Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (74 page)

Viva makes a point of mentioning that this erotic daydream, which her autobiographical persona couldn't-wait-to-finish-her prayers to begin afresh each night, took place a few years af ter World War II. She also informs us that during this time she and her sisters had been molested vaginally by the family doctor. Exhi bitionism and passive masochism, as expressed in her fantasy, marked the early stages of Viva's "superstar" career.

Anai'.s Nin, companion to famous men, analysand and writer who chose as her life's work to contemplate her "subjective" femaleness-"My self, woman, womb"-confessed to her diary in the summer of 1937:

Sometimes in the street, or in a cafe, I am hypnotized by the "pimp" face of a man, by a big workman with knee-high boots, by a brutal criminal head. I feel a sensual tremor of fear, an obscure attraction. The female in me trembles and is fascinated. For one second only I am a prostitute who expects a stab in the back. I feel anxiety, I am trapped. I forget that I am free. A subterranean primitivism? A de-

women that may prepare the soil for the growth of masochistic phenomena [and] fertilize an emotional conception of a masochistic female role." In ad dition to the "possibility of rape," already mentioned, she suggested in brief outline fashion: the greater physical strength of men over women; menstrua tion, defloration and childbirth; and "the biologic differences in intercourse." These thoughts of Horney's were published in
i935.
They are not incom patible with the thinking of present-day feminists. We would not, however, be inclined to view her list as either incontrovertible or inevitable.

sire to feel the brutality of man, the force which can violate? To be violated is perhaps a need in women, a secret erotic need. I have to shake myself from the invasion of these violent images, awaken.

How much these thoughts reflect Nin and how much they reflect a dutiful parroting of Otto Rank, her former mentor, remains uncer tain. Three years earlier the imperious Rank had informed her, and she had faithfully recorded, that many of the women he analyzed wanted to be "mastered, wanted to lose.
It
was almost as if they continued to re-enact the old primitive forms of love-making, in which woman was overpowered by the strength of man. To feel themselves conquered, in a more abstract situation, they enjoyed losing."

The morbid attraction of Sylvia Plath to a male Nazi figure ("Panzer-man, panzer-man, 0 You--") in the poems "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" is also pertinent to this discussion. Plath, who was three years older than I and Protestant, appears to have identified as a young girl with the same concentration-camp

victims that haunted my childhood:
"I
think I
may
well
be a

Jew
. . .
I
may be a
bit
of a
Jew."
Plath's victim identification remained with her throughout her life; she could not shake it. According to "Daddy," she even married "A man
in black with
a
M einkampf look/
And a
love
of
the
rack and
the
screw." Her painful emotional credo was expressed in these lines:

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the
face,
the
brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of thirty-one.
( "Dying/ Is
an art,
like everything else.J I
do
it exceptionall y well.")
As Helene Deutsch would have it, the "certain amount of masochism" necessary to a woman
"if
she is to be adjusted to reality" had gotten out of hand.

Through legend and lore, history has mythified not the strong woman who defends herself successfully against bodily assault, but the
beautiful
woman who dies a violent death while trying. A good

heroine is
a
dead heroine, we are taught, for victory through physi

cal triumph is a male prerogative that is incompatible with femi-

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I
AGAINST OUR WILL

nine behavior. The sacrifice of life, we learn, is the most perfect testament to a woman's integrity and honor.

Raising a woman to the stature of heroine because she has suffered a violent death that carries sexual implications is a Chris tian concept, unknown to Old Testament Judaism. Parables of female martyrdom-or male martyrdom, for that matter-are conspicuously absent from the pragmatic, Hebraic Old Testament, where traces of strong, physically triumphant females, products of an incomplete patriarchal rule, can be found. Consider the Book of Judith. Described as a glamorous Israelite widow, Judith con sciously risked the possibility of sexual assault to slay Holofernes in his tent. Not only did she cut off his head and escape unharmed, Judith inspired her people to military victory. Instructive as the story of Judith might be to little girls, this heroine was not the sort of role model that any patriarchy in its right mind would wish to put forward. Judith and her Book appear in the nether regions of the dubious Apocrypha.

