It’s a shame that nobody was around to teach Danielle Berrin these facts of life.
RAPE is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in civilized society. Yet feminism, which has waged a crusade for rape to be taken more seriously, has put young women in danger by hiding the truth about sex from them.
In dramatizing the pervasiveness of rape, feminists have told young women that before they have sex with a man, they must give consent as explicit as a legal contract’s. In this way, young women have been convinced that they have been the victims of rape. On elite campuses in the Northeast and on the West Coast, they have held consciousness-raising sessions, petitioned administrations, demanded inquests. At Brown University, outraged, panicky “victims” have scrawled the names of alleged attackers on the walls of women’s rest rooms. What marital rape was to the ’70s, “date rape” is to the ’90s.
The incidence and seriousness of rape do not require this kind of exaggeration. Real acquaintance rape is nothing new. It has been a horrible problem for women for all of recorded history. Once, fathers and brothers protected women from rape. Once, the penalty for rape was death. I come from a fierce Italian tradition where, not so long ago in the motherland, a rapist would end up knifed, castrated and hung out to dry.
But the old clans and small rural communities have broken down. In our cities, on our campuses far from home, young women are vulnerable and defenseless. Feminism has not prepared them for this. Feminism keeps saying the sexes are the same. It keeps telling women they can do anything, go anywhere, say anything, wear anything. No, they can’t. Women will always be in sexual danger.
One of my male students recently slept overnight with a friend in a passageway of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. He described the moon and sand, the ancient silence and eerie echoes.
I am a woman. I will never experience that. I am not stupid enough to believe I could ever be safe there. There is a world of solitary adventure I will never have. Women have always known these somber truths. But feminism, with its pie-in-the-sky fantasies about the perfect world, keeps young women from seeing life as it is.
WE must remedy social injustice whenever we can. But there are some things we cannot change. There are sexual differences that are based in biology. Academic feminism is lost in a fog of social constructionism. It believes we are totally the product of our environment. This idea was invented by Rousseau. He was wrong.
Emboldened by dumb French language theory, academic feminists repeat the same hollow slogans over and over to each other. Their view of sex is naive and prudish. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist’s.
The sexes are at war. Men must struggle for identity against the overwhelming power of their mothers. Women have menstruation to tell them they are women. Men must do or risk something to be men. Men become masculine only when other men say they are. Having sex with a woman is one way a boy becomes a man.
College men are at their hormonal peak. They have just left their mothers and are questing for their male identity. In groups, they are dangerous. A woman going to a fraternity party is walking into Testosterone Flats, full of prickly cacti and blazing guns. If she goes, she should be armed with resolute alertness. She should arrive with girlfriends and leave with them. A girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool. A girl who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot. Feminists call this “blaming the victim.” I call it common sense.
FOR a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, “Rape is a crime of violence but not of sex.” This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class.
Aggression and eroticism, in fact, are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Every generation, men must be educated, refined and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness.
Society is not the enemy, as feminism ignorantly claims. Society is woman’s protection against rape. Feminism, with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness, does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape. Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it.
The date-rape controversy shows feminism hitting the wall of its own broken promises. The women of my ’60s generation were the first respectable girls in history to swear like sailors, get drunk, stay out all night – in short, to act like men. We sought total sexual freedom and equality. But as time passed, reality dawned. The old double standard protected women. When anything goes, it’s women who lose.
Today’s young women don’t know what they want. They see feminism has not brought sexual happiness. The theatrics of public rage over date rape are their way of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation.
Yet nothing about the sexes has really changed. The comic film “Where The Boys Are” (1960), the ultimate expression of ’50s man-chasing, still speaks directly to our time. It shows smart, lively women skillfully anticipating and fending off the dozens of strategies with which men try to get them into bed.
The agonizing subplot and climax are brilliantly done. The victim, Yvette Mimieux, makes mistake after mistake, obvious to the other girls. She allows herself to be lured away from her girlfriends and into isolation with boys whose character and intentions she misreads. “Where the Boys Are” tells the truth. It shows courtship as a dangerous game in which the signals are not verbal but subliminal.
Neither militant feminism, which is obsessed with politically correct language, nor academic feminism, which believes that knowledge and experience are “constituted by” language, can understand preverbal or non-verbal communication. Feminism, focusing on sexual politics, cannot see that sex exists in and through the body. Sexual desire and arousal cannot be fully translated into verbal terms. This is why men and women misunderstand each other.
Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men’s sexual anxiety, their fear of woman’s dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men’s sense of psychological weakness toward women.
It takes many men to deal with one woman. Woman’s voracity is a persistent motif. Clara Bow, it was rumored, took on the USC football team on weekends. Marilyn Monroe, singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” rules a conga line of men in tuxes. Half-clad Cher, in the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time,” deranges a battleship of sailors and straddles a pink-lit cannon. Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to woman’s cosmic sexual power.
To understand rape, you must study the past. There never was and never will be sexual harmony. Every woman must be prudent and cautious about where she goes and with whom. When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences and, through self-criticism, resolve never to make that mistake again.
Running to mommy and daddy or the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women. Posting lists of guilty men in the toilet is cowardly, infantile stuff.
THE Italian philosophy of life espouses high-energy confrontation. A male student makes a vulgar remark about your breasts? Don’t slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, “Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!” In general, women who project this take-charge attitude toward life get harassed less often.
I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter. It’s the Yvette Mimieux syndrome: Make me happy. And listen to me weep when I’m not.
The date-rape debate is already smothered in propaganda churned out by the expensive Northeastern colleges and universities, with their overconcentration of boring, uptight academic feminists and spoiled, affluent students. Beware of the deep manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.
As a fan of football and rock music, I see in the swaggering masculinity of the jock and in the noisy posturing of the heavy-metal guitarist certain fundamental, unchanging truths about sex. Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history. Women must reorient themselves toward the elemental powers of sex, which can strengthen or destroy.
The only solution to date rape is female self-awareness and self-control. A woman’s No. 1 line of defense against rape is herself. When a real rape occurs, she should report it to the police. Complaining to college committees because the courts “take too long” is ridiculous.
College administrations are not a branch of the judiciary. They are not equipped or trained for legal inquiry. Colleges must alert incoming students to the problems and dangers of adulthood. Then colleges must stand back and get out of the sex game.