Seduction is a Four-Letter Word

Once in a hot courtroom in New Zealand, I had occasion to ask a lady who was giving evidence against me for saying fuck in a public meeting whether she was as disgusted and offended by hearing the word rape used in a similar context. She wasn't. I asked her why. She thought for a moment and said happily, "Because for rape the woman doesn't give her consent."

My little linguistic inquiry opened a sudden peephole on the labyrinth of crazy sexual attitudes that we have inherited from our polyglot traditions (although it did not prevent my being sentenced to three weeks in jail). The craziness extends into our (mis)understanding of the nature of sexual communication and thereby finds its way back to behavior. Our muddled responses to the word rape have their source in the sexual psychosis that afflicts us all, especially the policemen and judges who are most vindictive in their attitudes toward those few sexual criminals who have sufficient bad luck or bad judgment to fall foul of the law.

Otherwise quite humane people entertain the notion that women subconsciously or even consciously desire to be raped, that rape liberates their basic animality, that, like she-cats, they want to be bloodily subdued and savagely fucked, regardless of their desperate struggles and cries. Women are thought to provoke the sexual rage of men who in turn may need to add blood lust to their sexual desire in order to achieve full potency. Darwin is sometimes quoted as the ideological ally of the rapist and forcible impregnator--how else but by his marauding activities could the survival of the fittest be assured?

Yet many women are afraid of rape as of nothing else. Women who have been raped may, as a consequence, be too terrified to leave their house by day or night or so distressed by male nearness that they cannot take a job or get onto a crowded train. There may be some truth in the notion that the lonely spinster who is terrified of intruders is actually longing to be violated, but her subconscious wish is of the same order as the wish of a mother to destroy her children, which is chiefly expressed in her fantasies that they may have come to violent harm. The fury that a father feels against the man who rapes his daughter might as profitably be construed as jealousy. For all practical purposes what the spinster experiences is a fascinating terror that may become an obsession. The man who actualizes her fantasy is in no way gratifying her or benefiting her, except in his own overweening estimation. The extent to which all men participate in this fantasy of violent largess can be dimly detected in their willingness to laugh at Lenny Bruce's description of his aunt going into Central Park each day for her appointment with the flashers or in the sneering assumption that older women and unattractive women are disappointed if intruders or invading soldiers don't rape them.

Many (men) believe that rape is impossible. The more simple-minded imagine that the vagina cannot be penetrated unless the woman consciously or subconsciously accepts the penetration, and so the necessary condition of rape cannot be fulfilled. The difficulty of getting a fully erect penis into the vagina is in direct proportion to the difficulty of overcoming the woman, either by physical force or by threat or by drugging her or by taking her by surprise.

The idea that rape is impossible may be an invalid extension of the view that all women subconsciously desire or provoke rape. It is certainly true that women do not defend themselves against rapists with any great efficiency. Even though they know that a sharp blow to the groin will incapacitate a man, or that a high heel smashed into the temple will have a certain effect. they seldom take advantage of what forms of self-defense may be accessible to them. The fault lies not in their suppressed lechery or promiscuity but in the induced passivity that is characteristic of women as we have conditioned them. Feminist encounter groups have developed routines in which a woman is encouraged to fight off a would-be rapist. Even strong heavy women have had to struggle to overcome the passivity that impeded the release of energy in self-defense: passionate urging from the other members of the group was needed before they could take advantage of their own strength and determination.

Without special help, most women have no idea how to defend themselves and no concept of themselves as people with a right to resist physical misuse with violence. They are like children being beaten by their parents and their teachers, or slaves being brutalized on the plantation. Their physical strength remains unexploited because of the pathology of oppression. Women are poorly motivated to be as aggressive with their assailants as their assailants are with them, and so rape is easer than it should be. But this cannot be held to justify the contemptuous attitude of the rapist. Women's helplessness is itself part of the psychosis that makes rape a national pastime. And even encounter groups have not yet developed the kind of psychic energy that can defeat a gun or a knife or the frenzy of drugs.

The fear of sexual assault is a special fear: Its intensity in women can best be likened to the male fear of castration. As a tiny child I was utterly unafraid of the derelict old men who drooped their pallid tools at my mother and me when we sun-bathed in the beach park, but I remember an occasion when much less sinister behavior provoked wild terror. A young man simply came up to me and offered me a sweet; his kind smile was the most hideous thing I had ever seen. Usually I invoked my parents' rage because I consorted so readily with strangers, but this time I recoiled from the bribe, speechless with fright. Then I was running and running until my lungs were screaming, and I fell down and cowered in the grass, desperate not to look up for fear I would see that indescribable smile. Whenever I saw that man hanging out in the lane below our apartment, looking up my six-inch skirts as I went up or down the stairs. I was terrified. When I tried to explain to the grownups why I loathed that man, I had no words for it, but I knew it was the greatest fear of all. worse than spiders or octopuses or falling off the roof. Devoted sadists might argue that my terror was simply the terror of my own innate femaleness. but it would be bad Frud, because I was presumably in my phallic phase and unaware of my vagina; and if such a view is not to be justified by the great apologist of female masochism, it is not to be justified at all. What I was afraid of was rape as El-dridge Cleaver described it. "bloody, hateful, bitter and malignant." even though I had no clear idea of what it entailed.

