Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

Loose Women, Lecherous Men (43 page)

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
2.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
Page 172
icy of preventing and responding to this kind of intimate violence, despite a batterer's constant presence on campus.
49
Gender role socialization that prompts many women to take full responsibility for the success of their relationships convinces them that if only they were better lovers, housekeepers, mothers, or support systems for their families or their partners, the abuse would stop. These beliefs persist despite the clinical documentation of battered woman syndrome, a psychological condition much like the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by war veterans and concentration camp and hostage survivors. Those who suffer from such conditions reexperience the traumatic events in dreams and externally stimulated memory, have difficulty concentrating, feel detached and alienated from loved ones, and suffer insomnia and nightmares. As with victims of sexual harassment and rape, a battered woman's psychic life features fear, shock, shame, anger, distrust, sadness, guilt, and helplessness. Suicide rates among battered women are high, as if they were carrying their abusers' destructiveness with them.
50
The sexual violation of a young girl is perhaps the most difficult to countenance. Florence Rush notes that the youngest victims of sexual abuse may suffer from internal hemorrhaging and ruptures from penises and objects too large for their fragile bodies; they can also enter clinics ravaged by disease and infection.
51
Not all of the sexual abuse of girls is this physically violent, at least not in the beginning: Sandra Butler reports that in the majority of father-daughter incest cases, the abuse begins with fondling, then escalates to intercourse at puberty, after a history of sexual play justifies to the father the move to the next step.
52
Even in the absence of violent abuse, the sexual molestation of girls is invasive in its violation of the trust that a young girl has been taught to place in those adults who are responsible for her protection and well-being. Like the rape of teen and adult women, the sexual violation and abuse of a prepubescent girl is perpetrated largely by men she knows and often loves or trusts: a father, stepfather, mother's boyfriend, brother's schoolmate, uncle, grandfather, foster father. Such men are typically not regarded by their community as self-serving pedophiles, mental misfits, or criminals on the loose but as law-abiding, church-going "family" men.
53
If a man's emotional security, sexual virility, and social status define his masculine identity yet are constantly being threatened by other men equally driven to establish their power positions in a male hierarchy, powerless children can be exploited to reassert a man's masculinity, particularly in the privacy of his home. Women's entry into the workforce in ever-increasing numbers and feminists' challenges to men's presumption of institutional dominance have often been blamed for men turning to their domestic lives to reestablish their perceived loss of control. Diana Russell argues that men far outnumber women as perpetrators of child sexual abuse because of men's gender role socialization to initiate and control the sex they want, to divorce sexuality from affection or intimacy, and to sexualize emotions that women regard as maternal and caring. As with rape, Russell attributes the sexual abuse of girls to the social and economic power disparity between women and men and to a culture of violence that dominates the effectiveness of social institutions to control the abuse.
54
Like adult women, children have traditionally been viewed as the property of the family patriarch. Many feminists argue that such a tradition lives on in the lack
 
Page 173
of credibility and legal rights we afford the contemporary child. The belief in a male right to the unconditional sexual accessibility of children certainly appears to live on in the booming global business in child pornography and prostitution. Some feminists critical of pederasty and pedophilia suggest that this same sense of entitlement comes into play in the male sexual "deviant."
55
Sexual activity between children and adults is a crime in every state in the United States: statutory rape and sexual molestation laws prohibit vaginal, oral, or anal sex with a legal minor as well as the fondling of her genitals or private parts. Physicians, psychologists, teachers, social workers, and other professionals who closely supervise children are required by law to report all suspected cases of such activity to law enforcement agencies; police are required to investigate reports made; prosecutors are required to prosecute. Yet the horror at the offense by some professionals, their need to find serious physical injury before they report abuse, the predisposition of police and prosecutors to disbelieve children in the face of denials by adults, and children who are manipulated or forced into retractions all contribute to a system that often fails to protect children from adults who wish to abuse them sexually. Often the child is the one who feels punished by being removed from the only home she knows. Indeed, the irony in this is that sexual abuse commonly exists in juvenile halls and foster care as well.
56
When the perpetrator of child abuse is white but the victim is not, women of color find convictions more difficult to get than when the perpetrator is a man of color. The most common convictions still involve a black perpetrator and a white victim. As I mentioned earlier, researchers report that offenders are overwhelmingly male. Female perpetrators of child sexual abuse are not only much rarer than males but use less violence and verbal threats to get what they want, are less likely to molest children much younger than themselves, and almost never molest girls. Nevertheless, a young girl's fear of reprisal, of being disbelieved, of breaking up her family, or of hurting or leaving her parents, combined with her confusion over what is actually happening to her and her ignorance of where to turn when she believes something is wrong, make the probability that authorities will discover her abuse from an adult of either sex extremely low.
57
Survivors of incest who have endured many years of oral, anal, and/or vaginal intercourse by their fathers often struggle to develop self-esteem and self-confidence. Adult sex can be difficult, reminding them of their vulnerability and failure of control as children. One woman writes of her feelings of violation and intrusion, "How do I feel? Emptylostdisgustedangryguiltysuicidal inside. I am exploding with emotions, but outside I am emptyI feel like my eyes are black holes to my soul."
58
Some women develop split personalities from incestuous abuse as a way to metaphysically and psychically dissociate themselves from their trauma. Ironically, this personality profile is often judged
normal
for women, since the feminine stereotype is that of a "charmingly unsure, ambivalent and slightly confused" person.
59
Judith Lewis Herman has documented how the emotional upheaval of many incest victims matches the post-traumatic stress disorder of the rape trauma victim and the traumatized battered woman, including not only the dissociation of the split personality but also insomnia, nausea, overreaction, nightmares, and the intrusion of constantly reliving the trauma in memory. Herman wryly points out that only after
 
