eBook - ePub
Rape
The Politics of Consciousness
Susan Griffin
This is a test
Share book
- 147 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Rape
The Politics of Consciousness
Susan Griffin
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
A powerful feminist examination of the deeply ingrained roots of rape in our shared cultural values Rape is the most frequently occurring violent crime in America. In this courageous, controversial, and groundbreaking work, the poet, feminist, and philosopher Susan Griffin examines rape as an inevitable result of a culture that celebrates and rewards aggressive sexual behavior in men, and one in which male dominance and female submissiveness have long been considered natural. With razor-sharp intelligence, clear-eyed candor, and surprising lyricism, Griffin explores the psychological, historical, political, and societal underpinnings of this devastating act, which cruelly denies a victim her self-determination. By viewing the dark phenomenon of rape through the lens of her personal experienceâand through the words of injured parties, writers, legal agencies, and the mediaâGriffin's powerful discourse is an essential contribution to feminist thought and literature.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Rape an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Rape by Susan Griffin in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Feminism & Feminist Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
PART FOUR
The Power of Consciousness:
A Collage
compiled by Sandy Boucher and Susan Griffin
In this collage, we have woven together words from the feminist movement, events from our recent history, and reflections from the patriarchy, both ancient and modern, about women, all bearing on the subject of rape and the power of consciousness to change our lives. This collection is necessarily partial and its weavings eccentric, but we trust it to ring back into the life of each reader, so that her own experience resonates with the stories, the statements made, the wisdom revealed in these documents. We ring the bell; the response is hers.
Sandy Boucher and Susan Griffin
Berkeley, California, Winter Solstice, 1986
In order that we stop being victims, we ourselves must take up the struggle against rape. Individually and collectively we can break the silence and make it no longer a taboo subject, or something shameful which weighs us down.
French witness. In Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Eds.), The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, 1976
Few Latinas could fail to believe Inez Garciaâs inability to describe the experience of rape to the policemen who arrested her. We are painfully shy about our bodies and about sex. When she later complained of pains âdown thereâ to a woman prison attendant, she was taken to a doctor who reportedly implied that Inez was upset, imagining things, and didnât examine her.âŠ
We Latinas are not encouraged to be articulate about any part of our experience, much less about sexual abuse.âŠ
In the courtroom she decided to defy the twin macho assumptions of Latin culture, that a woman belongs to a man; and that a woman dishonored by belonging to more than one man is herself at fault, as sinful as Eve. She defied the shameful silence with which women, especially Latinas, are supposed to treat their own sexual enslavement. I am grateful to her.
Maria del Drago, Ms., May 1975
âYou could have screamedâwhy did you suddenly lose your voice?â
His words sank deep and bitter within me. For, dominated by a feeling of shame, I believed them. I could not face him, could not be entirely honest and open about such thingsâit was too shocking, too shameful; I was not entirely conscious of their truth. I was too poisoned with shame and dishonesty about sex to face any situation clearly.
Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth, 1973
When the defiled female says, âThat is the gentleman who raped me,â we need corroboration. If her jaw is broken, for example, that is proof of force. Otherwise, how do we know she was raped? The difference between rape and romance is a very thin line.
N.Y. State Assemblyman Joseph F. Lisa, Redbook, September 1972
In Holland rape is a hidden problem. The police admit that rape exists, but when a woman comes to them to report a rape, the reaction is often that she has provoked it. Very often she is not treated seriously. Thatâs why the group âVrouwen tegen verkrachtingâ (Women against rape) started in Amsterdam in November â75.⊠In the first month we opened our center, we got 150 phone calls from women who had been raped or assaulted.
Dutch witness. In Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Eds.), The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, 1976
Mamie Carter said firmly, âIf you look at the laws covering rape youâll see they all stem from the property code. Now Almetaâat sixty-five a woman is not considered of much value as property so her rapist wasnât even indicted. And if she is black too sheâs not even believed. The fact is, people feel sex is obscene with the old, but you all read the tittering between the lines. The fourteen-year-old girl was property not really damaged since her hymen was left intact, so her rapist was allowed to plead to a lesser sentence.
June Arnold, Sister Gin, 1975
So determined were the Levites that a reverent regard for the paternity of children be developed that among them even violent rape was equated with marriage, much as it was among the Indo-European-controlled Assyrians. In Levite law, the rape of a virgin was honored as a declaration of ownership and brought about a forced marriage.
Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman, 1976
If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbourâs wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die:
But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:
For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.
If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damselâs father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
Deuteronomy 22:23â29
The interviewer: Do you see rape as much worse than physical assault, or do you see it as equivalent?
