(16 percent pair rapes, 27 percent group rapes). 33 I want to
tell you about two multiple rapes in some detail. The first is
reported by Medea and Thompson in Against Rape. A twenty-
five-year-old woman, mentally retarded, with a mental age of
eleven years, lived alone in an apartment in a university town.
She was befriended by some men from a campus fraternity.
These men took her to the fraternity house, whereupon she
was raped by approximately forty men. These men also tried
to force intercourse between her and a dog. These men also
put bottles and other objects up her vagina. Then, they took
her to a police station and charged her with prostitution.
Then, they offered to drop the charges against her if she was
institutionalized. She was institutionalized; she discovered that
she was pregnant; then, she had a complete emotional breakdown.
One man who had been a participant in the rape bragged
about it to another man. That man, who was horrified, told a
professor. A campus group confronted the fraternity. At first,
the accused men admitted that they had committed all the acts
charged, but they denied that it was rape since, they claimed,
the woman had consented to all of the sexual acts committed.
Subsequently, when the story was made public, these same
men denied the story completely.
A women’s group on campus demanded that the fraternity
be thrown off campus to demonstrate that the university did
not condone gang rape. No action was taken against the fraternity by university officials or by the police. 34
The second story that I want to tell was reported by Robert
Sam Anson in an article called “That Championship Season”
in New Times magazine. 35 According to Anson, on July 25,
1974, Notre Dame University suspended for at least one year
six black football players for what the university called “a
serious violation of university regulations. ” An eighteen-year-
old white high school student, it turned out, had charged the
football players with gang rape.
The victim’s attorney, the county prosecutor, the local reporter assigned to cover the story, a trustee of the local newspaper—all were Notre Dame alumni, and all helped to cover up the rape charge.
Notre Dame University, according to Anson, has insisted
that no crime was committed. It was the consensus of university officials that the football players were just sowing their wild oats in an old-fashioned gang bang, and that the victim
was a willing participant. The football players were suspended
for having sex in their dormitory. The President of Notre
Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, a noted liberal and scholar, a
Catholic priest, insisted that no rape took place and said that
the university would produce, if necessary, “dozens of eyewitnesses. ” I quote Anson:
Hesburgh’s conclusions are based on an hour-long personal
interview with the six football players, along with an investigation conducted by his Dean of Students, John Macheca, a. . .
former university public relations man. . . Macheca himself will
say nothing about his investigation. . . Various campus sources
close to the case say that, throughout his investigation, no university official spoke either to the girl [j/c] or her parents. Hesburgh himself professes neither to know or to care. He says testily, “It’s irrelevant.. . . I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ”36
According to Anson, had Dr. Hesburgh talked to “the girl” he
would have heard this story: after work late on July 3, she
went to Notre Dame to see the football player she had been
dating; they made love twice on his dormitory bunk; he left
the room; she was alone and undressed, wrapped in a sheet;
another football player entered the room; she had a history of
hostility and confrontation with this second football player
(he had made a friend of hers pregnant, he had refused to pay
for an abortion, she had confronted him on this, finally he did
pay part of the money); this second football player and the
woman began to quarrel and he threatened that, unless she
submit to him sexually, he would throw her out the third-story
window; then he raped her; four other football players also
raped her; during the gang rape, several other football players
were in and out of the room; when the woman finally was able
to leave the dormitory she drove immediately to a hospital.
Both the police investigator on the case and a source in the
prosecutor’s office believe the victim’s story— that there was a
gang rape perpetrated on her by the six Notre Dame football
players.
All of the male university authorities who investigated the
alleged gang rape determined that the victim was a slut. This
they did, all of them, by interviewing the accused rapists. In
fact, the prosecutor’s character investigation indicated that the
woman was a fine person. The coach of the Notre Dame football team placed responsibility for the alleged gang rape on the worsening morals of women who watch soap operas.
Hesburgh, moral exemplar that he is, concluded: “I didn’t
need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” The Dean of
Students, John Macheca, expelled the students as a result of
his secret investigation. Hesburgh overruled the expulsion out
of what he called “compassion”— he reduced the expulsion to
one year’s suspension. The rape victim now attends a university in the Midwest. Her life, according to Anson, has been threatened.
