mikró olvas, idéz

We live in a society in which adult males have power over all women and children. The nuclear family is not the ‘natural’ way to bring up children, but an institution which maintains male control. It facilitates the exercise of male authority and the exploitation of women, and trains children into the dominant or subordinate positions considered appropriate for men and women in the system of power relationships that is male supremacy.

The effects of sexual abuse on children are precisely those likely to escape the scrutiny of researchers intent on upholding the status quo between men and women. It is because such abuse in the home reinforces rather than disrupts male authority that its effects are considered minimal. It is probably that all father/daughter relationships contain some element of sexual pressure which is merely part of the normal training programme for young girls. We learn to flirt, to please and to win affection from older males in a position of authority by ‘being a good girl for daddy’. Some fathers cause distress to their daughters by watching them undress or giving them prolonged goodnight kisses. The point at which being ‘daddy’s little girl’ shades into what can be called sexual abuse is not as clearly defined as writers on the subject would have us believe.

Victim blaming has become a popular approach to the explanation of crime in the last thirty years. A new discipline called ‘Victimology’ has been invented with its own journal and institutes to stand alongside criminology. The victimologists claim to study the victim in the same way as criminologists study the criminal. Victimology has been applied to rape from its inception. It has been a particularly popular approach to child sexual abuse because of the Freudian assumptions behind much work in this area, i.e. that children really want sexual relations with their parents and are likely to initiate them. Many studies adopt this approach and divide victims into participant or non-participant, precipitating or non-precipitating groups. The evidence used to prove participation or even precipitation involves such things as accepting sweets or talking to strangers (Virkkunen, 1975). The greater power, authority and influence of male adults combined with the fear, lack of understanding of adult male sexuality and the desire for approval of the child, are never mentioned, or taken into consideration.

At the interpersonal level, rape is an exercise in male power over specific women. At the level of the male/female class or caste system, it is a form of social control of all women.

It is the social control of women by the ‘male state’, i.e. the historical, cultural and social context, which sanctions and promotes the differing power relationships between men and women. This means that acts of physical and sexual violence by individual men can be seen not as deviant, but as an over-zealous use of power vested in them by being members of the male ‘class’ with all that this implies. Further, this over-zealous use of power by a few serves to maintain the power position of all men.

Talking to my friends that day about disengaging, part of what I knew was that if I were serious about ‘disappearing’ patriarchy, I could never again work to get laws passed in the system. I finally understood that men, who own all laws—since they make, interpret, and enforce them—will never manipulate their legal system in a way that threatens their privilege. I remembered what happens when women finally do persuade men to pass laws for us: how women’s hard work in California, for instance, finally produced a no-fault divorce law that, though it quickly proved disastrous for them, they couldn’t get rid of because it was so profitable for men; how women in many states, by dint of extraordinary dedication and labor, got child support payment laws passed only to see them succeed primarily for men in extorting child support from women; how the same holds true for custody laws—men are using the laws we worked for to take our children away from us. Men use the laws we get them to pass as daggers to stab us in the back. How many lessons do we need before we learn the simple facts of gender-based control? I have decided not to be an accomplice in my own oppression any longer, never again to hand men weapons with which to kill me.

Reality is what we believe we will see when we look there, what we think is possible, what we have been told to believe is true, very strong, inevitable, unchangeable, irrevocable. Reality is what we are conditioned to value, and therefore what we pay attention to. Reality is what we are taught to think god plunked down in front of us and we have no choice but to learn to live with the best we can. It is what is called ‘natural.’ Reality, then, is an internal construct, and it is defined and controlled by the dominant group. The moment we internalize men’s propaganda, their reality comes to live in our hearts and minds. Then, projecting it out onto our external screen, out onto the harbor or our friend’s front door, we proceed to interact with it in ways that make it concrete, that institutionalize it, that real-ize it. In order for it to continue, all of us have to wake up every morning and project again what we believe is real out onto our external screen and immediately begin again to connect with it in reciprocal ways. This is how we are intimately and every moment involved in its creation and perpetuation.

There is no law in Britain which forbids women to be independent, to live alone or with other women, to go out alone at night, to refuse to relate to men sexually or emotionally; yet in so many reported cases of rapes the behaviour of the victim is cited as provocation. She was hitch-hiking (she asked for it). She was wearing a low-cut dress (she asked for it). She left her door open (she asked for it). She seemed friendly in the pub. She came up for coffee. I only wanted to talk to her and she told me to fuck off. She’s a lesbian. She’s a prostitute. She’s had two abortions. She had to be punished. Feminists: bitter, frigid, man-haters: what you need is a good fuck. The whole point being to keep each woman isolated from her sisters, the protected property of one man, who has exclusive sexual rights over her body. It is not a crime for a man to rape his wife.