Sexual intercourse between grown men and little girls is automatically termed rape under most codes of law. It does not matter whether the child invites it or even whether she seduces the adult; he and he only is guilty of a felony. From the child's point of view and from the common-sense point of view, there is an enormous difference between intercourse with a willing little girl and the forcible penetration of the small vagina of a terrified child. One woman I know enjoyed sex with an uncle all through her childhood, and never realized that anything unusual was toward until she went away to school. What disturbed her then was not what her uncle had done but the attitude of her teachers and the school psychiatrist. They assumed that she must have been traumatized and disgusted and therefore in need of very special help. In order to capitulate to their expectations, she began to fake symptoms that she did not feel, until at length she began to feel truly guilty about not having been guilty. She ended up judging herself very harshly for this innate lechery.

The crucial element in establishing whether or not vaginal penetration is rape is whether or not the penetration was consented to. Consent is itself an intangible mental act; the law cannot be blamed for insisting that evidence of absence of consent be virtually conclusive, so that a woman who has not been savagely beaten or threatened with immediate harm or rendered unconscious has little chance of legally proving that she has been raped. Consent is not a simple procedure; it may be heavily conditional or thoroughly muddled, and the law cannot allow itself to be drawn into ethical conundrums. Most of us do not live according to the bare letter of the law but according to moral criteria of much greater complexity. Morally, those of us who have a high opinion of sex cannot accept the idea that absence of resistance sanctions all kinds of carnal communication; rather than rely on such a negative criterion, we must insist that only evidence of positive desire dignifies sexual intercourse and makes it joyful. From a proud and passionate woman's point of view, anything less is rape.

The law of rape was not made with a woman's pride or passion in mind. The woman is no more and probably even less the focus of the rape statutes than the murder victim is the raison d'être of the homicide statutes. The crime of rape is rather considered an offense not against the woman herself but against the men who made the law, fathers, husbands and kin. It is a crime against legitimacy of issue and the correct transmission of patrimony. The illegitimate sexual intercourse constitutes the offense; what the woman who complains must do is primarily to dissociate herself from any suspicion of complicity in the outrage against her menfolk. This she must do by making a complaint immediately. She is regarded as the prosecutrix of the rapist and he has all the recourse against her accusation that any defendant has against the state prosecutor, and then some. Only a girl child escapes the ordeal, because she is automatically deemed incapable of consent. An adult woman is actually called upon to prove her own innocence in the course of a rape prosecution, as well as managing to establish that the circumstances of the man's behavior are as she alleges.

A man has to be very unlucky to be convicted of the crime of rape. He has to be stupid enough, or drugged or drunk enough, to leave a mile-wide trail of blood, bruises, threats, semen, screaming and what have you, and he has to have chosen the kind of woman about whom the neighbors have nothing but good to say. who has enough chutzpah to get down to the police station at once and file her complaint, and, if it results in a trial, to face down public humiliation, for hearsay evidence about her morals and demeanor is admissible. The most the court will do for her is to rule that evidence emanating from a district other than the one she actually lives in is inadmissible. Then the jury must feel confident that no element of consent entered into the woman's behavior.

Nevertheless, men do go to jail for rape, mostly black men, nearly all of them poor, and neither the judges nor the prosecuting attorneys are hampered in their dealings by the awareness that they are rapists, too, only they have more sophisticated methods of compulsion. A deprived man forces his way into a woman's body by pressing the point of a knife against her throat; a man who owns an automobile may stop on a lonely road and tell his passenger to come across or get out and walk. The hostility of the rapist and the humiliation of the victim are not necessarily different.

(continued on page 164) Seduction (continued from page 82)

Seduction despite the difference in the circumstances; indeed, they could both be worse in the latter case, and that sort of thing happens every day. Probably the commonest form of noncriminal rape is rape by fraud--by phony tenderness or false promises of an enduring relationship, for example.

The woman who is assaulted and raped by a total stranger may suffer less than the woman who endures constant humiliation at the hands of people she is trying to know and love. The inadequates and psychotics who are arrested for rape have been known to select their victims and lie in wait for them; other criminal rapes may involve women who are known to or even related to their assailants, but for the most part, the selection of the victim is as fortuitous as it might be in an automobile accident. That element of haphazardness can help the woman avoid permanent psychic damage, because she is not compelled to internalize the experience, and so to feel guilty and soiled as a consequence of it.

