To the Editor:
I do not share Andrea Dworkin’s belief that women lose their integrity when they lose their virginity, I am neither a lesbian nor a “man-hater,” and I do not practice or even advocate abstinence. But I must take violent exception to the outrageous thesis of Norman Podhoretz’s article, “Rape in Feminist Eyes” [October 1991], namely, that all women want it and that men have a wholesale right, if not an obligation, to give it to them—whenever and however—even if they encounter what Mr. Podhoretz coyly refers to as “resistance.” His argument that date or acquaintance rape is an artificial and vague construct, the invention of which conveniently coincides with a radical-feminist plot to discredit and discourage heterosexual sex, is bizarre at best but more likely one more frightening example of just how vulnerable women still are in our culture. Sadly, Mr. Podhoretz’s misogynist diatribe proves once again that erudition and intellectual sophistication are no match for chauvinism and arrogance.
Mr. Podhoretz ignores the painfully incremental strides which progressive women and men have made in convincing legislators, jurists, prosecutors, police officers, psychiatrists, and in some cases their own sexually abused sisters that rape is neither the logical nor socially acceptable consequence of either female provocation or what he benignly calls “the ever restless masculine sex drive,” but an indefensible crime of violence and violation, the blame for which lies solely with the aggressor and not the victim. Instead, he is encouraging men—particularly young men—to act with singular and ironic disregard for the women they fancy sexually, and admonishing women—particularly young women—to lie on their backs and think of England.
I am curious as to whether Mr. Podhoretz further suggests that these same indecisive, inarticulate, and indoctrinated women, who have the temerity to believe that date and acquaintance rape actually exist—and for whom he asserts “yes” means no, “no” means yes, and “maybe” defies textual analysis—should also fake it, “proving” beyond a shadow of connubial doubt that their erstwhile lovers were right in the first place: he knew she wanted it (despite what she said), so he gave it to her, and who cares—so long as they were acquainted in some vague way before he mistook coercion for seduction.
Thus knowledge, in Mr. Podhoretz’s neo-Neanderthal universe, is power. So completely is his definition of rape hinged on the prior relationship of the actors, and so divorced is it from the act itself, that I wonder if he would similarly confuse assent with consent if the subject were Communism and not coitus. To recast the question in terms that are arguably more familiar to Mr. Podhoretz: was the imposition of martial law in Poland merely a frolic and not rape because General Jaruzelski is himself a Pole and not a Russian?
Given Mr. Podhoretz’s indulgence of the most priapic excesses of adolescent male sexuality, I fear I know what advice he gave his once-teenaged son: go for it! But how did he counsel his three daughters?
Did he tell them that the ideas which inform Robin Warshaw’s “guidelines for change” are, as he puts it, “bland translations of the lunatic prescriptions of an antinomian radical,” and therefore they should discard them as rubbish? In other words, did he tell them that it is acceptable for men to “force a woman to have sex”? To “pressure a woman to have sex”? To “equate ‘scoring’ with having a successful social encounter”? Or, to doubt that “‘no’ means ‘no’”? Did he also tell them that he would advise their brother that “his only hope of ever breaking through th[e] incomprehensible indifference [of teenage girls] is by not taking their no for an answer at any stage in the process of courtship . . .,” and add with a wink and a leer and a conspiratorial nod that this “is precisely what some (and probably most) of them want him to do”? . . .
Can Mr. Podhoretz’s politics have eclipsed his parenthood, not to mention his probity? . . .
But what is most galling about his demeaning attempt to reduce the horrible reality of violence against women to a figment of the collective imagination of the feminist movement’s philosophical fringe is his disingenuous assertion that date and acquaintance rape are something new. Mr. Podhoretz dismisses this blatant example of how our culture continues to condone the victimization of women as a recent arrival on the sexual-aggression scene, a novel ploy by women to even the playing field on which they had lost the battle of sexual freedom.