Since in patriarchal society man is considered to be the hunter/doer/seducer/instigator, the one-that-goes-out-and… it is considered quite OK and normal for a man to try to persuade a woman to have sexual intercourse. He asks her to dance, she accepts. (She wants to, or she doesn’t want to, but she’s afraid of hurting his feelings, she’s afraid of making him angry, and wants a man to dance with). He asks her out, she accepts. (She wants to, or she doesn’t want to, but all her friends have got blokes, she’s afraid of making him angry, he might feel hurt and she can’t go out if she’s on her own.) He kisses her. He puts his hand on her leg, her breast, her cunt. He wants to see how far he can go. She lets him. (She wants to, or she doesn’t want to, but he’s taken her out after all, and spent money on her, she needs a lift home, she doesn’t want to seem a prude, and he might be angry.) He asks her to sleep with him. She accepts. (She wants to, or she doesn’t want to but she thinks she might as well, she can’t back off now, it might be OK, she’s flattered that he wants her, and he might be angry.) Or she refuses. He tries to persuade her. He tells her he loves her. He says she doesn’t love him. He calls her a prude, immature, frigid. He says he ‘needs’ sex, so if she doesn’t come across, he’ll have to find a girl who will. Each time they meet he carries on a bit further, a bit further. (‘Why not go all the way?’) He buys Durex to demonstrate his sense of personal responsibility. Each time she finally tells him to stop and breaks away, he gets angry, he rages, he sulks; he tells her how bad it is for men to be left ‘excited’. (Prick-teaser!) He teaches her to suck him off. He works towards his goal, which is her vagina. He means to have, to possess this woman. This is not rape, this is normal everyday stuff. The magazines call it young love. So if this is normal and acceptable, no wonder the rape law in this country is ambiguous. If a man believes, however erroneously, that the woman he is fucking has consented to being fucked, he is not guilty of rape. So if a woman shows any sign of reluctance, that is not to say she does not really want to. She needs talking around, she is playing hard to get, she needs turning on, she likes a rough time. In heterosexual relationships it is the man’s desires which come first and which are necessary. Then it is up to him to make the woman want sex as well. But if she does not, he can go ahead anyway. He has his penis. He has his erection. There is the woman, there is the vagina. So what is rape? And what, exactly, is ‘consent’?

Men’s images of our bodies are thrust upon us wherever we go – in magazines, on advertising hoardings, on the tube, in the newspapers, in films, etc., etc. This makes us self-conscious about our bodies, the way we sit and stand and walk – when was the last time you saw a woman sprawled across a bus seat the way men do all the time? We keep our knees together, our legs crossed, our faces neutral. Somewhere in our minds we are always aware that any man – every man – can, if he wants to, use the weapon of rape against us. And men know it too. The man who utters obscenities at us in the streets knows it, the local greengrocer who insists on calling us love (although we have objected) knows it, the wolf-whistling building workers know it, the man on the tube reading page three and grinning at us knows it. At one point on a Reclaim the Night march in Soho, we were confronted by a large crowd of men shouting: ‘We’re on the rapist’s side – we’re with the rapist’. They did not really need to tell us. We already knew.

The conceptions of ‘sexuality’, ‘obscenity’, and ‘pornography’ are commonly used unquestioningly. After all, ‘everybody knows’ that men have innate sexual ‘needs’, often beyond their control, to which women, like it or not, have to cater. It’s much easier, of course, if we are persuaded that we do like it, which is what the sexual ‘liberation’ of the sixties was about. Alternatively, if women’s minds cannot be changed, why not start at the other end and change the body to fit the ‘need’? This is variously known as ‘plastic surgery’, ‘clitoridectomy’, ‘foot binding’ etc., depending on where or when you happen to live. Failing these methods, there are always more overt forms of violence…

It is not surprising that sex between women has always featured highly and widely on the porn menu. Laboratory research has shown, in a very convoluted way and what lesbians knew all along, that lesbianism poses one of the ultimate threats to the heterosexual sense of ‘manhood’. Porn provides the necessary mechanism for diffusing that threat to the male psyche. Mavissakalian et al (1975) showed that, when exposed to various forms of erotic stimuli, men were overwhelmingly ‘turned on’ (i.e. got erections) by images of lesbian sex, in contrast to those of hetero sex or of women alone. Within the ‘action mags’, the lesbian depictions are never completed without the inevitable male entering the scene wielding what (he would like to think) they ‘really need’ – his ‘angry’ prick. It seems probable that as lesbians and the women’s liberation movement become stronger and more visible, so such porn depictions will escalate.

