experience. It is absurd to suggest that slavery had no
mitigating or redemptive or agentic dimension to it, that the
oppression per se was merely oppressive. These tautologies
demonstrate how the dogma o f victimization has supplanted
the academic endeavor to valorize theory, which, in a sense,
does not descend to the rather low level o f direct human
experience, especially o f suffering or pain, which are too
subjective and also, frankly, too depressing to consider as
simple subjects in themselves or, frankly, as objects o f
inquiry. We apply our principles on agency, ambiguity, and
nuance exclusively to the experience o f women as women.
There is no outrage in the academy when we develop an
intellectually nuanced approach to rape as there would be, o f
course, if we applied these principles to Jew ish or A fro-
American experience. It is inappropriate for white women to
approach those issues anyway and thus we are insulated from
what I can only presume would be an intellectual backlash
while we support the so-called victims in a political atmosphere that Ronald Reagan created and that is anathema to
us— the cutbacks in civil rights and so on, funding for A fro-
American groups and so on. Then, when we mount our fight
for abortion, which rests firm ly in the affirmative context o f a
w om an’s right to choose, we have the support o f other groups
and so on. Outside w om en’s studies departments our theoretical principles are not used, not understood, and not paid attention to, for which we are, in fact, grateful. T o be held
accountable outside the sphere o f w om en’s studies for the
consequences o f our theoretical propositions would, o f
course, be a stark abridgment o f the academic license we have
w orked so hard to create for ourselves. Simple-minded
feminists, o f course, object to a nuanced approach to rape but
we can only presume that their response to the abduction o f
Persephone would have been to picket Hell. T o understand a
w om an’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure
dimensions o f pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under
duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs— the clothes
that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary
dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent
conform ity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency o f signs, an obdurate appearance o f conformity that sim ply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs. A real
woman cannot be understood in terms either o f suffering or
constriction (lack o f freedom). Her artifice, for instance, may
appear to signal fear, as if the hidden dynamic is her
recognition that she will be punished if she does not conform.
But ask her. She uses the words o f agency: I want to. Artifice,
in fact, is the flag that signals pride in her nation, the nation o f
wom en, a chosen nationalism, a chosen role, a chosen
femaleness, a chosen relationship to sexuality, or sexualities,
per se; and the final configuration— the w ay she appears— is
rooted neither in biological givens nor in a social reality o f
oppression; she freely picks her signs creating a sexual-
political discourse in which she is an active agent o f her own
meaning. I do not feel— and I speak personally here— that we
need dignify, or, more to the point, treat respectfully on any
level those self-proclaimed rebels who in fact wallow in male
domination, pointing it out at every turn, as if we should turn
our attention to the very men they despise— and what? Do
something. Good God, do what? I do not feel that the marginal
types that use this overblown rhetoric are entitled to valorization. They are certainly not women in the same sense we
are— free-willed women making free choices. If they present
themselves as animals in cages, I am prepared to treat them as
such. We are not, as they say, middle-class, protecting the
status quo. It is not, as they maintain, middle-class to
appreciate the middle way, the normal, the ordinary, while
espousing a theoretically radical politics, left-wing and solidly
socialist. It is not middle-class to engage in intellectual
discourse that is not premised on the urgency o f destroying
western civilization, though certainly we critique it, nor is it
middle-class to have a job. It is not repugnance that tur^s me
away from these marginal types, these loud, chanting,
marching creatures who do not— and here I jest— footnote
their picket signs, these really rather inarticulate creatures who
fall o ff the edge o f the civilized world into a chaotic politics o f
man-hating and recrimination. Indeed, the sick-unto-death
are hard to placate, and I would not condescend to try.
W omen’s biography seeks to rescue from obscurity women
who did not belong there in the first place, women o f
achievement made invisible by an unjust, androcentric
double standard. These are noble women, not in the class
sense, because we do valorize the working class, though o f
course often these women are upper-class, and not in the
moralistic sense, although o f course they often are pure in the
sense o f emblematic. But certainly one need not labor to describe
the muck or the person indistinguishable from it. We affirm
sexually active women, yes. We will not explicate either the
condition or the lives o f sexually annihilated women— they
achieved nothing that requires our attention. The crime o f rape is
not an issue o f sex. It is an issue o f power. To recast it once again,
in a revisionist frenzy, as an issue o f freedom is painfully and
needlessly diversionary. O f course, there is a tradition in
existentialist philosophy o f seeing rape as an expression o f
freedom, a phenomenon o f freedom incarnate as it were, for the
rapist o f course, presumed male, presumed the normative
human. But certainly by now the psychological resonances o f
rape for the raped can best be dealt with in a therapeutic forum so
that the individual’s appreciation o f sex will not be distorted or
diminished— a frequent consequence o f rape that is a real
tragedy. The mechanics o f the two, rape and intercourse, have
an apparent likeness, which is unfortunate and no doubt
confusing for those insufficiently sex-positive. One is the other,
exaggerated, although, o f course, we do not know —pace St.