As with wife-beating and other forms of the physical and mental violence some men inflict on women, the only thing that is new about date and/or acquaintance rape is that it has become a topic of public and legal debate. Just as there have always been husbands who beat their wives, there have always been men who impose themselves on unwilling women. Whether the man is that woman’s date or neighbor or janitor or boss or cousin or a total stranger makes no difference; nor does it matter whether the encounter occurs in a parking lot, at a frat party, or on a woman’s own living-room couch as “reimbursement” for an expensive night on the town, because in this country it is generally the law that a man commits rape when he has intercourse with a woman who is not his wife by force or threat of force, against her will and without her consent. Prior social or sexual intimacy has nothing to do with what is rape; intimidation and domination have everything to do with it.
Legally, that is. Mr. Podhoretz would have us believe that prior social or sexual intimacy has everything to do with what is rape in practice, and this is where he deviates from his fellow adherents of the “she-asked-for-it” school. In Mr. Podhoretz’s bifurcated universe, it is rape when a man physically, verbally, or psychologically coerces a woman he does not know to have sex with him; with a woman with whom he has the slightest degree of acquaintance, it is seduction—unless the hand that caresses her tresses also wields a knife or gun or similar nonsexual aid. With this peculiar inequality, Mr. Podhoretz cynically blames the victim, whose double misfortune it becomes to have both known her attacker and escaped armed confrontation, and reserves his sympathy and outrage for those women “lucky” enough to have been attacked by strangers or weapon-toting friends, thus “really raped.” To borrow Mr. Podhoretz’s phrase, this is truly the new sexual dispensation: politically-correct rape. And in this case I take the position of Mr. Podhoretz and his intellectual cronies against a “PC” view of the world.
Elizabeth H. Berger
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . In his article, Norman Podhoretz attempts to shed light on the problems and misconceptions inherent in what he sees as the growing tendency within feminist circles to view heterosexual sex as a demeaning and abusive activity for the female, regardless of the context or even in the presence of consent. But beware—the article is an emotional one. Mr. Podhoretz is hardly the objective author presenting, without bias, the feminist view of rape. Rather, he comes across as a man clearly burdened with his own experiential baggage as he presents his emotional response to what he perceives to be the feminist—the woman’s—view of rape. And in his zeal to discredit the view he attributes to feminists, he succeeds more in revealing his own contempt for women.
Mr. Podhoretz reminds his readers that the word rape has traditionally been reserved for situations where sexual intercourse has occurred by means of physical force. If one is to agree with him on anything it is that the word should, in fact, be reserved for those situations alone, for to use it in any other context . . . is to do an injustice to women who have suffered the terror that accompanies being taken by force. And if the rape is committed by an acquaintance rather than a stranger, it is not date rape; it is rape.
Beyond this, however, it is difficult to agree with very much of the author’s thinking. He asserts that what has come to be referred to as date rape but which takes place in the absence of physical force is not rape at all, but rather seduction, plain and simple. OK, he tells us, maybe the word seduction is simply a euphemism for the verbal and psychological coercion all the feminists are squalling about, but this is the way the game has always been played, ladies, and we’re not about to change the rules because some of you are not smart enough to watch out for yourselves.
Mr. Podhoretz seems comfortable drawing one bold line to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable male sexual behavior: on one side of the line is sex which occurs by means of physical force where the woman has no power, no choice; on the other side of the line is everything else. In his ignorance he does justice neither to the distinct pleasure—before, during, and after—of openly and willingly surrendering to sexual attraction, nor to the anger, embarrassment, and humiliation that go hand-in-hand with the knowledge that one has been had.
When a person is seduced he or she is choosing to enter into a sexual encounter fully informed of what is going on. There are no false pretenses, no lies; there is no emotional coercion. When a person is manipulated, however, his/her mind is played with; there are no rules. To the extent that a person has the choice to resist in either case, the two situations are alike. But to the extent that the person seduced feels coaxed and the person manipulated feels used, the two phenomena are quite distinct. When a man manipulates a woman into sex, he has succeeded in using the woman’s emotions as a weapon against her. The result is that instead of simply not trusting men, she doesn’t trust herself. Or even worse. . . .