Lucretia, an earlier heroine of ancient Rome, was cast in a more acceptable mold. She, too, in a sense, served as a catalyst to free her people. Raped by the dictator's son, Sextus Tarquinius, the chaste Lucretia took her own life rather than shame her husband, and thereby inspired the Romans to drive the dread Tarquins from their city. Thus was the Roman republic established. The rape of Lucretia (or Lucrece, as Shakespeare renamed her ) served patri archal attitudes better than the triumph of Judith, but neither model-suicide or a clever act of beheading-was quite what Christianity required of its female converts.

As a matter of fact, Saint Augustine, writing in the fif th century A.n., heaped witty scorn on Lucretia's act of suicide as the gesture of a woman "excessively eager for honor."

When a woman has been ravished without her consenting and forced by another's sin, she has no reason to punish herself by a voluntary death [the saint maintained in
City
of God]. Her killing of herself . . . was due to the weakness of shame, not to the high value she set on chastity. . . . Since she could not display her pure conscience to the world she thought she must exhibit her punish ment before men's eyes as a proof of her state of mind. She blushed at the thought of being regarded as an accomplice in the act if she were to bear with patience what another had inflicted on her with violence.

VICTIMS: THE SETTING
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329

Augustine was killing two birds with one stone in this clever exposition. He was arguing that Christians had no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance, and he was defending against skeptics the behavior of Christian women raped by the Goths "the violation of wives, of maidens ready for marriage, and even in some cases of women in the religious life"-who did not choose the course of suicide:

When they were treated like this they did not take vengeance on themselves for another's crime. They would not add crime to crime by committing murder on themselves in shame because the enemy had committed rape on them in lust. They have the glory of chastity within them, the testimony of their conscience. They have this in the sight of God, and they ask for nothing more. In fact there is nothing else for them to do . . .

That other great Catholic philosopher, the orthodox, scholas tic Aquinas, devoted a few dry words to rape in "the second part of the second part" of his Summa
Theologiae.
The brevity of his discourse seems to prove how unimportant to Aquinas (and to other fathers of the Church ) the "element of violence"-his phrase-really was in the cosmic system. Since
all
sexual inter course outside of marriage was a mortal sin in God's eyes-fornica tion-what was lef t to the logician was a mere ordering of the sin in terms of spiritual gravity. The Thomistic pyramid went like this:

Simple fornication without injustice done to a partner is the least among the sins of lechery. Then, to continue, it is a greater injury to misuse a woman subject to the father of her children [i.e. a wife] than one subject to her guardian [i.e. a virgin], and consequently, adultery is worse than seduction. Both are aggravated by violence, and therefore raping a virgin is worse than seducing her, and raping a wife is worse than committing adultery.

It seems from the ahove extract that Thomistic reasoning holds the rape of a married woman to be a worse sin than the rape of a virgin. Nevertheless, dating roughly from the third century and the Diocletian persecutions, the Church ingeniously began to dramatize a virgin role model that embodied two critical tenets, chastity and defense of the faith, in one lurid act of annihilation.

33c
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AGAINST OUR WILL

Elevated to sainthood for the manner of their violent deaths as much as for the purity of their short lives, Agnes, Agatha, Lucia, Philomena, Susanna and many others became celebrated in Catho lic tradition as the virgin martyrs.

It is difficult even for devout Catholics to keep the stories of these tragic maidens separate and distinct. Each was beautiful and wellborn, each willingly chose martyrdom over the option of forced sex or marriage with a pagan nonbeliever, and each suffered a cruel death to maintain her Christian faith and virgin status. Saint Agnes, the most famous virgin martyr of them all, was a child of twelve. She was thrown naked into a brothel as part of the routine punishment of "outrage," but through miraculous intervention her honor was preserved. Virginity intact, little Agnes was beheaded.