarded her.

  Women, in those bad old days, were chattel. That is,

  women were property, owned objects, to be bought, sold,

  used, and stolen—that is, raped. A woman belonged first to

  her father who was her patriarch, her master, her lord. The

  very derivation of the word patriarchy is instructive. Pater

  means owner, possessor, or master. The basic social unit of

  patriarchy is the family. The word family comes from the

  Oscan famel, which means servant, slave, or possession. Paterfamilias means owner of slaves. The rapist who abducted a woman took the place of her father as her owner, possessor, or

  master.

  The Old Testament is eloquent and precise in delineating

  the right of a man to rape. Here, for instance, is Old Testament law on the rape of enemy women. Deuteronomy, Chapter 21, verses 10 to 15—

  When you go to war against your enemies and Yahweh your God

  delivers them into your power and you take prisoners, if you see

  a beautiful woman among the prisoners and find her desirable,

  you may make her your wife and bring her to your home. She

  is to shave her head and cut her nails and take off her prisoner’s

  garb; she is to stay inside your house and must mourn her father

  and mother for a full month. Then you may go to her and be a

  husband to her, and she shall be your wife. Should she cease to

  please you, you will let her go where she wishes, not selling her

  for money; you are not to make any profit out of her, since you

  have had the use of her. 2

  A discarded woman, of course, was a pariah or a whore.

  Rape, then, is the first model for marriage. Marriage laws

  sanctified rape by reiterating the right of the rapist to ownership of the raped. Marriage laws protected the property rights of the first rapist by designating a second rapist as an adulterer,

  that is, a thief. Marriage laws also protected the father’s

  ownership of the daughter. Marriage laws guaranteed the father’s right to sell a daughter into marriage, to sell her to another man. Any early strictures against rape were strictures

  against robbery— against the theft of property. It is in this

  context, and in this context only, that we can understand rape

  as a capital crime. This is the Old Testament text on the theft

  of women as a capital offense. Deuteronomy 22: 22 to 23: 1—

  If a man is caught sleeping with another man’s wife, both must

  die, the man who has slept with her and the woman herself. You

  must banish this evil from Israel.

  If a virgin is betrothed and a man meets her in the city and

  sleeps with her, you shall take them both out to the gate of the

  town and stone them to death; the girl, because she did not cry

  for help in the town; the man, because he has violated the wife

  of his fellow. You must banish this evil from your midst. But if

  the man has met the betrothed girl in the open country and has

  taken her by force and lain with her, only the man who lay with

  her shall die; you must do nothing to the girl, for hers is no

  capital offence. The case is like that of a man who attacks and

  kills his fellow; for he came across her in the open country and

  the betrothed girl could have cried out without anyone coming to

  her rescue.

  If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her

  and lies with her and is caught in the act, the man who has lain

  with her must give the girl’s father fifty silver shekels; she shall

  be his wife since he has violated her, and as long as he lives he

  may not repudiate her.

  A man must not take his father’s wife, and must not withdraw

  the skirt of his father’s cloak from her. 3

  Women belonged to men; the laws of marriage sanctified that

  ownership; rape was the theft of a woman from her own
er.

  These biblical laws are the basis of the social order as we

  know it. They have not to this day been repudiated.

  As history advanced, men escalated their acts of aggression

  against women and invented many myths about us to insure

  both ownership and easy sexual access. In 500 B. C. Herodotus, the so-called Father of History, wrote: “Abducting young women is not, indeed, a lawful act; but it is stupid after the

  event to make a fuss about it. The only sensible thing is to take

  no notice; for it is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be. ”4 Ovid in the Ars amatoria wrote: “Women often wish to give unwillingly

  what they really like to give. ”5 And so, it became official:

  women want to be raped.

  Early English law on rape was a testament to the English

  class system. A woman who was not married belonged legally

  to the king. Her rapist had to pay the king fifty shillings as a

  fine, but if she was a “grinding slave, ” then the fine was reduced to twenty-five shillings. The rape of a nobleman’s serving maid cost twelve shillings. The rape of a commoner’s serving maid cost five shillings. But if a slave raped a commoner’s serving maid, he was castrated. And if he raped any woman of

  higher rank, he was killed. ®

  Here, too, rape was a crime

  against the man who owned the woman.

  Even though rape is sanctioned in the Bible, even though

  the Greeks had glorified rape— remember Zeus’ interminable

  adventures— and even though Ovid had waxed euphoric over

  rape, it was left to Sir Thomas Malory to popularize rape for

  us English-speaking folk. Le Morte d’Arthur is the classic

  work on courtly love. It is a powerful romanticization of rape.

  Malory is the direct literary ancestor of those modem male

  Amerikan writers who postulate rape as mythic lovemaking.

  A good woman is to be taken, possessed by a gallant knight,

  sexually forced into a submissive passion which would, by

  male definition, become her delight. Here rape is transformed, or mystified, into romantic love. Here rape becomes the signet of romantic love. Here we find the first really modern rendering of rape: sometimes a woman is seized and carried off; sometimes she is sexually forced and left, madly, passionately in love with the rapist who is, by virtue of an excellent rape, her owner, her love. (Malory, by the way, was