So-called ‘soft’ pornography, used to promote consumer goods and in which women themselves are portrayed as consumer goods, also functions as a permanent symbol, ‘everywhere, all the time’ – a public form of flag-waving from billboards, ‘pin-ups’, and page three onwards – to remind women that our bodies are supposed to be men’s territory. What would seem to be defined as ‘soft’ porn are those static images of women, clothed, semi-clothed or naked, which only hint at the innumerable possibilities to which our bodies may be put. Such images are deemed to be acceptable because the suggestions remain implicit; it is on the other side of the billboards, in the realm of so-called ‘hardcore’, that the game is really given away.

Prior to marriage, a woman’s sexuality is a commodity to be held in trust for its rightful owner. Making ‘free’ use of one’s own sexuality is like making ‘free’ use of someone else’s money. One can act autonomously only with things that belong to oneself. Things held in trust for others are surrounded with special duties which place the trustee under strict obligations for the care and maintenance of the assets in question… Women are not regarded as being entitled to use their sexuality according to their own desires because their sexuality is not theirs for the use of such purposes. Their duty is to preserve it in the best possible condition for the ultimate use and disposition of its rightful owner.

One aspect of this ideology [the ideology of differentness] is the parallel that may be drawn between stereotypes of women and stereotypes of children (which are oppressive to both). Stereotypes tend to polarise into dichotomies, viz. masculine/feminine, adult/childlike. What is adult is often equated with what is masculine, and that which is childlike with that which is feminine. An example of this is provided by a study of American clinicians’ assessment of indicators of mental health (Broverman et al., 1970). Their depiction of the ‘normal healthy adult’ proved to be almost identical with that of the ‘normal healthy man’ while the characteristics of the ‘normal healthy woman’ were virtually the opposite. Women, in order to be characterised as ‘healthy’, should be dependent, emotional, vulnerable, child-like creatures. If normal, adult humanness is by definition male, then, given our cultural tendency to think in opposites, the female of the species is not quite normal, not quite adult, and not quite human. Conceptions of maturity are gender-bound: there is a contradiction between the requirements of maturity per se and those of mature womanhood. The attainment of the latter would seem to be dependent upon retaining certain child-like attributes in order to progress from being a girl child to become a feminine child-woman. This is an obvious ideological reflection of women’s material dependence in the form of a psychological dependence which we are supposed to share with that archetypal dependent: the child. Just as children are deemed to be in need of adult protection, so are we – where adult = male.

Marxist theory, like functionalist theory, is protective of men. In presupposing heterosexuality to be a biologically natural phenomenon, and presenting couples and heterosexual parenthood as having arisen because they were functional for economic class-based societies, this approach conveniently (for men) averts its eyes from questioning how these social relations can be seen to benefit all men at the expense of all women. Men are excused from the oppression of women – in the first case, because it is ‘biologically natural’ and in the second, because it is ‘necessary for the economic system’. And just as the direct interest of men in the exploitation of women is rendered invisible and legitimised in this view of the world, so any fundamental future problems in the achievement of the liberation of women remain unseen. It is not surprising that marxist-feminists have run into major difficulties in attempting to ‘extend’ marxist theory to explain male dominant/female subordinate relations. This is not to deny the considerable and invaluable insights into the conditions of women’s lives which have been highlighted in the work of feminists who use a marxist perspective. However, as an explanatory framework for understanding why these conditions exist for women and not for men – i.e. why they are not the same for anyone who labours in a particular job or task, whatever it might be – marxism is weak, contradictory and I would contend, precludes the possibility of creating a new theory which may provide an adequate explanation. As long as the framework which we use to understand male dominant/female subordinate relations denies the possibility of theorising that men directly benefit from the exploitation of women, that men as a group or class actively maintain, perpetuate and protect their privileges over and against women (whether they are aware of it or not), then, of course, such a theoretical perspective can never be developed. Again, it must be asked: in whose interests is it to deny the possibility of developing the theory of male supremacy?

The very great advantage of marxist theory over functionalist theory lies in its recognition of the conflict of power between social groups throughout history. The social order is seen to be divided into antagonistic social classes – the ruling class deriving its power and benefits through its exploitation of the oppressed class. However, in assuming economic development to be the ultimate determining force in history, from which the relations of class conflict are derived, a marxist approach does not allow for the possibility of acknowledging any conflict of ruling class/oppressed class which is not derived from the economic class division. As such, the possibility of recognising men occupy a class position in relation to women, that they are a ruling class deriving their power and benefits through the exploitation of an oppressed class, is within the marxist concept of history (as the exploitation of some social groups by others) but denied by the marxist premise of economic reductionism (where all social relations are ultimately seen to be derived from the economic mode of production.