Loose Women, Lecherous Men (39 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 156
Indeed, many feminists point out that sexual violence against women in the United States is considered staggering enough in scope and intensity that many mental health professionals, social scientists, and legal theorists refer to it as a national epidemic.
1
However, these same feminists contend that characterizing sexual violence as
epidemic
may leave many with the impression that the violator is a mentally ill, deviant, or otherwise deranged individual whose personal responsibility for his actions is mitigated by serious psychopathology. Feminist researchers of sexual violence against women point out that such acts are perpetrated by men of every class, nationality, race, age, sexual preference, or religion, men whose personality profiles most often put them well within the range of "normal" and whose victims are themselves equally diverse.
2
The 1990s have seen a dramatic increase in various highly publicized sexual harassment, rape, or battery allegations, including Anita Hill's 1991 charges of sexual harassment against then Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas; allegations against former U.S. Senator Bob Packwood for sexual harassment over the past two decades of several female secretaries and aides; Paula Jones's allegations of sexual harassment by President Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas; charges of sexual assault at the 1991 Tailhook Association Convention in Las Vegas, at which over 100 female officers were allegedly accosted by Navy and Marine Corps men; allegations of rape against Mike Tyson (1991, convicted) and William Kennedy Smith (1992, acquitted); charges of sexual harassment and intimidation against the 1993 Lakewood, California, high school men's Spur Posse, whose members would compete for the best female "score"; and O. J. Simpson's alleged harassment and assault of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson, whose murder he was charged with (1994) and acquitted of (1995). Such cases paint a very public picture of workplace, domestic, and campus life that, together with researchers' survey data, would appear to reflect women's widespread sexual intimidation by men.
Feminism is often identified with the claim that the pervasive and often violent sexual intimidation of women by men is by no means a coincidental series of isolated, spontaneous, or unrelated events; rather, it is evidence of the systematic and institutionalized sexual subordination of women whose intimidation serves a patriarchal status quo. Indeed, many feminists contend that while women are less likely to be the victims of violent crime than men, men prey on other men (and women defend themselves against men) in ways that do not maintain and reinforce a cultural ideology that encourages the devaluation and sexual subordination of the male sex.
3
It is argued that in a patriarchal society in which social and economic power and prestige lie in the hands of men, the sexual intimidation of women is an especially successful means of maintaining dominance over and control of women, when that intimidation is built into the very fabric of our laws, education, economics, media, culture, and family life. From this perspective, tacit institutional approval of women's sexual harassment and abuse creates a climate of paranoia and fear in which women gain no social recognition for the violence they experience nor any economic independence or legal protection from it. Coerced into unconditional sexual accessibility by men in positions of social and economic power who define the terms and conditions of women's lives, women become the sexual victims of men. Marilyn French refers to the insidiousness of such socially sanctioned appropriation of women's bodies by men as the "slime under the rug of patriarchy."
4
The sexual vic-
 
Page 157
timization of women is successfully reinforced by patriarchal sex role socialization that teaches men to be sexually dominant and women to be sexually submissive, and the resulting model of woman's fundamental inferiority and passivity justifies and legitimizes the violence done to her. This is the thrust of many feminists' claim that men abuse women because they can.
5
From this view, sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls become the tools of sexual intimidation whereby men establish and maintain their dominance and supremacy over women. Men's sexual violation, terrorization, coercion, and dehumanization of women insure this dominance by turning women into sexual victims. The ultimate elimination of such victimization, according to such a view, would require the wholesale dismantling of the hierarchical structures of our current patriarchal politics and sex role socialization within the family that reinforce, and are enforced by, the sexual intimidation of women. Feminists who subscribe to the general tenets of this theory claim that unless men's sexual intimidation of women is exposed and vilified for its systematic and pervasive violence against women, women will never be free to control our own bodies and so our own sexual and reproductive lives.
6
However, socially constructing the problem of individual women's sexual intimidation by defining women
as a class
as sexually subordinate to men has appeared to at least some feminists only to reinvigorate the debilitating feminine stereotype of the sexually passive and vulnerable woman. Such feminists argue that much of feminist theory in effect
defines
or
determines
women as victims in ways that ironically succeed in performing patriarchy's own task of inhibiting women's sexual agency and self-definition. Critics claim that the victim mentality apparently promoted by many feminists absolves women of their responsibility for taking undue risks in sexually dangerous environments that common sense would dictate avoiding altogether; and sexual harassment policies only succeed in communicating that women need special protection in an overwhelmingly hostile male environment. Critics contend that date rape brochures advise an unrealistically sterile approach to sex that denies the inevitability and legitimacy of flirtation and temptation in sex, depicting women as helpless victims of coercive male sexual power. Many of these same critics would agree that individual men count on the passive and silent suffering of women to perpetuate men's crimes against women and to reinforce a legal and social services system that discriminates against women. These feminists would acknowledge that when that silence is broken, as it is in the consciousness-raising forums of public speak-outs, marches, educational seminars, and community-sponsored public meetings, the community becomes accountable for the ways in which it has blamed, ignored, or trivialized the violence that many men inflict on women. It is contended, however, that more than a few members of that community feel bombarded by feminists' antimale and antisex propaganda that says all men are potential rapists and no heterosexual bedroom is safe for women. Feminists critical of antirape marches and incest victims' speak-outs believe that these activities produce a "groupthink" hysteria about male violence against women that results in false accusations of men's sexual abuse of women and effectively closes women's minds to the possibility of satisfying sexual exploration and pleasure with passionate and pleasure-seeking men. From this perspective, presuming that an institutionally entrenched, ubiquitous, and all-powerful patriarchy sexually oppresses women at every opportunity alienates
 