One of the great injustices that the victims of criminal rape must suffer is the necessity of reliving the experience in minute detail over and over again from the first complaint to the police to the last phase of the trial. By attempting to prosecute the man who has raped her, a woman dissociates herself from the crime and endeavors to reconstitute her self-esteem, but it is a rare woman who is so independent of the evaluation of others that she can survive the contemptuous publicity that her attempt will draw upon her. If she fails to make her accusation stick, so that people assume that she is malicious or hysterical or that she enticed her rapist, she is in more serious psychic trouble than before. The odds against her succeeding in her prosecution, even after the police have reluctantly agreed to charge her assailant, are rather worse than four to one. If a woman's only concern is for herself and her eventual recovery from the experience, then she is much better advised not to prosecute. Rape is a habitual crime, however, and any woman who decides not to prosecute ought to spare a little thought for the women who will be raped as a consequence of her decision.

It is true that women have attempted to frame men for rapes that were never committed. Some have done so out of fear of punishment for an illicit sexual relationship that has been discovered. Others have done so because they needed abortions, others for revenge and other ulterior motives, for politics or policy. Some studies of rape quote a percentage of phony rape charges as high as 20 percent, but it is important to remember that the essence of the frame is that it is public, and that a good deal is left to the discretion of law enforcers in deciding whether or not a woman has been truly offended. There are not too many profeminists in police stations.

Criminologists believe that fewer than one in five rapes are reported, making rape the least reported crime on the books. Those figures are, I believe, conservative, even within the terms of their narrow legalistic definition, which refers to the second gravest crime in the statutes--what we might call grand rape. The punishments for grand rape are very savage, but it was not women who decided long ago that rapists should be blinded and castrated or hanged with benefit of clergy (as they once were) or sentenced to jail for life (as they still are). Nevertheless, even from a woman's point of view there are instances in which rape is an injury just as serious as homicide, and perhaps more so. A black friend of mine spent years of passionate effort to see that the seven white youths who raped her when she was 16 years old and a virgin spent the maximum time in jail, for they ruined her life by cursing her with a child whom she could never leave and never love. (The wonder of it is, of course, that a white jockocratic court convicted on the evidence of a black girl.)

It is in the interests of everyone involved that pregnancy must not be allowed to be a consequence of rape. This means that all women claiming rape must be entitled to abortion, long before the offense can be proved. To wait for any legal process is to increase the degree of physical and mental trauma involved. Nowadays a raped woman has a pretty good chance of getting an abortion, especially if she can supply reasonable circumstantial evidence of the offense. However, the women who are most traumatized by rape are religious and sheltered women who are not likely to get over their experience by the necessity of committing what they devoutly believe to be a mortal sin as a result of an act committed upon their person against their will. In cases of scrupulous religious conscience, religion can be the woman's only consolation, but most cases of normally muddled morality would be best aided by the adoption of a protocol by medical officials confronted with rape cases. One practical solution would be to order the removal of the contents of the womb by aspiration as part of the diagnostic procedure. This would diminish the element of psychic intrusion and relieve the woman of the necessity of making a difficult moral choice arising out of circumstances beyond her control. The procedure is the same as biopsy aspiration, which is commonly practiced and need occasion very little discomfort.

The woman who is not impregnated or physically injured as a result of rape may nevertheless suffer acutely. The idea, so commonly entertained, that women somehow enjoy rape is absolutely unfounded, and a further indication of the contempt that men feel for women and their sexual functions. One might as well argue that because most men have repressed homosexual or feminine elements in their personalities, they enjoy buggery and humiliation. Women are, as a result of their enculturation, masochistic, but this does not mean that they enjoy being treated sadistically, although it may mean that they unconsciously invite it. Because of this masochism, women frequently take the whole burden of horror upon themselves. I know personally of a case in which a woman has been repeatedly raped by her mentally retarded brother for 30 years and has never sought any protection from him because of the distress that the knowledge would cause her parents. Her struggle to cope with the situation alone has had a marked effect on her psychic balance, and yet it is not beyond a law-enforcement officer to argue that she is guilty of collusion, that she is an accomplice, in effect.