The fact is, as these two stories demonstrate conclusively,
that any woman can be raped by any group of men. Her word
will not be credible against their collective testimony. A
proper investigation will not be done. Remember the good
Father Hesburgh’s words as long as you live: “I didn’t need to
talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” Even when a prosecutor is convinced that rape as defined by male law did take place, the rapists will not be prosecuted. Male university officials will protect those sacrosanct male institutions—the football team and the fraternity— no matter what the cost to women.
The reasons for this are terrible and cruel, but you must
know them. Men are a privileged gender class over and
against women. One of their privileges is the right of rape—
that is, the right of carnal access to any woman. Men agree, by
law, custom, and habit, that women are sluts and liars. Men
will form alliances, or bonds, to protect their gender class
interests. Even in a racist society, male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding.
It is very difficult whenever racist and sexist pathologies
coincide to delineate in a political way what has actually happened. In 1838, Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and feminist, described Amerikan institutions as “a system of complicated
crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies
of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood,
sweat, and tears of my sisters in bonds. ”37 Racism and sexism
are the warp and woof of this Amerikan society, the very
fabric of our institutions, laws, customs, and habits— and we
are the inheritors of that complicated system of crimes. In the
Notre Da
me case, for instance, we can postulate that the
prosecutor took the woman’s charges of rape seriously at all
because her accused rapists were black. That is racism and
that is sexism. There is no doubt at all that white male law is
more amenable to the prosecution of blacks for the raping of
white women than the other way around. We can also postulate that, had the Notre Dame case been taken to court, the rape victim’s character would have been impugned irrevocably because her lover was a black. That is racism and that is sexism. We also know that had a black woman been raped,
either by blacks or whites, her rape would go unprosecuted,
unremarked. That is racism and that is sexism.
In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth
more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are
protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male
law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of
the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim’s
life to absolute zero. In the Notre Dame case, the woman’s
lover allowed his fellows to rape her. This was a male bond. In
the course of the rape, at one point when the woman was left
alone— there is no indication that she was even conscious at
this point— a white football player entered the room and
asked her if she wanted to leave. When she did not answer, he
left her there without reporting the incident. This was a male
bond. The cover-up and lack of substantive investigation by
white authorities was male bonding. All women of all races
should recognize that male bonding takes precedence over
racial bonding except in one particular kind of rape: that is,
where the woman is viewed as the property of one race, class,
or nationality, and her rape is viewed as an act of aggression
against the males of that race, class, or nationality. Eldridge
Cleaver in Soul on Ice has described this sort of rape:
I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi I
started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto. . . and
when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks
and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately,
willfully, methodically. >.
Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was
defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. 38
In this sort of rape, women are viewed as the property of men
who are, by virtue of race or class or nationality, enemies.
Women are viewed as the chattel of enemy men. In this situa
tion, and in this situation only, bonds of race or class or nationality will take priority over male bonding. As Cleaver’s testimony makes clear, the women of one’s own group are also viewed as chattel, property, to be used at will for one’s own
purposes. When a black man rapes a black woman, no act of
aggression against a white male has been committed, and so
the man’s right to rape will be defended. It is very important
to remember that most rape is intraracial—that is, black men
rape black women and white men rape white women—because
rape is a sexist crime. Men rape the women they have access
to as a function of their masculinity and as a signet of their
ownership. Cleaver’s outrage “at the historical fact of how the
white man has used the black woman” is wrath over the theft
of property which is rightly his. Similarly, classic Southern
rage at blacks who sleep with white women is wrath over the
theft of property which rightly belongs to the white male. In
the Notre Dame case, we can say that the gender class interests of men were served by determining that the value of the black football players to masculine pride— that is, to the
championship Notre Dame football team—took priority over
the white father’s very compromised claim to ownership of his
daughter. The issue was never whether a crime had been
committed against a particular woman.
