Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (69 page)

In Twenty-seven Wagons
Full
of Cotton, a remarkable short play later turned into the movie Baby
Doll ,
Tennessee Williams wove a fascinating tale around an unusual battle of property rights. Jake sets fire to his neighbor's cotton gin in order to secure a contract to process the neighbor's cotton. While Jake is ginning the first of the load in boozy celebration of his good fortune to have his competitor "by the balls," to use an apt colloquial expression, the neighbor enters his house and rapes Jake's wife. The play ends on the implicit note that the neighbor intends to take his vengeance out in trade on the body of Jake's slow-witted wife for every one of his twenty-seven wagons of unprocessed cotton.*

A similar theme of man's revenge against man appears with four variations in Kurosawa's Rashomon. In this Japanese film classic, a virile bandit rapes a young nobleman's wife in his pres-

* Tennessee Williams has always treated the rape theme with sensitivity. Stanley Kowalski's rape of Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire is also no glamorization, for Blanche, however damaged, represents fragility and aspiration while Stanley is symbolic of the darker forces of nihilism. An addi tional element here is class antagonism. Stanley has already pulled Stella "down off those white columns" that represented her genteel, Southern, upper-class plantation background, and as this beautifully wrought play pro ceeds it becomes clear that he intends to perform a similar feat on the woman he contemptuously refers to as Her Majesty, the Queen of the Nile and Dame Blanche. This the climactic rape scene accomplishes. Blanche is vulnerable because she has no male protector. Mitch turns from her when he learns of her past promiscuity and the millionaire Shep Huntleigh of Da11as is an illusion.

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ence as a brash thumbing of the nose toward a member of the aristocracy. In the bandit's version of the story he articulates his motivation quite directly. "I wanted to take her right before his eyes," he snarls. And this he does, while the powerless young lord thrashes about, tied and trussed like a chicken. The bandit, con sciously or unconsciously, has engaged in class warfare, using the dual means of robbery and rape,
des vols
et
des
viols, and his triumph is complete because he has rendered his highborn antago nist incapable of defending his property before he draws his sword to kill him. As further testament to his manhood the bandit crows with pride that the noble wife actually enjoyed his attentions, an arrogance not uncommon among police-blotter rapists.

The wife in
Rashomon
disputes the bandit's story. She is adamant that she did not enjoy being raped. Interestingly enough, her husband does not endorse her version. Conjured up from his grave, the husband cries that he has been cuckolded, partially by his wife's treacherous, seductive behavior. He also disputes the bandit's story that he was murdered ,and claims instead that he committed hara-kiri to protect his honor. The final version of the events in Rashomon is provided by an itinerant woodcutter who claims to have witnessed everything. In his story all the partici pants are reduced to less than heroic terms. As the woodcutter tells it, the bandit accidentally killed the husband during a ridiculous sword fight instigated by the wife-because both men rejected her as damaged property after the rape.*

*
Mario Puzo dealt nicely with the damaged-property aspect of rape from another perspective in
The
Godfather. In one of the opening scenes of the book an undertaker petitions Don Corleone for justice. His daughter has been the victim of a brutal attempted rape by two young boys-"not Italian." The petitioner has made the mistake of going through the American court system, and the boys have been let off with a suspended sentence. The girl, disfigured for life, keeps asking, "Father, Father, why did they do this to me?" Don Corleone does not attempt to deal with this question; like the judge who heard the case, he does not believe it is a serious affair. "The boys were young, high-spirited," he tells the distraught man, "and one of them is the son of a powerful politician." He advises the father to send his daughter a box of candy and flowers at the hospital. But the undertaker will not be assuaged his daughter "will never be beautiful again." When it is understood
between
the two men that Don Corleone is a higher authority to his Mafia "family" than the American system of jurisprudence, the Don dispatches a lieutenant to "take care of" the would-be rapists.

