Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (65 page)

LeVine discovered that the Bantu-speaking Gusii had no spe cial word for rape, but used a number of revealing euphemisms such as "to fight," "to stamp on" and "to spoil." Before the imposition of British rule in 1907, the patrilocal Gusii had often "imported" wives from related but hostile clans with whom they conducted blood feuds. Virginity was not especially prized. As mentioned earlier, a famous Gusii proverb went, "Those whom we marry are those whom we fight." Interclan rape and abduction was kept in check by the constant threat of retaliation. Af ter the British moved in, traditional clan life and self-regulation broke down: "Whereas previously a prospective rapist could anticipate the pos-

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sibility of annihilation of himself and his fellows by the clansmen of his victim, nowadays he faces an indecent assault charge with a maximum prison sentence of one year," LeVine wrote in
1959.
"Furthermore, two-thirds of indecent assault indictments are dis missed, mostly because the enforcement agencies cannot prevent the escape of rapists to European plantations . . . where they stay and work until the charges are dropped."

The Gusii experience baldly highlights the concept of woman as property, secured by rape. An extreme example, it has its West ern counterpart in recurring stories of the rape and abduction of Sicilian women. LeVine called the Gusii a "high-rape culture" and reported that their annual rape rate for
1955-1956
was estimated at
47.2
per
100,000
population. The current rape rate for certain American cities, such as Denver, Little Rock and Los Angeles, it should be noted, actually exceeds the Gusii's.
·

Ethnological studies of primitive peoples far removed from us suggest the use of rape as an expression of manhood, as an indica tion of the property concept of women, and as a mechanism of social control to keep women in line. It has been no different in other parts of the world, if not in actual fact then of ten in the private and public fantasies of the men who dominate and define the culture.

Male bonding employed against women in a collectively vio lent fashion is not a recent nor an ethnic phenomenon, nor has it been restricted historically to a war situation or a lower-class mob. In Renaissance Italy the dashing corps of noblemen who led the condottieri, the mercenary bands who carried out skilled warfare, were feared as ruthless abusers of women in their spare time, and at least one, Sigismondo Malatesta, was convicted in
1450
of raping the Duchess of Bavaria, who was on her way to the Roman Jubilee. A staple of modern Japanese pornography, comic-book variety, depicts the noble samurai of feudal times vanquishing their foes and then stripping the kimonos off women won in battle. In eighteenth-century London, societies of young dandies named the Mohocks and the Bold Bucks terrorized the streets without fear of trial or prison, secure within their class privilege. "The ravages of the Bold Bucks," Christopher Hibbert has written, "were more specifically sexual than those of the Mohocks and consequently, as it was practically impossible to obtain a conviction for rape and as the age of consent was twelve, they were more openly conducted."

My favorite scene in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts oc curs when the tired, anguished newspaperman stops off in Dele hanty's for a drink and joins a group of his friends at the bar.

One of them was complaining about the number of female writers.

"And they've all got three names," he said. "Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford Mary Rinehart . . ."

Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.

"I knew a gal who was regular until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block got sore and took her into the lots one night. About eight of them. They ganged her proper . . ."

"That's like the one they tell about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to hanging around with a lot of mugs in a speak, gathering material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn't know they were picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn't let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to niggers . . ."

Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves.

Throughout history no theme grips the masculine imagination with greater constancy and less honor than the myth of the heroic rapist. As man conquers the world, so too he conquers the female. Down through the ages, imperial conquest, exploits of valor and expressions of love have gone hand in hand with violence to women in thought and in deed. And so it was the poet Ovid, the Roman celebrant of love, who wrote of the rape of the Sabine women, "Grant me such wage and
I'll
enlist today," setting a flippant attitude toward rape in war that has persisted for two thousand years.

James Bond, the mythic superagent creation of Ian Fleming, fights SMERSH and wins women with equal success. Of a new

29c
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sexual interest Bond muses, ". . . however long they were to gether, there would always be a private room inside her which he could never invade. . . . And now he knew that she was pro foundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the tang of rape."

But writers are known to exaggerate, and what, af ter all, do they truly know of war or women? A man who did know was Genghis Khan, who led the great thirteenth-century Mongol con quest. Genghis explained his divine mission with a seriousness that befitted his successful station. "A man's highest job in life," said the man who practiced what he preached, "is to break his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all the things that have been theirs, to hear the weeping of those who cherished them, to take their horses between pis knees, and to press in his arms the most desirable of their women." This remains, I think, the defini tive statement o
.
f heroic rape: woman as warrior's booty, taken like

'.
their
proud ;horses. We owe a debt to Genghis for expressing so eloquently the direct connection between manhood, achievement, conquest and rape.

Permissible rape as an act of manhood infused the theories of courtly love propounded by the social arbiters of the Middle Ages. Andrew the Chaplain, a most secular fellow who served in the twelf th-century court of Marie of Champagne, wrote a treatise to guide the behavior of knights in love. His rules were somewhat rigid when a pair of would-be lovers were of equal station, but with women of peasant stock no stately minuet was needed. Wrote Andrew, "When you find a convenient place do not hesitate to take what you seek and embrace them by force. For you can hardly sof ten their outward inflexibility so far that they will grant you their embraces quietly or permit you to have the solaces you desire unless first you use a little compulsion as a convenient cure for their shyness." The Chaplain's approach to women of the peasant class was grounded in his exquisite understanding of feudal labor. Peasant women ought not be instructed in the delicate art of courtship, he warned, "lest while they are devoting themselves to conduct which is not natural to them the kindly farms which are usually made fruitful by their efforts may through lack of cultiva tion prove useless to us."

Andrew's contemporary, Chretien de Troyes, poetically restated the rules of chivalry in his romances of the King Arthur legend. As Chretien defined the Arthurian ethic,

If
a knight found a damsel or wench alone, he would, if he wished to preserve his good name, sooner think of cutting his own throat than of offering her dishonour; if he forced her against her will, he would have been scorned in every court. But, on the other hand, if the damsel were accompanied by another knight, and if it pleased him to give combat to that knight and win the lady by arms, then he might do his will with her just as he pleased, and no shame or blame whatsoever would be held to attach to him.

So much for theory. Sir Gawain the courteous, the "most perfect knight" of King Arthur's Round Table, gallantly ravished the unprotected Gran de Lis "in spite of her tears and screams." According to some commentators on medieval England's social mores, "To judge from contemporary poems and romances, the first thought of every knight on finding a lady unprotected and alone was to do her violence."

The fifteenth-century English narrator of the Arthurian cycle, Sir Thomas Malory, shed some unexpected light on the chivalric code of gallant rape. In Le Morte d'Arth ur he tells of a rapacious knight who drags a weeping, screaming lady from the hall of the King during supper. Not only did the other knights not rush to her aid, but the King was glad at her removal, "for she made such a noise."

Malory's concept of heroic rape was no mere fantasy, as it turned out. Marte d'Arthur was written while he languished in Newgate Prison on a variety of charges, the particular nature of which remained a mystery until
1927
when a painstaking scholar sifting through some dusty records in Warwickshire found a parch ment of his original indictment. The dashing poet-knight of New bold Revell apparently had supported his life-style by plundering the local monasteries and on two occasions he "did feloniously seize and have carnal knowledge with Joan, the wife of Hugh Smyth," in
.
addition to stealing the Smyth family's household goods.

1

Sirr;,;Thomas . Malory a ntpistl
'. 1
5f he discovery and shock were more than the academic community could bear. Response to the unwelcome news was a closing of ranks and a stirring twentieth-