Bored policemen, amusing themselves with girls who come to them to complain of rape, often kick off the proceedings by asking if they have enjoyed it. Rapists often claim in their defense that the prosecutrix enjoyed herself, that she showed evidence of physical pleasure or even had an orgasm. Most of them are lying. Some are sincere, but men are notoriously incapable of judging whether or not a woman is feeling pleasure, and women are not so unlike men that terror cannot cause something like the symptoms of erotic excitation in the genitals. Even if a woman were to have an orgasm in the course of a rape, it need not necessarily lessen the severity of the trauma that she suffers. This, it would seem, is quite understandable in the case of men raped by women, which, although not an entity in law, is still a possibility. Malinowski describes with thrills of disgusted horror the rape of a Melanesian male; if the clear evidence of the victim's sexual excitation makes any difference to his sense of outrage, it is to intensify it:

The man is the fair game of women for all that sexual violence, obscene cruelty, filthy pollution and rough handling can do to him. Thus first they pull off and tear up his pubic leaf, the protection of his modesty, and, to a native, the symbol of his manly dignity. Then, by masturbatory practices and exhibitionism, they try to produce an erection in their victim and, when their maneuvers have brought about the desired result, one of them squats (continued on page 178) Seduction(continued from page 164) over him and inserts his penis into her vagina. After the first ejaculation he may be treated in the same manner by another woman. Worse things are to follow. Some of the women will defecate and micturate all over his body, paying special attention to his face, which they pollute as thoroughly as they can. "A man will vomit, and vomit, and vomit," said a sympathetic informant.

For Malinowski the trauma is directly connected with loss of dignity and obliteration of the individual's will, at which his body actually connives. Women, too, have been known to vomit and vomit, to wash themselves compulsively, to burn their clothes, even to attempt suicide, after a rape. Nightmares, depression, pathological shyness, inability to leave the house, terror of darkness, all have been known to develop in otherwise healthy women who have been raped.

Malinowski was writing from the point of view of the rapee. The injury for him lay not in an outrage to his tutors and guardians, nor in injury to his body, nor in an unwanted pregnancy, but somewhere even more fundamental, in his will, and thence in his ego, his dignity. In this perspective the legalistic category of grand rape fades into unimportance. Sexual rip-offs are part of every woman's daily experience; they do not have the gratifying strangeness of disaster, with the special reconstructive energies that disasters call forth. They simply wear down the contours of emotional contacts and gradually brutalize all those who are party to them. Petty rape corrodes a woman's self-esteem so that she grows by degrees not to care too much what happens or how. In her low moments she calls all men bastards; she enters into new relationships with suspicion and a forlorn hope that maybe this time she will get a fair deal. The situation is self-perpetuating. The treatment she most fears she most elicits. The results of this hardening of the heart are eventually much worse than the consequences of fortuitous sexual assault by a stranger, the more so because they are internalized, insidious and imperceptible.

The idea that a woman has merely to consent, or to give in to sexual contact, provides the basic motivation for petty rape. Silence or failure to resist is further misconstrued as consent. Then, by a further ramification of blunder, passive silence is thought to indicate pleasure. The breakdown in sexual communications occasioned by acceptance of these related vulgar errors can be illustrated by an example.

A young Cambridge undergraduate at a party in London missed his last train back to Cambridge and so asked around the party for a bed for the night. A female guest, who lived nearby, said he might use her spare room, unconcerned by the fact that her husband was away, for the young man and all his family were well known to them. She duly drove him to her apartment, where clean towels and pajamas were laid out for him, and he was wished a good night's rest in the spare room. She had had a lot to drink at the party and was feeling giddy and rather ill, so she was grateful to slide between the sheets and pass quietly out.

It was beneath young Lochinvar's dignity to stay in his room, though, and his hostess was just slipping through rather swirling veils of sleep when he climbed into the bed beside her. She resisted, but there was little point in making much to-do; having the police called to the apartment would have made a scandal, upset everybody and left her in a ridiculous situation. The law would take only one view of an unaccompanied married woman's invitation to a young man to stay the night, regardless of the fact that Victorian sexual paranoia is gradually ebbing in other areas. She scolded and pleaded, exaggerated the degree of her drunkenness and even resorted to being sick, but the young man's ego would give no quarter. Like a Fascist guard in Mussolini's Italy, he woke her every time her eyelids began to close. Then he made his little show of force. She offered only passive resistance and so got fucked.

It was, of course, a terrible fuck. She was exhausted, distressed and mutinous; he was deeply inconsiderate and cruel, although he fancied himself a nipple twiddler and general sexual operator and believes to this day that he gave her the fucking of her life. He has boasted of his conquest just often enough so that his talking about it has come to her ears and reduced her to a state of misery. She has never told her husband what happened because of the sheer unlikeliness that he would exonerate her from any taint of desire for the little shit, however nobly he decided to behave. Worst of all, she must see her enemy frequently at dinners and parties in friends' houses and endure his triumph over her time and time again. She has not allowed the circumstances to corrode her self-esteem to any serious extent, but her enemy cannot lay the fact to his credit.

