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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 188
sees herself as a woman. Many women who consider themselves sexually attractive to men are often upset by sexual harassment precisely because they feel they are being punished for appearing and behaving exactly the way men would insult them for were they
not
sexually attractive. In fact, many women, lesbian and heterosexual alike, report sexual harassment based on sexual slurs and epithets that let them know that they are not measuring up to their male coworkers' definitions of sexual desirability. Older women have complained that they have been harassed out of their jobs to make way for younger women whose youth
and
gender make them more accessible and desirable sexual objects. If heterosexuality is socially constructed on the foundations of male dominance and female submission, as radical feminists claim, then
sexual
harassment is an ideal venue for women's exploitation and abuse. As Catharine MacKinnon asserts, "[G]ender distributes power as it divides labor, enforcing that division by sexual means." Indeed, the sexual harassment of women who work in the sex industry has been dismissed by some courts, who regard it as "a rational consequence of such employment."
113
Feminists like Susan Brownmiller have argued that rape should be understood as a violent attempt to humiliate, degrade, or defile women, not to alleviate men's over-sexed nature or quell their sexual fears or anxieties. Such a thesis is consistent with the tradition that rape is the seizing of another man's property as his own, such that a woman's value to her original possessor is severely diminished. If a woman is identified either by herself or by her culture in terms of her sexuality, then a rapist's violation of a woman's sexuality is a violation of her
self
, a diminution of her
self
to that of exploitable and expendable object. Kathryn Larsen remarks, "Rape is a death of sorts. It slowly chokes the spirit and drains one's sense of self."
114
Furthermore, in a culture whose sexual double standard can demean women merely for being sexual, rape stands out as just one more way to sexualize women and thus demean them. For this reason, some feminists remark that rape degrades women in a way that mugging does not, even though both are attacks on the body. On the other hand, women are given the implicit message that we deserve no better than rape by men who normalize rape as heterosexual sex and by legal institutions who question women's accounts of sex by force. As in the case of sexual harassment, the dialectical message of rape is that a woman is an innately inferior creature whose sexuality is deserving of violation and abuse, as well as an active subject whose sexuality is a means of devaluing her.
Women of color are multiply dehumanized by race and by gender, and often by class: white men often regard women of color as already inferior in virtue of their race or poverty so that their gender makes them even more vulnerable to the myth that women want, need, and deserve to be raped. Black feminists point out that the exploitation of female black slaves by white masters involved sexual appropriation as much as economic exploitation. Indeed, when women are perceived as having no claim to our own bodies, the myth that a promiscuous woman never has sex against her will gains force and legitimacy.
Some feminists claim that a feminine socialization that encourages kindness, compassion, patience, and acceptance and emphasizes connectedness in human relations may make women more susceptible to rape, particularly acquaintance rape. Many women do not want to hurt their dates' feelings or appear rude or unfeminine
 
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and believe they will bear the blame if the relationship sours. A young woman who is raped is blamed for dressing too seductively, but when she refuses to beautify herself on men's terms, she is marked frigid, lesbian, or just plain ugly. In this way the social expectations placed on women to be sexually seductive while at the same time sexually discriminating are themselves dehumanizing, insofar as they encourage a woman to submit her feelings about her own sexual needs and preferences to the service of male sexual desire. Some feminists have argued that many college fraternities that brutalize and degrade their initiates with epithets of "wimp" and "pansy" reinforce the masculine mystique of toughness and domination that is then acted out on campus women in the form of battering and rape. While boys are taught how
not
to be weak and submissive, "like a girl,'' many girls are taught that this is exactly what they are.
115
Many feminists bemoan the reemergence of "the waif look" among models, in the fear that associating female beauty with physical fragility and vulnerability can only encourage rape and the submission to rape.
One of the manipulative techniques of the woman batterer is to degrade the object of his abuse with verbal assaults on her self-esteem. "You can't do anything right," "You're a worthless bitch," and "I'll show you who's boss" are typical examples of the verbal abuse that undermines the self-confidence and self-worth of the battered woman. If he batters her by destroying her property or pets, she is being told that she too is breakable and expendable. The batterer's physical abuse is often accompanied by verbal abuse precisely because in this way he can most effectively communicate to her that she is deserving of nothing better. She can be so terrorized that her sense of her own personhood, of herself as an autonomous being in control of her own life, is effectively shattered. Bat-Ami Bar On remarks that such terrorization results in "a self [that] is intentionally eroded and a will [that] is intentionally broken." Larry Tifft contends that battering "deconstructs the self," causing the battered to lose the ability to observe, express, and identify herself as someone whose consciousness and being in the world are independent of the will of the batterer.
116
If the batterer is successful at attaching the battered woman to him at the same time that he abuses her, he has at least partially succeeded in disintegrating her own independent interests and reintegrating them into his own. If he is too successful, however, she becomes so completely will-
less
, abject, and emotionally flat that his abuse no longer expresses power
over
any agent at all. His despair at her total inattentiveness may drive him to kill her as a final attempt at control. Jessica Benjamin observes, "Violence is a way of expressing or asserting control over an other, of establishing one's own autonomy and negating the other person's. It is a way of repudiating dependency while attempting to avoid the consequent feeling of aloneness. It makes the other an object but retains possession of her or him." Of the sadists and their object in
The Story of O
, Benjamin writes: "When her [O's] objectification is complete, when she has no more will, they cannot engage with her without becoming filled with her thing-like nature. They must perform their violation rationally and ritually both in order to maintain their boundaries and to make her will the object of their will." Many feminists believe that O. J. Simpson's alleged history of battering and verbally abusing Nicole Brown Simpson was directly relevant to his murder trial, precisely because Nicole's express rejection of his attentions could have been overwhelming enough for her batterer to turn to murder.
117
 
