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… The self-depreciation which inclines women individually and collectively to find every cause more important than our own is deeply connected with the myth of feminine evil. Women have been conditioned to see any act that affirms the worth of the female ego as blameworthy. Female ambition can “pass” only when it is diluted into vicarious ambition through the male or on behalf of patriarchal values. To counteract this mass-produced self-depreciation, women will have to build female pride, raising up our own standards of how it is good to be a woman. Our failure has consisted in not actively affirming the female ego. If we must feel shame, it should be for this. The raising up of women’s new image and pride means giving prime energy to our own cause and refusing to see this as an illegitimate rival to other causes. It is not a rival to any truly revolutionary movement, but goes to the root of the evils such movements are trying to eradicate.

What is almost impossible for some people to contemplate is that there are human cultures where rape is virtually unknown. Societies where women don’t calibrate themselves, for their entire lives, to its threat. More than 40 years ago, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted an extensive cross-cultural study of rape involving more than 150 human societies around the word. She found that 47% of societies she studied had no rape, 36% had some incidence of rape, and 17%, of which we are one, were definitively rape prone. What marked cultures where rape was missing were that women had authority in the community that was not related to reproduction — they were political or religious leaders and made valued economic contributions to society; feminine qualities were valued by communities; the relationships between men and women was not defined as hierarchical; boys were taught to respect girls and women (something altogether different from learning to protect them); these societies were stable and peaceful, making reliance on brute male physical dominance less likely; divinities were not uniquely male; and, lastly, these cultures had great respect for their environments and did not destructively exploit them. On the other hand, rape-prone societies like ours are those which tolerate, encourage and often glorify violence as a marker of masculinity starting in early childhood. Boys learn that to be men meant being aggressive, competitive and dominant; work and access to authority are more rigidly sex segregated; women have minimal, if any authoritative roles in public or religious life or sports; femininity and feminine qualities are considered inferior and routinely mocked; “women’s work” is undervalued and considered demeaning to men; and, women’s roles were largely restricted to reproductive ones, their reproduction more likely to be regulated by men. Sound familiar?