Page 174
successful efforts by combat veterans to legitimize post-traumatic stress disorder did the trauma suffered by victims of sexual violence become recognized as not just another form of female hysteria. Young women's antisocial behavior; problems with drugs, diet, or alcohol; or difficulty with adult authority can often be traced to earlier sexual abuse.
60
Mothers of incest victims are often blamed by authorities and by their own children for not protecting them from men's abuse, for being already too burdened to handle the strain of the exposure, or for not staying home and being a "real" mother. Many mothers' frustration with their own powerlessness within the family, their loyalty to their husbands, and their competition with their children make intervening in the abuse a difficult task. In their preoccupation with social recrimination and personal guilt in a society that has acculturated them to take full responsibility for the emotional well-being of their families, many mothers simply choose to ignore what is going on.
61
While some sex radicals and mental health professionals have claimed that children have a right to sex, I suggested in chapter 3 that children have little experience in saying no to adults who tempt them either with attention and affection or with physical and emotional security in exchange for sex. Often they do not understand their own or others' sexuality, ignorance of which is used to the advantage of the abuser. Even some politically active gay pedophiles assert that heterosexual pedophilia under conditions of gender inequality is a "reprehensible form of power tripping."
62
Yet even if it is insured that children in nonhierarchical settings have the sexual knowledge and economic freedom to make informed and unfettered sexual choices, sexual activity between adult and child, especially adult male and female child, will always carry with it the burden of proof that such activity is not exploitative of a child's emotional immaturity. To stress this point, Sandra Butler has characterized incest in terms of incestuous assault, in which an adult family member imposes sexual contact on a child "who is unable to alter or understand the adult's behavior because of his or her powerlessness in the family and early stage of psychological development." Florence Rush asserts that children are entitled to be free of their violation by exploitative and violent adults and to legislation that insures against abuses of power.
63
Sexual Terrorization
Several feminists have argued that the sexual intimidation of women is victimizing not only for its violent and violating intrusiveness but also for its success in instilling
terror
in women. According to this view, a woman who is intimidated by the possibility of sexual harassment, rape, woman battering, and child sexual abuse feels a wariness, paranoia, and fear that come from not being able to predict if or when her actual violation will occur, who the perpetrators will be, or whether she will be able to protect herself adequately from the abuse. This is the thrust of Sandra Lee Bartky's comment quoted earlier that a woman living under conditions of male dominance can experience her sexual violation by almost anyone, anytime, anywhere she goes. In this way, a climate is created in which a woman's fear becomes a part of her everyday life. Robin Morgan has called the daily insistence of this fear "the normalization of terror," which functions, among other things, to keep individual women from
 
Page 175
properly assessing the extent of their sexual danger. Morgan compares a woman's daily condition to a population terrorized by subnational groups or clandestine state agents whose political, premeditated motivation "is not to kill or to destroy property but to break the spirit of the opposition."
64
Bat-Ami Bar On suggests that terrorism is a formative process that produces people who are psychologically and morally diminished by a constant, threatening surveillance. A terrorized woman no longer has control over what happens to her. From this point of view, a woman who is not individually terrorized by a boyfriend or husband must still live with institutional terrorism in the fear that at anytime, any one man might victimize her. Thus, every woman is terrorized because she is a member of a class all of whose members are potential targets. Susan Brownmiller comments, "That
some
men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation."
65
From this perspective, a woman's terror is exacerbated by the fact that her sexual intimidation is enforced by a secrecy and silence for which she perceives a real threat of punishment if broken. A woman who is sexually harassed at work or at school often does not report her abuse for fear that the harasser will "get her later" either by impugning her own character or by actually raping her. Her lack of confidence in the grievance procedures available to her, her lack of self-confidence due to the humiliating attacks, and her embarrassment at having to describe such attacks reinforce this fear.
66
Men who create a hostile environment for women with off-color jokes, comments, cartoons, sex toys, or pornography often do so with just enough irregularity and variety that a woman cannot know how to prevent what is happening or defend herself against it. Sandra Lee Bartky writes:
Feminist consciousness is a little like paranoia, especially when the feminist first begins to apprehend the full extent of sex discrimination and the subtlety and variety of the ways in which it is enforced. Its agents are everywhere, even inside her own mind, since she can fall prey to self-doubt or to a temptation to compliance. In response to this, the feminist becomes vigilant and suspicious.
67
If her harasser is her supervisor or professor, a woman may fear for her job or academic standing if she does not comply. She may wonder whether it is her work quality or her sexuality that got her the position in the first place. Despite legislation designed to allay such fears, the process of reporting and prosecuting a harasser is still a harrowing and uncertain experience for many women.
68
Unlike sexual harassment, stranger rape is an act of violence that, according to Susan Griffin, "always carries with it the threat of death." Among many women, only murder is feared more than rape. Susan Brownmiller calls stranger rapists "anonymous agents of terror" whose rape is "designed to intimidate and inspire fear."
69
Griffin refers generally to rape as a form of what she calls "mass terrorism,'' where women are victimized indiscriminately then blamed for behaving as though they were free. I would qualify Griffin's remark by noting that date rapists can be quite particular about whom they rape; their purpose is not just to dominate and control some woman or other but to dominate
this
woman sexually. Ironically, the threat of stranger rape can terrorize women into seeking intimate relationships with men as a means of protection, even though women are more likely to be raped by an intimate than by a stranger. Indeed, some black feminists contend that the historical lynch-
BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
2.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Power to Burn by Fienberg, Anna
Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal
The Two of Us by Andy Jones
The Art of Sinning by Sabrina Jeffries
Prince Amos by Gary Paulsen
Their Wicked Ways by Julia Keaton