But a movie like Rashomon or De Sica's Two Women ( see page 73 ) has always been the exception. A typical Hollywood product might throw in a rape scene for a bit of sexy pizzazz and nothing more. Screenwriter Eleanor Perry ran afoul of this unwrit ten code during the making of
The
Man
Who
Loved Cat
Dancing
when she fought against the insertion of a rape scene, and lost. She later said, "I thought [the heroine] would defend herself; she would not be raped. But the director and my co-producer thought otherwise. The rape scene is in the film. One of the men told me, 'Well, rape turns some men on.' " Aljean Harmetz in her quest for why the rape scene has become an ugly movie trend found a producer who told her flatly, "We give the people what they want to see."

An answer that movie producers are giving the public what they want to see will not do. Movie producers, who are male, give the public
their own concept
of what the world is all about, and in this function they perpetuate, shape and influence our popular attitudes. I have dwelt in this chapter on mass-culture figures because I believe it is they who truly affect attitudes, and in particular the attitudes of adolescent males, who are our potential rapists. But I do not mean to suggest that Stanley Kubrick, Mick Jagger or Harold Robbins stand alone in their role as glorifiers of rape. Modern-day proponents of heroic rape pop up all over the place and span the intellectual horizon from the prestigious poetry review
New York
Quarterly, which saw fit to print an early morning-sex poem brazenly titled "Rape" ("On top of you
this morning on
yr fl.at
belly
. . .
yr
eyes
open in
aversion but no longer fighting ") ,
to the foolish attempt by some black literati to forge a political theory of "insurrectionary" rape ( see pages
248
to
2
53 ) to the buffoonery of America's current king of letters, Nor man Mailer, who has tied his view of male dominance into a cryptomystic, pseudoscientific doctrine of the aggressive sperm swimming heroically toward the stolid, passive egg, and who treats college audiences on his lecture circ
'
uit to the pronunciamento that "a little bit of rape is good for a man's soul."

As patriotism was said to be the last refuge of a scoundrel, buffoonery may well be the last refuge of the heroic rapist. The very concept of heroism, as it has been defined by men, appears to be undergoing a serious re-evaluation these days. The medieval knight in shining armor is rusted and clanking; toughies like the

THE MYTH OF THE HEROIC RAPIST
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Hell's Angels are generally perceived as the overaged, two-bit punks they really are. In the future I am confident that men will cease to define their manhood in terms of their aggression toward, or pro tection of, women. At present, however, they continue to display more than a little public confusion as to their proper stance. For this reason I find a novel by Ed Bullins,
The
Reluctant
Rapist,
to

be of considerable interest. Torn between a concept of heroic, insurrectionary rape,
a
la Eldridge Cleaver, and an intruding reality

that makes such an idea laughably ludicrous, Bullins, who is black, resolves the conflict by presenting contradictory statements and refusing to permit his reader the satisfaction of knowing for certain whether he is deadly earnest or just plain kidding.

Throughout the novel Bullins' protagonist reports his rape of black women and white women with impartiality and gusto, ap pearing, like Cleaver, to have started on blacks and moved on to whites, but the element of buffoonery and self-mockery wins out. "I'm actually a lover," his hero announces. "I am very reluctant to rape any woman I don't relate to." Professing astonishment that a woman he raped might "misunderstand" and think he was moti vated by hostility, he protests, "On the contrary, rarely is it the case that I dislike a source of my pleasure. And I would not knowingly take a woman's body that I did not desire, unless I was drunk or terribly horny, or depressed, or it was very dark, or someone offered her to me out of comradeship and I couldn't refuse . . ."

The Reluctant Rapist wants us to know that some of his conquests have treated his predatory acts "as the compliments they are," once they have "recovered their composure af ter having been taken advantage of against their will, if it really was against their will." Like Hunter Thompson's Angels and husbands, Bullins' hero worries over female complicity, and he also vaguely worries over why he does not feel any guilt. But dismissing these nagging doubts, the Reluctant Rapist calls his victim "the moon to the sun of my manhood" and declares that "it is not for her to decide how her man is to use her." In his most ambitious and foolish exegesis he argues that committing rape is the highest compliment he can pay a woman: "For to commit
_
rape is to commit oneself to one's own death, if the woman so wills it and if one allows her to live with this power to speak of it to the authorities." In the next breath he tells us, "Though frankly, I would rape a snake if the opportunity presented its slinky self . Af ter all, it's all relative . . ."