What happened is just one of the zillions of forms of petty rape. There is no punishment and no treatment for offender nor victim in a case like this. It just has to be crossed off as another minor humiliation, another devaluation of the currency of human response. The woman in this instance revenged herself by striking the man from her list of friends, but he hardly noticed. His account of the affair, needless to say, is very different from hers.

The attitude of the rapist in such an example is not hard to interpret in terms of the prevailing sexual ideology. A man is, after all, supposed to seduce, to cajole, persuade, pressurize and eventually overcome. A reasonable man will avoid threats, partly because he has a shrewd idea that they will not produce the desired result. A psychotic rapist is quite likely to desire fright and even panic-stricken resistance and struggle as a prerequisite to his sexual arousal or satisfaction. But not your everyday pusillanimous rapist. He simply takes advantage of any circumstances that are in his favor to override the woman's independence. The man who has it in his power to hire and fire women from an interesting or lucrative position may profit by that factor to extort sexual favors that would not spontaneously be offered him. A man who is famous or charismatic might exploit those advantages to humiliate women in ways that they would otherwise angrily resist. In cases like these, mutual contempt is the eventual outcome, but what the men do not realize is that they are exploiting the oppressed and servile status of women. The women's capitulation might be ignoble, but it is morally more excusable than the cynical manipulation of their susceptibility.

One of the elements that is often abused in the petty-rape situation is the woman's affection for the rapist. This might not even be a completely nonsexual affection: There is a case on record in Denver in which a woman who was brutally raped explained to the judge that she would have been quite happy to ball with her assailant if he had asked her nicely, but as soon as they got into her apartment, he beat her up and raped her. The parallel in petty rape is the exploitation of a woman's tenderness, which would involve eventual sexual compliance, for a loveless momentary conquest. Because a woman likes a man and would like to develop some sort of relationship with him, she is loath to make trouble when he begins to prosecute his intentions in an offensive way. Her enemy takes cold-blooded advantage of that fact. For lots of girls who slide into promiscuity, this is the conflict in which they are defeated time and time again.

In all but the most sophisticated communities, a young woman who wishes to participate in the social life of her generation must do so as a man's guest. Dating is a social and economic imperative for her. This situation is the direct result of her oppressed condition, and however venal her motives may seem to be, she is not totally responsible for them. For her the pressure is disguised as pressure to fall in love and go steady; he may see it (continued on page 224)Seduction (continued from page 178) as a kind of being on the make, corresponding to his own fairly impersonal desire for sexual gratification. If she gets raped as a result of her dependence upon a man as an escort, neither party thinks that she has anything grave to complain of, and yet a great wrong has been done.

For most young women who set out on the dating road to marriage, petty rape is a constant hazard. The fact that a man pays for the night's entertainment, that he owns and drives the car, that he has initiated all that has happened means by extension that he is also entitled to initiate and to set the pace of the physical intimacies that will occur. She would probably be disappointed if he manifested no desire for her, but she also has the problem of not seeming easy while keeping him interested. His selfesteem prompts him to achieve as much intimacy as he can before she draws the line. The element of petty rape appears when he threatens to throw her over if she doesn't come across or whenever he decides that he does not like her well enough to move gradually through the stages of intimacy as she desires them, but will force the pace to get as much as possible out of an otherwise unsatisfactory encounter. His use of the vocabulary of tenderness becomes fraudulent. He may even fake an excess of sexual desire.

A group of law students at the first university I attended had a competition to see who could fuck the most women in one semester; one ploy that they all had in common was a trick of heavy breathing and groaning, as if they were writhing in torments of desire. As they were after quantity and not quality, this was not often the case. It worked very well, in the main, but partly because they were exercising the class prerogative of the rich bourgeois and wantonly disrupting the lives and expectations of women situated in less fortunate circumstances, like the hero of My Secret Life, but more callously.

The man who won that competition was an expert in exploiting women's fantasy and vanity, and their tendency to delude themselves that the contact they were experiencing was a genuine personal encounter and not a crass sexual rip-off. He and his friends were proud of their mastery of the gestures of tenderness, but their use of them was utterly self-centered. They were simply exercising a skill like angling, drawing silly women to their own humiliation. The only way to earn their respect and friendship was to resist them, so they wantonly encouraged toughness and suspicion in this cold world. The girls they had had never realized they'd been victims of petty rape until they grasped the fact that the first time was also the last.

For such rich and handsome young men, petty rape was a sport that by virtue of their privileges they played with great success. There were occasional uglinesses that marred the lightheartedness of their proceedings. One of them was threatened with a paternity suit, but all his friends turned up in court and testified that they had had carnal knowledge of the plaintiff, and so he got off. In fact, they committed perjury, but it did not disturb their sleep.