While we make a point of reserving special status for the victim of rape, it is the very helplessness of the situation which provides the woman’s emotional salvation. The woman who has succumbed to emotional manipulation, however, has to live with the fact that choice was available to her and that she made the wrong choice. Choice is really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it implies that the woman controls her own destiny. Whether or not to participate in the sexual act is her own decision. On the other hand, it implies responsibility. As long as she has the physical power to refuse a sexual encounter, then the responsibility for poor choices lies solely with the woman, Mr. Podhoretz would say, regardless of the tactics undertaken by a desirous male.
The truth is that the emotional state of the woman is the product of what she brings to the situation and what the man is feeding into her mind. And to the extent that he is using her mind as a weapon against her, he shares responsibility for her choices.
Sex does not always mean love, or commitment, or that there will even be a tomorrow for tonight’s lovers. What it should mean, regardless of the significance attached to the act, is that both parties have provided informed consent. That both parties are being honest with each other. That both parties know exactly what they are getting into.
Karen Linda Defuria
Succasunna, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
As an older feminist I could easily point out the many ways in which my life has taken a turn for the better due to the feminist movement. I have benefited at work, in the way our home is managed, and most of all by the fact that my adult children see their spouses as respected and equal partners. Contrary to Norman Podhoretz, my marriage was not and is not an “armistice”; my acceptance of many of the basic tenets of the movement is not “a covert revulsion against the sexual revolution”; I am not the “helpless and stupid female” of feminist literature nor am I “swaggeringly self-assured, . . . flaunting my sexual allure.” And there are no ashes in my mouth because the movement, speaking in my name and presuming to act in my interest, has, as Mr. Podhoretz claims, already done so much damage.
I read selectively, whether it be the writing of “man-hating, lesbian sectors,” or the “realities” cited by Mr. Podhoretz which others term “myths,” or the many biased writings of many men, including some of our classic Jewish sages. All writers attempt to stake out their interests, but some do it more fairly than others. Andrea Dworkin is not my advocate. However, Andrea Parrot’s instructions in her book on avoiding date rape and acquaintance rape make good sense to me. Mr. Podhoretz might even be surprised to learn that I, like him, would want each instance of alleged rape to be judged as a separate and distinct case.
It is my gut feeling, based on conversations with people I know and deal with, that the vast literature which has sprung up on rape is not merely alarmist writing. Nor do I accept Mr. Podhoretz’s contention that all feminist writing defies nature’s truths and is bringing about no change at all or else change that is harmful to society.
Instead, I believe it is Mr. Podhoretz’s vitriolic stance against the feminist movement which is most counterproductive. Moreover, it detracts from the key points of his article. . . .
COMMENTARY readers deserve more balanced writing on this vital issue.
Vivian Mann
Golden Valley, Minnesota
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To the Editor:
While I found many parts, of Norman Podhoretz’s article intriguing, I’m afraid that I must strongly disagree with one of its main premises. At the risk of sounding like a feminist, I must say that if a woman says no in a clear manner and a man “forges ahead anyway,” then what has happened is rape.
Mr. Podhoretz tries to explain the man’s actions by referring to the intensity of his desire. Clearly, though, the fact that a party desires something strongly does not make that action right. For example, many African-Americans in New York City desire “justice” from the police. This does not make the stabbing in Crown Heights last year any better than it would have been without these urgings. The arousal of a man does not excuse forcing sex upon a woman.
This is not to say that I agree with the feminist agenda. . . . The trouble with the current sexual-harassment craze is that . . . harassment can be charged without the woman ever saying no in any way, shape, or form. The Clarence Thomas case took this to its logical extreme. Anita Hill told friends about what had allegedly happened, but she never bothered to tell Thomas himself. It is no wonder he protested his innocence: he was never told that he had offended her.