Ms. Gold: I see rape as being worse in that it doesnât come from a need for money and it doesnât come from total insanity either. Whatever it is that causes someone to hit someone else is horrifying in a different kind of way. Rape seems to be so imbedded in our society. It seems just a natural outcome of the way that men are. And that is a really frightening thing.
Diana E. H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victimâs Perspective, 1975
Allowing a male friend into your home who turns violent and rapes you cannot be prosecuted in court. In the eyes of the court, allowing the male into your home implies consent for him to have sexual intercourse with you. The courts apparently see that opening your front door to a man means that the vagina is opened to his penis. As brash and boorish as these conclusions may sound, we must understand that they constitute the thinking of society and the courts, not of women.
Kathy Barry, in Stop Rape (pamphlet), 1972
People in Scandinavia have a reputation for being free and tolerant. According to criminologists, Scandinavian police are considered the least corrupt in the Western world. Nevertheless; if a woman has trespassed just a few steps outside the limited sphere of her accepted premises, she will be met by suspicion if she accuses anyone of raping her, or she will be downright disbelieved. If Scandinavian women really behaved as the liberated women people in many countries think we are, we could not count on being respected and treated with dignity.
In Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Eds.), The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, 1976
Rape is a punishment without crime or guiltâat least not subjective guilt. It is punishment, rather, for the objective crime of femaleness. That is why it is indiscriminate. It is primarily a lesson for the whole class of womenâa strange lesson, in that it does not teach a form of behavior which will save women from it. Rape teaches instead the objective, innate, and unchanging subordination of women relative to men.
Barbara Mherof and Pamela Kearon, Notes from the Third Year: Womenâs Liberation, 1972
There is not real affliction unless the event which has gripped and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical.⊠Affliction causes God to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love.⊠That is why those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it are killers of souls.
Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader, 1977
The souls of women are so small
That some believe theyâve none at all.
Samuel Butler, Selections from Notebooks, 1950
I was raped by my fatherâs best friend when I was 14. My father had died only a little time before this. This situation was really traumatic for me, not solely because of the rape, but mainly because it was the outcome of the rejection I felt by my parents and the lack of love which existed in our family. Afterwards, I was made to feel dreadfully guilty. This man blamed me. The next morning he told me I was a bitch, a whore, a little slut, etc., etc. And when I tried to talk about it, when I tried to say what had happened to me, people threw the same accusations at me.⊠Since I felt so completely put down at that time, I felt I had no choice but physical death or internal death. For years I suffered terribly because of this experience. I was 18 before I managed to speak about it again.
French witness. In Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Eds.), The Proceedings of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, 1976
The atmosphere outside the [sorority] houses is less protected. âHey, horny, over here,â some fraternity boys yell at us as we walk across the street. At another house, there is a commotion on the roof. Four frat boys are checking us out and flashing numbers on cardboard from one to ten, judging our comparative assets. All the rushees make a supreme effort not to notice.âŠ
It isnât over, not yetâthere is still the so-called âpig run.â
We girls traditionally pick up our bidsâinvitations to join a houseâand then go running and squealing down frat row to our new homesâat least thatâs the chauvinistic fraternity version. Hundreds of frat men line the sidewalks on Saturday morning guzzling beer and hooting.⊠Last year, [a young man] tells me, one frat rented a 600-pound hog and brought it to pig run on a leash. It had a sign written on its back that said, âWhereâs my bid?â
Amy Linn, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2, 1978
I grabbed her from behind, and turned her around and pushed her against the wall. Iâm six foot four ⊠I weighed about two hundred and forty pounds at this time, and she didnât have much chance to get away from me. She tried. I pulled her back and hit her several times in the face quite hard, and she stopped resisting and she said, âAll right, just donât hurt me.â And I think when she said that ⊠all of a sudden a thought came into my head: My God, this is a human being.âŠ
It was difficult for me at that time to even admit that when I was talking to a woman, I was dealing with a human being, because, if you read menâs magazines, you hear about your stereo, your car, your chick.âŠ
Man who attempted rape at age 17, Ms., December 1972
The childhood of women must be free and untrammeled. The girl must be allowed to romp and play, climb, skate and swim; her clothing must be more like that of the boyâstrong, loose-fitting garments, thick boots, etc., that she may be out at all times and enter freely into all kinds of sports. Teach her to go alone, by night and day, if need be, on the lonely highway, or through the busy streets of the crowded metropolis. The manner in which all courage and self-reliance is educated out of the girl, her path portrayed with many dangers and difficulties that never exist, is melancholy indeed. Better, far, suffer occasional insults or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without a protector. The best protector any woman can have ⊠is courage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience: An American Documentary, 1977
If you wear a bikini or tiny miniskirt to the market, be warned: ...