The group-bonding skills of males will always defeat the interests of isolated women. Men will conspire to see that acts of petty rape are successful. Many women would be appalled to learn just how their most intimate behavior and physical peculiarities are discussed by men, and this supplies a further dimension of petty rape by blackmail. There is no point in resisting a man's advances if he is going to talk about how he had you in any case, especially when your word is generally less respected than his. I was once pestered for three or four days by a detestable male chauvinist who explained my consequent dislike of him as pique because he refused to fuck me. When sex is an ego contest, women get fucked over all the time.

Petty rape is sometimes called seduction, which is not regarded as a contemptible or particularly damaging activity. A woman who capitulates to a seducer is considered to do so because she really wanted to or because she is too silly or too loose to know how to resist. It might even be thought to be in her interest to overcome her priggishness about sex. The man who excuses his unloving manipulation of women's susceptibilities in ways such as these cannot honestly claim to have the women's interests at heart. His assumption that he knows what is good for them is overweening even if it is sincere, which it usually is not.

Some men decide that it is their prerogative to punish a woman in a sexual encounter, either for her looseness or for teasing or for lying and evading the issue. The distortion of an erotic response into a chastisement is pathological, but not uncommon. An economics student, son of a high-ranking public official, boasted to me once that because a girl had lied to him that she was menstruating, he punished her by raping her, buggering her and throwing her out of his rooms in Cambridge in the small hours of the morning, knowing that she would find no kind of transport to take her back to her home in the country. He had absolutely no understanding of her motives for lying to him. He believed she was stalling him; in fact, all she needed was time to build up a desire for intimacy that he was forcing on her. She could have walked out earlier, or screamed and brought the housekeeper to her rescue, but that would have meant rustication for him and a summary end to any developing relationship. Either course would have required positive hostility, which she simply did not feel. She had very little understanding of the sexual hostility that he did feel, which underlay a good deal of his sexual response, especially in casual affairs.

The men who do cruel things to women are not a class apart; they are not totally incapable of relating to women. In nearly every case I have described, the details were told to me by the men, who explained their comparatively humane attitudes toward me as a result of my own respect for myself and my own straightforwardness in sexual matters, both results of my unusually privileged status as a woman; I was also older than most of them. But I have not entirely emancipated myself from the female legacy of low self-image, self-hatred and identification with the oppressors, which is part of the pathology of oppression. The girls who have been mistreated in the ways that I have described take the fault upon themselves. They think they must have made a mistake somewhere, that their bodies have provoked disgust, that they were too greasy in their conversation. The internalization of the injury is what makes petty rape such an insidiously harmful offense against women. What the men have done is to exploit and so intensify the pathology of oppression.

Many petty rapists do not wittingly dislike women or hate them: they do not revenge themselves upon their mothers through other women's bodies in any conscious way. Group-therapy sessions at treatment centers for sex offenders are producing results that seem to indicate that repressed hostility toward the mother is one of the most common unconscious motivations for violent rape. But these conclusions ought not to be regarded as particularly enlightening; if an analyst is seeking evidence of an infantile trauma involving women, it is almost inevitably going to involve a mother or a mother surrogate. It is small wonder that our civilization manifests a psychotic attitude to women, when children are thrown upon the mercy of one woman almost exclusively during the formative years between one and five. Women's hostility to one another may be explained by the same phenomenon, at least partially. Teachers anywhere, women in authority over men in any capacity attract a good deal of antagonism, some of which masquerades as affection.

There are other discernible motives for active sexual hostility in the male. Religions that rely upon guilt mechanisms for their hold upon the faithful build up an image of the female as an occasion of sin. The nuns at my Catholic primary school prepared the children for raping and being raped by treating even the littlest girls' bodies as dire inducements to lasciviousness, to the point of forbidding us to bare our upper arms or our collarbones, and begging us all not to look at our "private parts" even when we were washing them as perfunctorily as possible in the bath. This wanton stimulation of sexual tension still goes on in religious schools. If scientology and other forms of psychic manipulation for eventual control can be declared illegal, then some attention should be paid to this process, enacted without fear of reprisal upon the very young.

Undue aestheticism in representing sexual behavior can also have harmful effects. The inauthenticity of sexual fantasy as it is stimulated by commercial representations of the woman as sex object leaves many immature men unable to cope with the eventual discovery that women do not feel smooth and velvety all over, that their pubic hair exists and is not swan's-down or vine tendrils, that a woman in heat does not smell like a bed of roses. (Most convicted rapists who have been subjected to any degree of analysis have shown an exaggerated dislike of menstruation.) For most men, sexual experience begins and persists throughout the years of most intense libidinous activity, the teens, as fantasy and masturbation rather than actual physical confrontation with the object of their desire. It is not surprising, then, that the imagery of their puerile fantasies continues to interpose itself between the ego and the reality long after their active sexual life has begun in earnest. What the permissive society has achieved, in fact, is merely the proliferation of inauthentic sexual fantasy, with virtually no degree of emancipation of the sexes into genuine communication and mutual understanding.

