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PARTISAN REVIEW
does not make the reality of death any less painful; nor does a death wish
make murderers any less guilty for their deed: no one could get away
with claiming that the victim "really wanted to die." Murder is a crime,
an objective act - and most rapes were treated as such, even in the Mid–
dle Ages.
True, there has been, historically, some uncertainty as to how to con–
ceptualize and punish rape, an uncertainty which endures today. And
men have sometimes shown bad faith, even a callous indifference, to
women and their feelings. But there are many issues to which answers are
not obvious, and on which people of good will could - and still can -
disagree. Such is, I would think, particularly the case for the Middle Ages,
when traditions of common law emphasized in general the need for com–
pensation for damage to property.
It
was clear that, for example, a virgin
who had been raped was damaged, but it was less obvious how the dam–
age to a raped married woman - a
fortior~
a prostitute - should be
understood, quantified, and restitution made or punishment taken. Was it
a good or bad solution to allow a rapist to marry the woman he had
forced if she accepted? (Many feminists are appalled by this solution.)
Historically, rape has always been understood within a conceptual
context based on implicit metaphors. Thus, rape can be seen as damage
(to the honor of the individual or the family, to the physical person), or as
theft, and so on. In America today the key legal principle seems to be the
right to choose: thus, rape does not constitute, for example, damage to a
woman's honor (an antiquated concept), but is an infringement on her
right to choose her own sexual partners.
In any event, contemporary women must be prepared to confront the
issue of rape squarely. Let's stop claiming that only men have enjoyed
thinking about forced sex, and that, if women have listened to and read
works containing rape fantasies, it's all men's fault. This charge infantilizes
women, implying that we have no mind or will of our own.
Rape, it is said, is easy to define and to distinguish from other modes
of sexual intercourse; male scholars are blamed for not having recognized
and castigated it in the past. But on the other hand, we are told that every
act by which a male dominates or possesses a woman, erotically or in
other ways, is an act of rape:
all
is sexual power play;
all
heterosexual sex
is conceived as rape. In fact, some today claim that males can't do any–
thing
but
rape women - and
everything
that men (and patriarchy) do to
women is rape. So the Virgin Mary has been called the ultimate rape vic–
tim. Powerful music by male composers is denounced for raping its
female listeners. (One wonders what it does to its male listeners.)
Wordsworth's poem "The Solitary Reaper" is a disguised rape fantasy -