It seems to me that this would be the ideal place to draw a legal distinction. If a woman says no, then that’s it. Stop. However, if she never makes any form of complaint, then she cannot expect the man, who most likely is not a mind reader, to know that she was offended. Not only does this fit nicely with the libertarian idea of protecting acts between consenting adults, but it also has a result that Mr. Podhoretz might like. Women would actually have to make some sort of active decision about sex. If they mean yes they would not be able to say no and hope that the man gets the right message. If they mean no, they nave to say no—or else forfeit the right to claim harassment. This solution, while perhaps utopian, would make for a welcome truce in the war between the sexes.
David Steinberg
Bard College
Annandale, New York
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To the Editor:
The article on acquaintance rape by Norman Podhoretz throws out the baby with the bath water. In reading it, I was reminded of a college classmate who boasted to me that he drove a girl he was dating to a lonely place many miles from campus. He then gave her a choice between having sexual intercourse or walking back.
In the 25 years that have elapsed since then, many social changes have occurred which enhance the possibility that a woman will be exposed to a situation in which she must participate in sexual intercourse against her will. Women in college are no longer protected by parietal rules or by limitations on visiting men’s quarters. They seldom marry soon after completion of high school or college, so that more women participate in dating situations for a longer time, and at a later age, than in the past. The liberalization of sexual mores, combined with more frequent dates by older women and men, undoubtedly lead to situations in which men, appropriately or not, assume that sexual relations constitute a reasonable expectation in many social relationships with females.
In an environment in which the opportunities for acquaintance rape have increased, it is not surprising that the event itself is more common, as is perception of the event. One need not believe that penetration per se constitutes a crime against women to deplore coercion of sexual activity. Sexual assault by an acquaintance is notoriously difficult to prove, and the line between persuasion and coercion is murky. Nevertheless, we must attempt to draw that line. Those who merely deplore the exploitation of this issue by radical feminists and who deny that there is a significant problem do not contribute to a solution; they simply abandon serious discussion of the problem to their opponents.
Allan J. Jacobs, M.D.
Director, Obstetrics and Gynecology
Beth Israel Medical Center
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . The very notion of “acquaintance rape” tends to trivialize legitimate rape, and mocks those women who have been truly brutalized. The perception of everything as rape is not very far from the perception of nothing as rape.
As I understand them, the value scale of the militant feminists is something like this:
- Man is the natural enemy, and a self-respecting woman should thwart his lechery, aggression, and ego at every opportunity. This is the traditional “battle of the sexes” with heightened consciousness and impassioned self-righteousness. Perhaps Jane Collier’s Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) might even be resurrected as an inspirational guide.
- More contemptible than man (who is partially a victim of his physiology), is a woman who willingly submits to a man’s lust and is hence even more hateful than the enemy.
- Despite her despicable behavior, the female quisling often receives desperately needed personal benefits and compensations for her voluntary humiliation. The woman who submits and enjoys herself has no such rationalization, and has placed herself beneath contempt. In addition to being traitorous and shameless, she has also had concupiscence added to the list of her moral transgressions.
Morton D. Kogut
University of Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
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To the Editor:
In attempting to make sense of the faddish feminist theory of rape, Norman Podhoretz directs our attention to several of its principal theoretician/perpetrators. . . . In doing so, he seems to take with equal seriousness an Andrea Dworkin and a Susan Estrich. . . . The two are quite different, however.
Susan Estrich did, after all, serve as the hapless Michael Dukakis’s second campaign manager and she also teaches at Harvard Law School. Thus, she is to be taken somewhat more seriously than the unfortunate Andrea Dworkin whose notions about sexual intercourse suggest, at the very least, that she lives at a considerable distance from the real world and the ordinary people who inhabit it. . . .