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Failing to see herself as someone capable of living on her own, a battered woman becomes convinced that she does not deserve a better life than she is living and so fails to seek help or confide her abuse to anyone. If she has been successfully socialized to be submissive or at least acquiescent in the face of the demands of men, or if she has learned to question her own behavior before she accuses others, she may accept her degradation as normal and expected. Even women who are the primary breadwinners in their families will stay in abusive households, because such socialization often means that they are unable to imagine themselves outside of their relationships with men, that they are confined to thinking of themselves primarily as men's wives and as the mothers of their children. If a woman believes love equals her denial and self-sacrifice, then the more she tries to do what he wants, despite his beatings, the more she will feel she loves him and the more this belief in reform can be used by her partner to keep her from leaving.
118
Men of color who have themselves experienced a demeaning sense of powerlessness in a racist world may seek to reestablish that power at home by subjecting their partners to the kind of physical or verbal abuse that makes women feel worthless. A perceived breakdown of patriarchy in the public domain in the wake of feminism has led many to believe that men of all races and classes are reverting to the privacy of the home to reestablish their dominance and authority. Feminists remind us that white women were legally beaten under English common laws that suspended a woman's legal existence during marriage: whipping a woman was likened in many men's minds to breaking a horse, since both women and horses were considered property acquired or exchanged at the will of the family patriarchs.
119
Daughters have also traditionally been regarded as the property of their patriarchs, a tradition that many feminists contend lives on in men who feel entitled to sexual access to their daughters, as if they were objects or possessions to be taken when wives are unwilling, unavailable, or unsatisfying. A little girl's sexual dehumanization by a male family member is a function not only of an inequality of gender but also of unequal generational power and unequal custodial power. Researchers such as David Finkelhor suggest that adult male abuse of female children is the most common form of child sexual abuse, because such abuse tends to gravitate to the relationship with the greatest power differential .
120
Mothers who cannot protect themselves or their children from abuse further devalue and berate themselves for being unable to act. When a young girl's mother feels powerless to stop her daughter's abuse, the young girl's dehumanization can become even more devastating: she has no role model for equality and respect in a heterosexual relationship; she learns very early that women are to serve at a man's sexual whim and that without either protection from the abuse or the resources to convince another adult of her violation, she concludes that she
must
be inferior after all. She sometimes sees herself as evil, as a witch, dog, rat, or snake, in order to stigmatize herself and save her attachment to her parents. Incest survivors commonly resort to self-injury in order to reestablish some semblance of control over their own lives and to experience themselves as something more than a mere object. As one survivor remarked, "I do it to prove I exist."
121
Women who are survivors of child sexual abuse also struggle to develop self-esteem and self-confidence, feeling used by someone who had no feelings at all for their emotional or sexual needs. A survivor may denigrate herself while idealizing
 
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others in an attempt to seek the love and affection she feels was denied her as a child, or she may become permanently dependent, passive, and unable to make her own needs known to her adult partner. If her abuse is severe enough, she may dissociate herself completely from a world she no longer sees as safe or just. She may completely lose any sense of positive value in herself or any meaning or purpose to her life. Mental health professionals can also dehumanize survivors of child sexual abuse by reducing them to personality profiles, implying that the survivor is equivalent to some stereotypical set of characteristics that determine her abuse.
122
The aim of this extended discussion has been to show why feminists believe that men's sexual intimidation of women must be exposed as an entrenched and ubiquitous feature of the patriarchal social institutions under which women live. From this view, the sexual harassment, rape, battering, and abuse of individual women and girls constitute the systematic victimization of women as a class, whose pervasive sexual violation and violence, terrorization, coercion, manipulation, deception, and dehumanization come to be regarded as a normal and inevitable part of women's social psychology and sexual agency. Many feminists believe that a necessary element in the liberation of women from men's sexual harassment and abuse is to actively and publicly continue to make both women and men aware of the form and function of men's individual and institutionalized sexual intimidation of women, and the excruciating pain, fear, anger, and anxiety such intimidation produces in women. According to this perspective, such consciousness-raising is vital if we are to effectively move women from our sexually subordinate position under patriarchy to a position of informed and autonomous choice concerning the nature and value of women's individual sexual lives. The following section fleshes out the general counterclaim that far from liberating women from men's sexual intimidation, such a perspective only succeeds in revictimizing the very women feminists wish to empower.
Feminist Paranoia, Male-Bashing, and the Avoidance of Personal Responsibility
A girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool. A girl
who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot.
Feminists call this "blaming the victim." I call it common sense.
Camille Paglia,
Sex, Art, and American Culture
We'd rather see a woman spend her money on a .357 magnum than con-
tribute to her therapist's BMW payments for the next 30 years.
Nikki Craft, quoted in Amber Coverdale Sumrall and Dena Taylor, eds.,
Sexual Harassment: Women Speak Out
While some feminists have been organizing Take Back the Night marches decrying sexual violence against women, distributing leaflets about sexual harassment and date rape on college campuses, and staffing shelters for battered women and their abused daughters, other feminists professing equal commitment to the cause of

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