Augustine— which came first. St. Augustine contends that there
was sexual intercourse in the Garden but without lust, which he
saw as debilitating once he stopped indulging in it. O f course, we
all get older. The philosophical problem is one o f will. Is will
gendered? Clearly Nietzsche’s comprehension o f will never took
into account that he could be raped. Sade postulated that a
woman had a strong will— to be raped and otherwise hurt. It is
the governing pornographic conceit, indistinguishable from a
will to have sex. The problem o f female freedom is the problem
o f female will. Can a woman have freedom o f will if her will
exists outside the whole rape system: if she will not be raped or
potentially raped or, to cover Sade’s odd women, if she will not
rape. Assuming that the rapist qua rapist imposes his will, can
any woman be free abjuring rape, her will repudiating it, or is
any such will vestigial, utterly useless on the plane o f human
reality. Rape is, in that sense, more like housework than it is
like intercourse. He wants the house clean. She does not want
to clean it. Heterosexual imperatives demand that she bend her
will to his. There is, o f course, a sociology to housework
while there is only a pathology to rape. I am dignifying the
opposition here considerably by discussing the question o f
rape at all. Housework, as I showed above, has more to do
with wom en’s daily, ordinary bending o f will to suit a man. I
object to tying rape to wom en’s equality, in either theory or
practice, as if rape defined wom en’s experience or determined
w om en’s status. Rape is a momentary abrogation o f choice.
At its worst, it is like being hit by a car. The politicizing o f it
creates a false consciousness, one o f victimization, and a false
complaint, as if rape is a socially sanctioned male behavior on a
continuum o f socially expressed masculinity. We need to
educate men while enhancing desire. For most men, rape is a
game played with the consent o f a knowledgeable, sophisticated partner. As a game it is singularly effective in amplifying
desire. A m plifying desire is a liberatory goal. We are stuck, in
this epoch, with literalists: the female wallowers and the
feminist Jacobins. It is, o f course, no surprise to see a schizoid
discourse synthesized into a synthetic rhetoric: “ I” the raped
becomes “ I” the Jacobin. As the Jacobins wanted to destroy all
aristocrats, the feminist Jacobins want to destroy all rapists,
which, if one considers the varieties o f heterosexual play,
might well mean all men. They leave out o f their analysis
precisely the sexual stimulation produced by rape as an idea in
the same w ay they will not acknowledge the arousing and
transformative dimensions o f prostitution. To their reductive
minds prostitution is exploitation without more while those
o f us who thrive on adventure and com plexity understand that
prostitution is only an apparent oppression that permits some
women to be sexually active without bourgeois restraints.