It was Estrich . . . who, during the ’88 campaign and supposedly speaking for the Democratic candidate in whose cause she was engaged, become one of the first respectable people in the history of Western civilization to go public with the proposition that homosexuals have the “right” to marry. Did she really think through the almost inevitable consequences, political and otherwise, of what she was saying? . . .
Dworkin and the science-fiction, comic-book mode of thought she represents are, as Mr. Podhoretz makes abundantly clear, decidedly peripheral. Estrich, I am afraid, is expressive of a far more ominous, indeed sinister, force. . . .
Harold J. Harris
Kalamazoo, Michigan
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s article, “Rape in Feminist Eyes,” has brought up the subject of the male-female relationship that should be understood intellectually, psychologically, politically, and, I might add, biologically. . . .
We speak of sexual harassment as if the chase were a threat rather than an affirmation of desire buttressed by a hormonal drive. At what point must the male frustrate his hormones or the female hers? Have we reached the intellectual stage in evolution where we can deny our biological heritage in favor of a strange counterproductive biology which frustrates the chase in favor of intellectual restraints? Is that what biology or mankind intended in the evolutionary process? . . .
Some time ago a survey was held among women, who were asked whether, given the choice, they would rather be reborn as male or female. Seventy-five percent of the women reported that they preferred to return as women. . . . It seems that the other 25 percent—presumably, the feminists—are running the female roost, possibly over the objection of most women. . . .
Jerome Greenblatt
Laguna Hills, California
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s analysis of the date-rape issue brings out two points that have not been widely discussed: that the campaign to expand the meaning of rape has been strongly influenced, if not dominated, by feminism’s radical faction, many of whom are misandric homosexuals; and that their goal in this effort is not equality but complete control of sexual relations.
During the past two decades many COMMENTARY writers have also examined radical feminism’s assault on the traditional two-parent family. Careful analysis of this campaign shows that the same faction is at work in pursuit of the same goal of total control. Although the radicals who have managed this effort have been open about their objectives—they were clear to Midge Decter and George Gilder as far back as 1971—they provoked relatively little alarm, in part because their numbers were so small and their goal so large.
Twenty years later it is easier to take them seriously and to demonstrate that they have in fact played a major role in bringing the two-parent family to its present state of crisis. . . .
Frank S. Zepezauer
Sunnyvale, California
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To the Editor:
. . . There is a real danger lurking in the trend toward the ever-broader use of the term “rape”—one not identified in Norman Podhoretz’s article—and it is that discussion of rape may begin once again to focus inordinately on the issue of consent. It was not so very long ago, after all, that the courts, ignoring the clear-cut line at physical coercion identified by Mr. Podhoretz, considered (in practice, at least) all rape to be nothing more than one end of a continuum whose sole parameter was the degree of the victim’s real or inferred consent. Hence matters such as the victim’s sexual history and modesty of attire, however irrelevant to an act often carried out with brutal force, were nonetheless deemed generally pertinent because of their possible bearing on the location of a given act on this spectrum of perceived consent. One of the enduring and genuinely positive achievements of the women’s movement of the 60’s and 70’s has been the correction of this injustice; phrases such as “rape is a crime of violence,” while perhaps somewhat simplistic, have had the tremendously positive effect of directing attention toward the real central attribute of rape: physical coercion. This emphasis, lest we forget, was promoted primarily by feminists, and it is to their great credit that they did so.
Unfortunately, the promotion appears to have succeeded too well; for the new generation of feminists is now attempting to exploit that same success in a far riskier enterprise. The current campaign against date rape and acquaintance rape is not simply arguing the case for criminalization of aggressive seduction on its own merits; rather, it is attempting, through liberal use of the word “rape,” and of anecdotal characterizations that skillfully blur the distinction between (violent) rape and (nonviolent) seduction, to establish a reflexive association between aggressive sexual advances and the visceral revulsion assiduously (and quite appropriately so) inculcated in all our minds at the thought of the violence and cruelty of rape.
