Susan Brownmiller und die Dämonisierung männlicher Sexualität

Nick spricht die Dämonisierung der männlichen Sexualität und wohl auch die Ursprünge der „Rape Culture“ durch Susan Brownmiller an:

Brownmiller’s book, Against Our Will (AOW) has enjoyed an amazing success. Promoted to the hilt by the establishment media, it became a Book of the Month Club selection and a best seller. Nevertheless, AOW is a shoddy piece of work: ludicrously inaccurate, patently reactionary, dishonest, and vulgarly written.
Brownmiller portrays rape as an omnipresent danger to women, whereas in fact it is a comparatively rare event; she argues that rape laws are too lenient, whereas in fact the penalties for rape are second only to those for murder in most states; she calls for reducing the evidentiary requirements for conviction, even though many innocent men have been executed after being falsely accused of rape. By special pleading, falsification, and atrocity-mongering, Brownmiller strives to create an atmosphere of hysteria and misinformation conducive to assaults upon civil liberties, as well as to diverting the women’s movement from its rational priorities (according to the New York Times, rape has now become the number one issue of the feminist movement, eclipsing such former concerns as legal abortion and equal pay for equal work).
A long essay-review of mine on AOW and the rape question appeared in the Gay Liberator (Detroit, Spring 1976); I have copies of the review here, so I’ll not go further into AOW now.
What is disturbing is the virtual absence of criticism. Two leading gay papers, Gay Community News and the Advocate, not only reviewed AOW favorably, but featured Susan Brownmiller’s photograph on their front covers — this in spite of the fact that AOW contains obvious antihomosexual bigotry.
Critical reviews of AOW, all written by women, did appear in Esquire, Nation, the Militant, People’s World, the Daily World, Women and Revolution, and the Libertarian Review, but these were a tiny minority compared to the accolades cranked out in the establishment press.

So wurde z.B. beharrlich das falsche Gerücht gestreut, dass in dem Argentinischen Film “The big Snuff” tatsächlich eine Frau ermordet worden sei. Das weitete sich dann zu einem USA-weiten “Skandal” aus.

http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/DTF.HTM

Lesenswert, auch sein Essay zu Brownmillers “Against Our Will”:

http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/RAPE.HTM

Wie unterschied sich die Bewertung im Vergleich zu den 50 ger Jahren?

Es gibt leider viel mehr Material aus den USA, weshalb es leichter fällt die Entwicklung dort zu beurteilen. Sehr aufschlußreich finde ich diese köstlichen “Social guidance Films”, sie spiegeln eben den damaligen Zeitgeist wieder.

Sex vor der Ehe war natürlich ein Skandal, innerhalb des Hafens der Ehe galt Sex hingegen offenbar durchaus als ein respektables, positives Bedürfnis. Petting unter Teenagern wurde aber offenbar als normal betrachtet.

(Homosexualität war natürlich gleich Pädophilie, kriminell und vor allem Krank)

Wodurch wurde es trotz weiterer Ausdehnung der Popkultur “Sex and drugs and ….) möglich, diese zunehmende Redämonisierung zu erreichen ??

Nach meiner Auffassung konnte man eben nicht mehr offen sexualkonservativ sein. Da bot sich der Dämon männliche sexuelle Gewalt, der das unschuldige Weib dauerbedrängt, eben geradezu an.

So lässt sich in meinen Augen erklären, warum ein paar durchgeknallte Radikalfeministinnen soviel Einfluß gewinnen konnten: Sie kanalisierten die Unsicherheiten, die die sexuelle Revolution mit sich gebracht hatte. So richtig zurück wollte man aber auch nicht, weshalb Radikalfeminismus und das Ideal der befreiten Sexualität eine imo bizarre Paralellexistenz, oft vertreten durch ein- und dieselbe Personen, begann.