Women are not yet consumers of commercial soft-core pornography; they do not have the same fetishistic attitude toward men's bodies that men have toward women's. Instead they are further alienated from the area of male sexual orientation by their own culture of romantic fantasy. Attempts to duplicate the marketing of images of women's bodies have been made with men's bodies without much success, and similar inauthenticities were represented. When my husband, Paul du Feu, posed for the gatefold in the British edition of Cosmopolitan, it was found necessary not only to cover him with body make-up and hide his penis behind his upraised thigh but also to airbrush his navel and the wrinkles on his belly clean out of the picture. Men trying to understand feminists' reactions to the commercialized stereotype of women ought to study their own reactions to the degradation and desexualization of Paul du Feu.

Those who hate women most are often the most successful womanizers. The connection used to be recognized in common parlance by the expressions lady-killer and wolf. Sylvia Plath describes a crucial encounter with one such in The Bell Jar, leaving it to the reader to estimate the role that this humiliation plays in Esther Greenwood's eventual collapse.

Marco's small flickering smile reminded me of a snake I'd teased in the Bronx Zoo. When I tapped my finger on the stout cage glass the snake had opened its clockwork jaws and seemed to smile. Then it struck and struck at the invisible pane till I moved off.

I had never met a woman hater before. I could tell Marco was a woman hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.

Young Esther has no hope of beating Marco at the game he has been perfecting most of his adult life. He sweeps aside her tremulous attempts to remain independent. On the dance floor he forces her to give up all idea of independent locomotion:

"What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."

I began to see why woman haters could make such fools of women. Woman haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

Marco's excuse for treating all women like sluts is an impossible love for his first cousin (probably a narcissistic fantasy), who is to become a nun. After he has assaulted Esther, and she has partly beaten him off and he has partly given up, saying, "Sluts, all sluts . . . yes or no, it's all the same," Esther goes back to her sex-segregated hotel, climbs onto the parapet of the roof and feeds her wardrobe to the night wind. Marco has brought her to the beginning of the end.

In all cases of petty rape, the victim does not figure as a personality, as someone vulnerable and valuable, whose responses must not be cynically tampered with. So great is women's need to believe that men really like them that they are often slow to detect perfunctoriness in proffered caresses or the subtle change in attitude when the Rubicon has been crossed and the softening up of the victim can give way to unilateral gratification. Not all woman haters can belie their feelings of hatred and contempt successfully throughout a sexual encounter. When their situation is secure--say, when they have the victim safe behind the hotel door and know that she is not about to run screaming through the lobby in a torn dress--they may abandon all pretense of tenderness and get down to the business of hate fucking, and yet still the wretched woman attempts to roll with the punches. Her enemy may use physical and verbal abuse, even a degree of force to make her comply with forms of sexual intercourse that she does not desire. Mostly he retreats into an impersonal, masturbatory frame of mind. After the loveless connection is over, he cannot wait to get rid of her, either by giving her cab fare or shutting her out of his mind by going to sleep or pretending to.

Guilt and disgust may follow. The man may be sorry that he went with such an abject creature, but he will not blame himself for the poor quality of the sex he has had, any more than when he finds the woman unresponsive because her sexual submission has been extorted from her. If he is distressed by the crassness and perfunctoriness of the love he has made or embarrassed by the willingness and generosity of the love he has been given, he will abuse the woman in his mind. She is a dog, a pig, goes with anyone, is so dumb she wouldn't know you were up her till you coughed. Like the grand rapist, he excuses his conduct on the grounds that she asked for it. by her lewdness, her willingness to discuss sex, her appetite at dinner, the money she made him spend, the dress she had on, the size of her breasts. If she has enjoyed and responded to caresses up to the point when they became brutal and then struggled to escape, then she is a tease who leads men on and then wants to chicken out when he gets to the nitty-gritty. No punishment is too severe for a tease.

Some men who are very well aware of their own preference for force fucking and their hostility to women may doubt that women's sensibilities are elevated enough to perceive their own humiliation. Feminists are at least beginning to spell it out for them, but too many men do not realize that the slogan "An End to Rape" does not so much refer to grand rapes committed on the crime-ridden streets of the cities as to the daily brutalization of contact between brother and sister, father and daughter, teacher and pupil, doctor and patient, employer and employee, dater and datee, fiancé and fiancée, husband and wife, adulterer and adulteress, the billions of petty liberties exacted from passive and wondering women. The solution is not to be found in the castration or killing of the rare rapists who offend so crazily that they can be caught and punished but in the correction of our distorted notions of the nature of sexual intercourse, which are also the rationale of the law of rape as a felony.