Now, I have laid out the dimensions of the rape atrocity. As
women, we live in the midst of a society that regards us as
contemptible. We are despised, as a gender class, as sluts and
liars. We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us— against our bodies and our whole lives. Our characters are defamed, as a gender class, so that no
individual woman has any credibility before the law or in society at large. Our enemies—rapists and their defenders—not only go unpunished; they remain influential arbiters of morality; they have high and esteemed places in the society; they are priests, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, artists, corporation executives, psychiatrists, and teachers.
What can we, who are powerless by definition and in fact,
do about it?
First, we must effectively organize to treat the symptoms of
this dread and epidemic disease. Rape crisis centers are crucial. Training in self-defense is crucial. Squads of women police formed to handle all rape cases are crucial. Women prosecutors on rape cases are crucial.
New rape laws are needed. These new laws must: (1) eliminate corroboration as a requirement for conviction; (2) eliminate the need for a rape victim to be physically injured to prove rape; (3) eliminate the need to prove lack of consent;
(4) redefine consent to denote “meaningful and knowledgeable assent, not mere acquiescence”; (5) lower the unrealistic age of consent; (6) eliminate as admissible evidence the victim’s prior sexual activity or previous consensual sex with the defendant; (7) assure that marital relationship between parties is no defense or bar to prosecution; (8) define rape in terms of degrees of serious injury. 39 These changes in the
rape law were proposed by the New York University Law
Clinical Program in Women’s Legal Rights, and you can find
their whole proposed model rape law in a book called Rape:
The First Sourcebook for Women, by the New York Radical
Feminists. I recommend to you that you investigate this proposal and then work for its implementation.
Also, we must, in order to protect ourselves, refuse to participate in the dating system which sets up every woman as a potential rape victim. In the dating system, women are defined
as the passive pleasers of any and every man. The worth of
any woman is measured by her ability to attract and please
men. The object of the dating game for the man is “to score. ”
In playing this game, as women we put ourselves and our wellbeing in the hands of virtual or actual strangers. As women, we must analyze this dating system to determine its explicit
and implicit definitions and values. In analyzing it, we will see
how we are coerced into becoming sex-commodities.
Also, we must actively seek to publicize unprosecuted cases
of rape, and we must make the identities of rapists known to
other women.
There is also work here for men who do not endorse the
right of men to rape. In Philadelphia, men have formed a
group called Men Organized Against Rape. They deal with
male relatives and friends of rape victims in order to dispel
belief in the myth of female culpability. Sometimes rapists who
are troubled by their
continued aggression against women will
call and ask for help. There are vast educative and counseling
possibilities here. Also, in Lorton, Virginia, convicted sex
offenders have organized a group called Prisoners Against
Rape. They work with feminist task forces and individuals to
delineate rape as a political crime against women and to find
strategies for combating it. It is very important that men who
want to work against rape do not, through ignorance, carelessness, or malice, reinforce sexist attitudes. Statements such as “Rape is a crime against men too” or “Men are also victims
of rape” do more harm than good. It is a bitter truth that rape
becomes a visible crime only when a man is forcibly sodomized. It is a bitter truth that men’s sympathy can be roused when rape is viewed as “a crime against men too. ” These
truths are too bitter for us to bear. Men who want to work
against rape will have to cultivate a rigorous antisexist consciousness and discipline so that they will not, in fact, make us invisible victims once again.
It is the belief of many men that their sexism is manifested
only in relation to women—that is, that if they refrain from
blatantly chauvinistic behavior in the presence of women, then
they are not implicated in crimes against women. That is not
so. It is in male bonding that men most often jeopardize the
lives of women. It is among men that men do the most to
contribute to crimes against women. For instance, it is the
habit and custom of men to discuss with each other their sexual intimacies with particular women in vivid and graphic terms. This kind of bonding sets up a particular woman as the
rightful and inevitable sexual conquest of a man’s male friends
and leads to innumerable cases of rape. Women are raped
often by the male friends of their male friends. Men should
understand that they jeopardize women’s lives by participating
in the rituals of privileged boyhood. Rape is also effectively
sanctioned by men who harass women on the streets and in
other public places; who describe or refer to women in objectifying, demeaning ways; who act aggressively or contemptuously toward women; who tell or laugh at misogynistic jokes; who write stories or make movies where women are raped and
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