Word: raping
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Rage Over Rape...
Women are intimidated into passivity and the dictates of society pressure them to remain so. Brownmiller deftly dismisses the Freudian theories of such psychiatrists as Helen Deutsch--proponents of the myth that women are at heart masochists, who can not only "enjoy" rape, but, in fact, fantasize about it. Theories such as these both stem from and help support the myth that women "ask for it", that they are somehow to be held responsible for their own violation and humiliation. The sorrowful disgrace of this is not only that men are socialized to accept these debilitating myths, but women...
WHAT ELSE can free women from the frightening specter of rape? The most immediate step, Brownmiller argues, is a complete revamping of the legal statutes that continue to make trials often unbearably humiliating for women, and conviction exceedingly difficult. "Rape, as the current law defines it," says Brownmiller, "is the forcible penetration of an act of sexual intercourse on the body of a woman not one's wife." Outmoded statutes must be replaced with a "gender-free, non-activity-specific law governing all manner of sexual assaults...
Along with these basic structural changes Brownmiller insists the entire ideology of rape must be eradicated. She has launched a campaign to suppress all pornography--"the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." Brownmiller points out that pornography is a key factor in the development of many men. It is "like rape...a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access..." She adds: "...hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently...
Some may not concur with Brownmiller's major assertion that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." Some may feel that Brownmiller places undue emphasis on this one manifestation of the subjugation of women. But rape is still the most extreme manifestation of sexist cultures; women will continue to be oppressed as long as they continue to be victims of sexual abuse--demeaned by those who attack them, demeaned by the society which doubts their word over the word of their male attackers...