Comments on: A Review of Against Our Will (first half)

By: jaine

jaine — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:34:34 +0000

Interesting review. I have just finished the whole book and I actually think your review is unfair. How can you seriously review a half book and critise it for being bad “scholarship”. Surely good “scholarship” also includes reading all of a book you are going to review. I also never got the impression from the book that she said all men rape all women. What she said was that all men have the physical ability to rape - this is not the same thing at all. It is important to remember that this book was written 30 years ago and some things have changed (though not as many things have changed as I would have hoped). Regarding the racism issue, I didnt get that she was being racist, I felt that she was focussing on rape and gender issues because at the time the book was published there was plenty of literature on racism but practicaly nothing on rape from a woman’s perspective.

By: KH

KH — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:54:11 +0000

Very interesting. It’s a real fault that Brownmiller’s argument can’t easily accommodate cases in which the interests of oppressed groups (or people generally) diverge, making it impossible to avoid choosing, balancing among goods. Legal rules that protect defendants can injure complainants, & vice versa. US sexual harassment jurisprudence, post-Oncale, arguably presents such a dilemma in same-sex cases. (See Janet Halley’s new Split Decisions.) However you decide, you’re going to have some blood your hands. We all condition our judgments on one set of stylized facts or another; responsibility demands that we at least subject them to skeptical scrutiny, & certainly not make it a moral imperative, rather than empirical warrant, to believe one thing or another about contingent matters of fact. I suspect that some theoretical orientations, or points of view, are friendlier toward these epistemic virtues, & keener about their moral significance, than others.

Although she obviously wouldn’t have insisted that the Scottsboro Boys were guilty, I wonder whether, if Victoria Price & Ruby Bates’ false accusations hadn’t been attributable to male agency, Brownmiller mightn’t have felt the some of the same anxiety, or cognitive dissonance, that she betrayed in her accusation against McGee’s wife (who, whatever the merits, was undeniably harmed by her husband’s execution). Police malfeasance adventitiously preserved her from a disconfirming &, I suspect, unwelcome conclusion. (There is, of course, no shortage of people who cling to contrary claims just as dogmatically, just as indifferently to the truth & the damage done.)

By: Maia

Maia — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:44:12 +0000

Bean: I probably am being unfair to her argument. Particularly as I only got half-way through the book before I lost it. I think part of the problem is that as a historian I have standards for historical research that no book of this type could ever reach. For example, when she’s talking about rape in colonial times, she mentions that there is far more evidence of native american women being raped by white men, than vice-versa. She then goes on to discuss the problem of evidence - white women who were captured by native americans might have very good reasons to lie about being raped. But I wanted her to go further. Was it just a different of evidence? Or were native american men less likely to rape white women than vice versa? Why and where did this come from? Did the level of rape change over time? Why? Obviously she didn’t have time, space, or knowledge to go into this I still found it very frustrating.

I generally find the specifics more interesting and important than generalities, but it’s possible that people would have found it harder to explore the specifics without her generalities.

Amp: The best summary of her views would be her book on the prison industry, which was called Kind and Usual Punishment in the US. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find much on-line, she wrote several articles at the same time as her book where she developed her ideas, but most of them don’t seem to be on-line. This article might be useful if you’re a subscriber to the New York Review of books. Bettina Apetheker’s article from the 1972 book about Angela Davis covers some of the same ground (they knew each other).

By: Crystal

Crystal — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 02:18:11 +0000

Susan Brownmiller’s book was, in many ways, absolutely pathbreaking. However, her scholarship is questionable. Certainly all men aren’t rapists, and in many cultures rape is rare to unknown. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday has done extensive research on rape (a good beginning is her book “A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial”). Her research demonstrates that in cultures where rape is rare to unknown, women are equal to men - people, not property. Interpersonal violence is rare, and rape is disapproved of and severely punished if it does occur (providing a deterrent).

In “rape-prone” societies, women are considered inferior to men and interpersonal violence is common. Men use rape or the threat of rape to control women.

Rape is very much a culture-specific occurrence and varies with predictable social conditions. Consider, for instance, the much lower rates of rape in Sweden and Norway (prosperous, non-violent, women have high status) with the US (a culture much more saturated in interpersonal violence).

By: Ampersand

Ampersand — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 18:07:49 +0000

Is there a link you’d recommend which summarizes, or at least gives an idea of, Jessica Mitford’s analysis of prisons?

By: Amanda Marcotte

Amanda Marcotte — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:25:42 +0000

Awesome post. It’s worth noting that while false accusations are incredibly rare, in a racist society, the patriarchy actually encourages false accusations against men of the oppressed race. The idea that men possess women by fucking them is often translated by racists as a way to say that a woman is “ruined” if fucked by a man of a hated race.

In Germany, gentile women who had sex with Jewish men were also sent to the camps. That dynamic surely played out in the South during the lynching era, which means that false accusations of rape might be a survival method. I suspect a whole lotta women were impressed with the idea that they had to accuse black men of rape in order to escape getting a beat down themselves. That this didn’t happen more often is an indicator that the “baseline” of false accusations is indeed very, very low.

One of the women in the Scottsboro case recanted and pursued their release.