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 Against Our Will: Men, Women and RapeSusan Brownmiller (1975) Considered a breakthrough book that put the subject of sexual violence on the feminist agenda, Brownmiller's study offers a broad-ranging cultural history of rape and Western attitudes toward it. Especially in her analysis of the intersection of racism and sexism, where she emphasizes how interracial rape has been used as a cultural weapon, Brownmiller encourages us to adopt a sociological view of rape. Rape is not just a random phenomenon, occurring to a few unlucky victims. Rape victims are not easy to distinguish from the rest of the population of American women, as Brownmiller, not herself a survivor of sexual assault, admits she once believed. Rape occurs in all social quarters, even among feminists who in clarifying their demands for access to social power have defined themselves as powerful. Rape is a pervasive cultural ideology, and Brownmiller's work pioneered the definition of rape as a crime of violence. The book is perhaps most famous for its keen analysis of rape-fantasy narratives, what she calls the "myth of the heroic rapist," that abound in American popular culture. She argues that the effect of these narratives is to place women in a position of imaginative victimization and that we need therefore to combat the cultural ideology of rape if we want genuinely to prevent the occurrence of rape. Although some of Brownmiller's attitudes about rape and some of her sociological assumptions have been superseded by more recent work on the subject, this book remains invaluable for its often brilliant technique of shining critical light on a subject treated for so long as a scandal, as an act perpetrated bya few social deviants whose crimes were not to be talked about in polite company. Brownmiller is one of the key figures in helping us to overcome such social attitudes, and if we might wish that those attitudes, having now been held up to critical investigation for some thirty years, should seem truly backward to us in the twenty-first century, in reality they remain very much a part of our society. |