Such an association, should it become commonplace, will have one inevitable consequence: rape will gradually come to be seen once again as a matter of niceties of consent, an act different only in degree from the sexual advances made all the time by men and often welcomed by women; and naturally, behavior on the part of women now seen as possibly inviting seduction (including such routine acts as wearing attractive clothing and makeup) will once again be seen as inviting rape. Rapists will therefore be treated with even more leniency than they now enjoy, and rape victims with even less sympathy. A major advance in our thinking about violence against women will thus have been reversed, and women will have only the most militant among themselves to blame.
Daniel R. Simon
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
In “Rape in Feminist Eyes,” I tried to show that the definition of rape, which has in the past always been understood to mean the use of violence or the threat of it to force sex upon an unwilling woman, is now being broadened to include a whole range of sexual relations that have never before in all of human experience been regarded as rape. At the extreme, we have radical feminists telling us that any act of sexual intercourse is tantamount to rape; watered-down versions of the same idea exempt acts of intercourse initiated and controlled by women; and still more “moderate” mutations extend their grudging approval to acts preceded by an explicit statement of female consent—or, rather, to some such acts, since Susan Estrich and others instruct us that even a woman’s saying “yes” to intercourse may mean “no” and is therefore not enough to absolve her male partner of rape.
It seems pretty obvious that this complex of ideas adds up to what Elizabeth H. Berger, coarsely though more or less accurately paraphrasing my main argument, describes as “a radical-feminist plot to discredit and discourage heterosexual sex.” To her this argument “is bizarre at best,” and yet her own letter shows how influential the feminist campaign to delegitimize male sexuality has become among women in general. She herself is, as she says, “neither a lesbian nor a ‘man-hater.’” Passing over the quotation marks in which she encloses the word man-hater, as though to suggest that there really is no such thing, I will take her word for it that in this respect she has little in common with Andrea Dworkin. How much more revealing it is, then, that she should characterize male sexuality with almost as much distaste and contempt as Dworkin does.
Apart from that, and in addition to offering impertinent (and hilariously inaccurate) speculations about what I told my children when they were teenagers, Miss Berger repeatedly accuses me of overlooking points I myself made. Thus I was careful to stress, not once but several times, that forcing a woman to have intercourse by using physical violence or the threat of it is rape, whether the man is a stranger or an acquaintance. The key is not, as she imagines I wrote, “the prior relationship of the actors”; the key is violence (which is why the imposition of martial law did indeed make General Jaruzelski the rapist of Poland). Conversely, there is no rape when physical violence or the threat of it is absent.
Karen Linda DeFuria also indulges herself in impertinent speculations about my personal life, but unlike Miss Berger, she at least understands the distinction I was drawing between seduction and rape. When, however, she goes on to explain why seduction is also bad for women, she too comes perilously close to the position of the radical feminists from whom she seems to dissociate herself, thereby demonstrating once again the extent of radical influence over women in general.
No doubt Vivian Mann is as wonderful in every possible way as she informs us she is. But she should recognize that this does not dispose of criticism of the feminist movement’s ideas as expressed in its canonical writings, and of the consequences of those ideas as observed in contemporary society.
I fear that David Steinberg does sound like a feminist. If he had more respect for masculine experience and less for feminist ideology, he might recall that there are subtleties and shadings and nuanced responses in the relations between men and women which that ideology, in its hatred of normal sex, wishes to blot out; and he would perhaps resist instead of helping this vicious tendency along.
Similarly with Allan J. Jacobs. The “many social changes” of the past 25 years which have left women less protected than they used to be were engineered by feminists out of disrespect for the nature of normal male sexuality. Now the same feminists want to restore protection by, for all practical purposes, criminalizing normal male sexuality altogether. As a man, Dr. Jacobs might want to start worrying about that “significant problem” for a change.
I thank the other correspondents for their comments, all of which I find suggestive and many of which I agree with—and especially the warnings issued by Morton D. Kogut and Daniel R. Simon against the trivialization of real rape by the date-rape ideologues.