(Radikalfeminismus ist eigentlich wohl auch keine Befreiung weiblicher Sexualität, es wird ja extrem auf die sexuelle Unschuld der Frau rekurriert)

Susan Brownmiller hat aus meiner Sicht tatsächlich die Grundlagen einer starken Männerfeindlichkeit im modernen Feminismus gelegt. Hier noch etwas zu ihrem Buch „Against our Will“ aus der Wikipedia:

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape is a 1975 book by Susan Brownmiller. The book, which is widely credited with changing public outlooks and attitudes about rape, promoted the concept that rape was not the victim’s fault. Brownmiller described rape as „a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.“[1] In short, Brownmiller asserts that „rape is a crime not of lust, but of violence and power.“[2]

Brownmiller sought to examine general belief systems that women who were raped deserved it, as discussed by Clinton Duffy and others. Believing that rape was a way for men to instill fear in women, she compared it to the gang lynchings of African Americans by white men.[1] This comparison was used to show how lynching was once considered acceptable by communities, and then attitudes changed, followed by changed laws; Brownmiller hoped the same would happen with rape.[2] The book is cited as having influenced changes in law regarding rape, such as state criminal codes that required a corroborating witness to a rape, and that permitted a defendant’s lawyer to introduce evidence in court regarding a victim’s prior sexual history. After her book was published, all fifty states in the U.S. eliminated marital rape exemptions.[1]

Against Our Will was included in the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, which listed 100 books that greatly influenced different aspects of culture.[3]

Bizarrerweise dient ja nunmehr der beständige Kampf gegen die Rape Culture dazu, Angst in Frauen zu installieren. vgl dazu auch:

• Rape Culture oder Angst?
• Rape Culture
• “Rape Culture” und der Wunsch nach Verletzbarkeit

Hier noch ein paar Zitate:

“A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent… Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity,’ men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”

— Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975)

Und hier noch etwas von ihrer Homepage:

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Zoologists for the most part have been reticent on the subject of rape. It has not been, for them, an important scientific question. But we do know that ‚ human beings are different. Copulation in our species can occur 365 days of the year; it is not controlled bythe female estrous cycle. We females of the human species do not „go pink.“ The call of estrus and the telltale signs, both visual and olfactory, are absent from our mating procedures, lost perhaps in the evolutionary shuffle. In their place, as a mark of our civilization,we have evolved a complex system of psychological signs and urges,and a complex structure of pleasure. Our call to sex occurs in the head, and the act is not necessarily linked, as it is with animals, to other Nature’s pattern of procreation. Without a biologically determined mating season, a human male can evince sexual interest in a human female at any time he pleases, and his psychologic urge is not dependent in the slightest on her biologic readiness or receptivity. What it all boils down to is that the human male can rape.

Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accommodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it. Anatomically one might want to improve on the design of nature, but such speculation appears to my mind as unrealistic. The human sex act accomplishes its historic purpose of generation of the species and it also affords some intimacy and pleasure. I have no basic quarrel with the procedure. But, nevertheless, we cannot work around the fact that in terms of human anatomy the possibility of forcible intercourse incontrovertibly exists. This single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it. Later, much later, under certain circumstances they even came to consider rape a crime.

In the violent landscape inhabited by primitive woman and man, some woman somewhere had a prescient vision of her right to her own physical integrity, and in my mind’s eye I can picture her fighting like hell to preserve it. After a thunderbolt of recognition that this particular incarnation of hairy, two legged hominid was not the Homo sapiens with whom she would like to freely join parts, it might have been she, and not some man, who picked up the first stone and hurled it. How surprised he must have been, and what an unexpected battle must have taken place. Fleet of foot and spirited, she would have kicked, bitten, pushed and run, but she could not retaliate in kind.

The dim perception that had entered prehistoric woman’s consciousness must have had an equal but opposite reaction in the mind of her male assailant. For if the first rape was an unexpected battle founded on the first woman’s refusal, the second rape was indubitably planned. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men. This accomplished, rape became not only a male prerogative, but man’s basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood.

Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

Es ist wie oben schon gesagt fast lustig, wenn eine Theorie ist, dass Frauen in Angst vor einer Vergewaltigung gehalten werden um sie zu unterdrücken und die Vertreter dieser Theorie diejenigen sind, die die Angst vor einer Vergewaltigung am meisten betonen, insofern eigentlich diese Theorie stärken und selbst den Männern bei ihrer Unterdrückung zuarbeiten.

Das die meisten Männer überhaupt keine Vorteile davon haben, Frauen zu verängstigen, sondern vielmehr ein System geschaffen haben, indem sich Frauen so sicher wie wohl noch nie in der Geschichte bewegen können und Vergewaltiger sozial geächtet und mit hohen Strafen bedroht sind, dass wird dabei anscheinend ausgeblendet.

Davon ausgehend, dass die Vergewaltigung überall lauert wird eine beständig drohende Übergriffigkeit und damit eine gefährliche männliche Sexualität aufgebaut. Dies erlaubt auch eine Dämonisierung der Sexualität, die dann in Schranken gehalten werden muss.