Freedom is implicit in prostitution because sex is. Stalinists on
this issue, they see the women as degraded, because they believe
that sex degrades. They will not consider that prostitution is
freedom for women in exactly the same way existentialists
postulated that rape was a phenomenon o f freedom for men—
striking out against the authoritarian state by breaking laws and,
in opposition to all the imperatives o f a repressive society, doing
what one wants. They w on’t admit that a prostitute lives in
every woman. They w on’t admit to the arousal. Instead, they
strategically destroy desire by calling up scenarios o f childhood
sexual abuse, dispossession, poverty, and homelessness. Even
the phallic woman o f pornography has lost her erection by the
end o f the list. Rape as idea and prostitution as idea are o f
inestimable value in sexual communication. We don’t need the
Jacobins censoring our sexual souls. Meanwhile, in the academy
our influence grows while the Jacobins are on the streets,
presumably where they belong if they are sincere. I will keep
writing, applying the values o f agency, nuance, and ambiguity
to the experiences o f women, with a special emphasis on rape
and prostitution. I have no plans to write about the Holocaust
soon, although, I admit, I am increasingly irritated by the
simple-minded formulations o f Elie Wiesel and his ilk. Kvetch,
kvetch. After I get tenure, I will perhaps write an article on the
refusal o f Holocaust survivors to affirm the value o f the
Holocaust itself in their own creative lives. Currently I want
those who are dogmatic about rape and other bad things to keep
their moralisms posing as politics o ff my back and out o f my
bed. I don’t want them in my environment, my little pond. I
w on’t have m y students reading them, respectfully no less, or
m y colleagues inviting them here to speak, to read, to reproduce
simplicities, though not many want to. I like tying up my lover
and she likes it too. I will not be made to feel guilty as if I am
doing something violative. I was that good girl, that obedient
child. Feminism said let go. Y ou can do what a man does. I like
tying her wrists to the bed, I like gagging her, I like dripping hot
w ax on her breasts. It is not the same as when a man does it. She
and I are equals, the same. There is no moral atrocity or political
big deal. I like fantasizing. I like being a top and I like bringing
her to orgasm although I rarely have one myself. I like the sex
magazines, the very ones, o f course, that the Jacobins want to
censor, except for the fact that these magazines keep printing
pictures o f the Jacobins as if they are, in fact, Hieronymous
Bosch pin-ups. One does get angrier with them. One does want
to hurt them , if only to obliterate them from consciousness,
submerge them finally in the deeper recesses o f a more muted
discourse in which they are neither subjects nor objects. One
would exile them to the margins, beyond seeing or sound, but
strangely they are sexualized in the common culture as if they are
the potent women. Everyone pays attention to them and I and
others like me are ignored, except o f course when the publishers
o f the sex magazines ask one or the other o f us to write essays
denouncing them. But then, o f course, one must think about
them. When I’m having sex I find that more and more I have one
o f them under me in my fantasy, I hear her voice, accusing, I
muffle the sound o f her voice with my fist, I push it into my
lover’s mouth, slowly, purposefully, easy now. M y lover thinks
m y intensity is for her. I can’t stand the voice saying I’m wrong. I
really would wipe it out if I could. It makes for angry, passionate
sex, a kind o f playful fury. The Jacobin despises me. I have more
in common with the so-called rapist, the man who makes love
by orchestrating pain, the subtle so-called rapist, the knowing
so-called rapist, the educated so-called rapist, the one who
seduces, at least a little, and uses force because it’s sexy; it is sexy;
I like doing it and the men I know know I like doing it, to a
woman; they are pro-gay. I’m an ally and I will get tenure. I’m
their frontline defense. If I can do it, they can do it. The so-called
rapists in my university are educated men. We like sex and to
each his own. In my mind I have the Jacobin under me, and in
m y nuanced world she likes it. I am not simple-minded. Rape
so-called is her problem, not mine. I have been hurt but it was
a long time ago. I’m not the same girl.
Author
’s Note
In a study o f 930 randomly selected adult women in San
Francisco in 1978 funded by the National Institute for Mental
Health, Diana Russell found that forty-four percent o f the
wom en had experienced rape or attempted rape as defined by
California state law at least once. The legal definition o f rape in
California and most other states was: forced intercourse (i. e.
penile-vaginal penetration), intercourse obtained by threat o f
force, or intercourse completed when the woman was
drugged, unconscious, asleep, or otherwise totally helpless
and hence unable to consent. N o other form o f sexual assault
was included in the definition; therefore, no other form o f
sexual assault was included in the statistic. O f the forty-four
percent, fully half had experienced more than one such attack,
the number o f attacks ranging from two to nine. Pair and
group rapes, regardless o f the number o f assailants, were
counted as one attack. Multiple attacks by the same person
were counted as one attack. See Diana E. H. Russell, Sexual
Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, and Workplace
Harassment, Sage Publications, 1984; see also Russell, Rape In
Marriage, Macmillan Publishing C o ., Inc., 1982 and The Secret
Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women, Basic Books,
Inc., Publishers, 1986.
Linda Marchiano, slave name Linda Lovelace, “ star” o f the
pornographic film Deep Throat, was first hypnotized, then
taught self-hypnosis by the man who pimped her, to suppress
the gag response in her throat. She taught herself to relax all
her throat muscles in order to minimize the pain o f deep
thrusting to the bottom o f her throat. She was brought into
prostitution and pornography through seduction and gang
rape, a not uncommon combination. Her lover turned her
over without warning to five men in a motel room to whom
he had sold her without her knowledge. Neither her screams
nor her begging stopped them. She was beaten on an almost
daily basis, humiliated, threatened, including with guns, kept
captive and sleep-deprived, and forced to do sex acts ranging
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