Women are now struggling to discover and develop their own sexuality, to know their own minds and bodies and to improve the bases upon which they can attempt communication with men. The men who continue to assume that women must be treated as creatures who do not know what is good for them, to be cajoled or coerced or punished at the will of a stiff-standing cock, seek to imprison women in the pathology of their oppressed condition. Some women are coquettish, although far fewer than the mythology of rape supposes; the only way to put an end to such fatuous guile is to cease to play the game, simply by taking women at their word. The woman who says no when she means yes and so loses a man she wants will find a way to see him again to tell him that she meant yes all the time--if she really did mean yes, that is. If she didn't really mean yes, then she is better left alone.

Any man who realizes that he likes screwing mutinous women, that he is bored at the prospect of balling only women who want him, had better be aware that he finds resistance and tension essential to his satisfaction: He is a petty rapist and should look to it.

The abandonment of the stereotype of seduction, conquest, the chase and all, increases the number of erotic possibilities rather than diminishing it. Once the rigid course of sexual manipulation is disrupted, the unexpected may occur, some genuine erotic development can take place. Even the rapist author of My Secret Life, whose sexual activity was entirely dependent upon the possibilities of exploiting lower-class women, was aware that coercion and insistence were not in his best sexual interests, even when he had paid for the use of a woman's body and was in some sense entitled to it:

A custom of mine then, and always followed since, is putting down my fee--it prevents mistakes, and quarrels. When paid, if a woman will not let me have her, be it so-- she has some reason--perhaps a good one for me.

Nothing that I have said should be interpreted to mean that no man should try to make love to a woman unless he is prepared to marry her or to undertake a long and serious affair with her. A one-night stand can be the most perfect and satisfying sexual encounter of all, as long as there is no element of fraud or trickery or rip-off in the way in which it develops. If women are to free themselves from the necessity of deploying their sexuality as a commodity, then men will have to level in their dealings with them, and that is all we ask. There is still room for excitement, uncertainty, even antagonism in the development of sexual friendship, but if you do not like us, cannot listen to our part of the conversation, if we are only meat to you, then leave us alone.

As women develop more confidence and more self-esteem, and become as supportive toward one another as they have been to men, they also lose their reluctance to denounce men for petty rape. Where before they respected men's privacy a good deal more than men respected theirs (despite the phony claims of chivalry), they are now beginning to tell it how it is. A theatrical impresario well known for his randiness recently invited a leading women's liberationist to his hotel for a business meeting. To her amazement, for she had thought such gambits long out of style, he leaped on her as soon as he had her fairly inside the room. She held him off until suddenly he ejaculated all over the front of her dress. Gone are the days when she would have slunk out behind a newspaper. Her dress is a museum piece of the women's movement in her country, and the joke will be around for years.

Rape crisis centers are being set up by groups of women more interested in selfhelp than in vindictiveness. Here a woman who has been traumatized by a sexual experience can come for counsel, for medical and psychiatric help. She is not regarded as a culprit or challenged about the length of her skirts or the thickness of her eye make-up; her word is believed, as the first step to reconstituting an ego damaged by sexual misuse. The victim is encouraged to externalize the experience rather than to entertain feelings of guilt and shame, and she is also taught how to defend herself against future assault and brutalization, even from her husband, who by law has the right of rape over her. Menstrual aspiration will also be practiced as the technique becomes better known and the instruments more widely available. Force fucking is being phased out.

The new feeling of solidarity among women will render petty rape quite futile. Women who used to rejoice to think that their men treated other women badly cannot accept it once their consciousness is raised. A musician returning to his feminist old lady after a protracted tour abroad boasted that he managed to be faithful to her (something she had never demanded) by making the adoring groupies give him blow jobs and then get out. He was proud that he had never even kissed one of them, let alone balled one. To his amazement, his old lady walked out on him.

Women are finding, in the stirring words of women's advocate Florynce Kennedy, that "kickin' ass and takin' names, talkin' loud and drawin' a crowd is better than suckin'." Our weapons may be little more than ridicule and boycott, but we will use them. Women are sick to their souls of being fucked over. Now that sex has become political, the petty rapist had better watch his ass; he won't be getting away with it too much longer. How would you feel if a video tape of your last fuck were playing at the Feminist Guerrilla cinema? We didn't start this war, but we intend to bring it to an honorable settlement, which means we have to make a show of strength sometime. People who are fighting for their lives fight with any weapons that come to hand, so it is foolish to expect a fair fight. Sex behavior is becoming as public as any other expression of political belief: Next time I write an article like this, I'll tell you all the names. So don't say you weren't warned.