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many women who would like to call themselves feminists but are hesitant to align themselves with a political platform that does not match their own experience of either men or sex. Indeed, it is argued that the evidence for a so-called epidemic of sexual violence against women is based on ambiguously worded surveys and misleading statistics that overestimate the actual battering and rape women suffer at the hands of men and underestimate individual women's causal role in their own abuse.
7
The dilemma is a deeply troubling one for feminists: if we ascribe to women too much sexual victimization and not enough sexual agency, we are at risk of reasserting patriarchy's message that women are to be identified as the proper sexual subordinates of men. If we ascribe to women too much sexual agency, however, and fail to see the ways in which women's condition is a socially constructed and institutionally subordinated one under conditions of male dominance, women's sexual harassment and abuse become personal failures that, had
women
only acted differently, would never have happened. In ascribing to women a sexual agency that places the responsibility for their abuse on women, men are able to shirk their own responsibility and reap the social benefits many of them share for intimidating women into men's sexual service. Feminists seem to be left with one of two equally unpalatable choices: a victimization model of woman's condition that appears to essentialize her sexually subordinate situation, despite the political necessity of exposing it; or an agency model of woman's condition that disguises the structural nature of her oppression but affords her the practical and moral basis for her liberation. How can feminists establish and promote women's sexual agency and sexual self-definition from a position of sexual subordination without either overwhelming individual women with a personal responsibility for their sexual abuse that they do not deserve or overdetermining women as sexual victims in ways that alienate women and men from feminism and reinforce debilitating patriarchal values? How do we recognize and politicize the pervasiveness and severity of men's sexual intimidation of women through sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and the sexual abuse of girls yet at the same time empower women to transcend the status of victim to one of self-determining sexual subject?
I propose that the answer can be found in analyzing women's sexual intimidation under patriarchy from the "view from somewhere different," the perspective I introduced in chapter 1 to provide a viable context and legitimacy for the diversity of voices within feminist debates over women's sexuality. This perspective requires that we recognize not only the ways in which gender politicizes sexuality under conditions of male dominance but also the ways in which sexuality informs gender with liberating strategies for women's (and men's) sexual pleasure, agency, and self-definition. In this chapter I will suggest ways in which we can facilitate a continuing dialogue among feminists of diverse viewpoints concerning the politics of women's sexual intimidation in the face of the apparently irreconcilable views already expressed.
The discussion that follows poses these questions: How should we understand the feminist claim that a woman is the "victim" of a man's sexual intimidation? What do feminists mean when we say that women as a class are sexually "victimized" by male dominated social institutions? To answer these questions, I offer a detailed summary of several feminists' denunciations of men's sexual harassment, rape, battering, and sexual abuse of women and girls to reveal the normative forms that such victimiza-
 
Page 159
tion takes: (1) the violation of and violence against women; (2) the terrorization of women; (3) the coercion, deception, and manipulation of women; (4) the dehumanization of women. I then look more closely at the feminist counterclaims that by describing women's sexuality as institutionally and pervasively male-dominated, feminists condemn women to the very condition of sexual passivity, feminine fragility, and physical vulnerability from which feminists would extricate women, and that this perspective leaves many women with the impression that feminists are antimale and antisex, if not outrightly misogynistic, when it comes to women who refuse to accept their "victim" role.
After framing the debate, I invoke the "view from somewhere different" to argue that men's sexual intimidation of women can be better represented by socially locating women in dialectical contexts that are both institutionally oppressive and personally liberating. As in the previous chapter on sex work, I contend that women's sexuality in contemporary Western culture can be described in terms of a complex and dynamic subject/object relation; I then use this relation to think and talk about women as both the objects of men's sexual victimization and the defining subjects of our sexual experience as women, capable of transcending the victimization we may suffer. Specifically, using the notion of woman as
survivor
, I argue that a woman's experience of being sexually victimized by men can generate within her a renewed sense of sexual agency and political activism. I contend that women can be reinvigorated by feminist consciousness-raising efforts at identifying men's sexual intimidation of women, not revictimized by them. However, women's sexual subjectivity will be impossible if men and women do not make an effort to dismantle the hierarchical structures and values that reinforce the male dominance of women. Therefore, in the closing section I sketch what is required for men to treat women with care respect in their sexual relations with them, and what women need to understand about men's socially complex power position under patriarchy in order to make that respect a shared one.
Sexual Victimization and Male Dominance
[M]en initiate, women consentthat's mutual?
Catharine A. MacKinnon,
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
[B]eing a woman [is] a life time occupational hazard in itself.
Robin Morgan,
The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
Funny, every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
Mae West, quoted in Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
In this chapter's overview, as well as in previous chapters, I have outlined feminists' arguments for the claim that women's sex role socialization and economic discrimi-

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