Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
If the violent rape and murder of one woman has an impact on the lives of thousands
of her sisters, then at the very, very least, she did not die in vain. Unfortunately,
for every solitary woman whose death inspires something other than cavernous million
of women are raped, maimed, mutilated and murdered without garnering so much as a
paragraph in the local newspaper.
There is no Howardina Stern on the airwaves every morning instigating passionate,
pro-active, cuntlovin’ dialogues about rape in our culture. News helicopters hover
over the scenes of bank robberies and traffic accidents, not parks where a woman was
raped. Cities bestow awards of valor to fire fighters and good samaritans, not women
who elude, maul or successfully prosecute would-be rapists.
On the back cover of Migael Scherer’s courageous and brilliant book,
Still Loved by the Sun : A Rape Survivors Journal,
Ursula K. Le Guin says, “The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends
above all on the silence of women.”
Contemplate the simplicity, depth and truth of this statement:
The power
depends
on the silence.
Silence is our focal point of attack.
Silence is the unlocked door through which intruders enter and pillage the sacred
temple of womankind.
The threat of rape lurked around my childhood in relentless warnings and admonishments.
When my mother told me she had been raped, I understood the source of the fear I grew
up with.
Like many women, it saddened me to feel “lucky” that rape remained a threat, but not
an actual occurrence, in my personal life. I was further saddened by the fact that
the very reason, I believe, neither my sister nor I has been raped is in part due
to our mother’s experience. She actively, consciously, ferociously protected us. Long
before we knew our mother had been raped, Liz and I developed a sixth sense for dangerous
situations. I am thankful for that. I believe it has aided me on a number of occasions.
I wish, however, it was not initially inspired by fear and feelings of powerlessness.
Fear and powerlessess.
Silence.
Rape.
Cunthatred.
It’s time for this to end.
When I started this chapter, I was re-studying Pippi Longstocking. Partly because
of my childhood, I would like to formally invoke Ms. Longstocking’s attitude to serve
as the Grand Duchess Overtone for the duration of this book:
“Have you ever seen hair like hers? Red as fire! And such shoes,” Bengt continued.
“Can I borrow one? I’d like to go out rowing and I haven’t any boat.” He took hold
of one of Pippi’s braids but dropped it instantly and cried, “Ouch, I burned myself.”
Then all five boys joined hands around Pippi, jumping up and down and screaming, “Redhead!
Redhead!”
Pippi stood in the middle of the ring and smiled in the friendliest way. Bengt had
hoped she would get mad and begin to cry. At least she ought to have looked scared.
When nothing happened he gave her a push.
“I don’t think you have a very nice way with ladies,” said Pippi. And she lifted him
in her strong arms—high in the air—and carried him to a birch tree and hung him over
a branch. Then she took the next boy and hung him over another branch. The next one
she set on a gatepost outside a cottage, and the next she threw right over the fence
so that he landed in a flower bed. The last of the fighters she put in a tiny toy
cart that stood by the side of the road.... The boys were absolutely speechless with
fright. (Lindgren, 1950, 32-33)
There are two things women can do to facilitate the end of rape as an inevitable—even
acceptable—aspect of our culture. The first is relatively easy, but the second will
take a bit of serious cuntlove to come to fruition.
One out of eight movies produced in Hollywood contains a rape scene. In American cinema,
rape scenes tend to be violently eroticized, and often have nothing to do with the
main plot of the film. When viewing a rape scene, scads of men feel confused and disgusted
with themselves if it turns them on.
Eugene Chadbourne, a columnist for
MAXIMUMROCKNROLL
eloquently discussed a male perspective on Hollywood rape scenes. In response to
The Accused,
he stated:
After more than an hour of the film, the audience is shown the rape. There she was,
Jodie Foster, stretched out on top of a pinball machine with a bunch of assholes holding
her down. The first few shots of her breasts and the man kissing her and slurping
around were undeniably erotic.... I kept wondering why I was turned on. I explained
it to myself that I just knew it wasn’t a real rape, [but] ... if the whole center
of the film, a supposedly brutal and disgusting rape, turns on even one person in
the audience just a little bit, then the film has completely missed its mark.
A few weeks later, I saw an Australian film entitled
Shame.
This was also about rape ... the differences between these two films were many, but
one basic thing was that the makers of
Shame
chose not to show the rape, the makers of
The Accused
made it their climactic scene.
(MAXIMUMROCKNROLL,
March 1990)
Another non-Hollywood film that deals with rape in a responsible way is
The Bandit Queen,
which is based on a true story. The protagonist, Phoolan Devi, was raped for a number
of days by high-caste men in an Indian village. The camera focused on the door of
the room she was kept in, with images of man after man entering and exiting. The point
of her assault was clearly, horrifically made, and there was absolutely nothing erotic
about it. (Her gang was allegedly responsible for later assassinating all of these
men.)
On July 25, 2001, Phoolan Devi was murdered outside her home in New Delhi. A moment
of silence, please.
In general, with the exception of a few films—
Thelma and Louise
comes to mind—rape scenes found in American cinema are filmed from the p.o.v. of
men, who evidently experience some kind of personal gain by humiliating women. I do
not know if the men who make movies enjoy humiliating individual actresses, or if
it is a symbolic show of power over women in general. I do know that too many movies
contain scenes that deal with rape in an unrealistic, male-fantasy-based manner.
Women viewers subjected to such scenes may experience any emotion between utter indifference
and profound grief. It is safe to assume, however, that underneath any emotional response
is a basic assumption of powerlessness. We are powerless to help the woman on the
screen, unable to change her destiny, we cannot kill the piece of shit who violates
her. We are forced to watch the pillage of one of our sisters unfold, under the charmed
auspices of something executives in Hollywood refer to as a plot.
Perhaps also, we are unwilling to take responsibility for something we are brought
up to think of as inevitable.
The last rape scene I ever saw was in
Last Exit to Brooklyn.
The gang-rape of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character physically sickened me. When someone
tells me about a great new movie, I almost always asks if there’s a rape scene in
it. Once this information is obtained, I can gauge whether or not this might, indeed,
be a great new movie. Boycotting movies with rape scenes has enriched the quality
of my life.
I don’t need to see that shit.
And so, I don’t.
We do not need to see our sisters up there on the screen being overpowered and assaulted
by bad, scary men. We do not need to see good, righteous men saving our sisters in
the knick of time, or achieving “justice” for us in the courtroom.
It does not serve us.
There are a couple of options here.
If you know a movie will contain a rape scene, forego seeing it altogether. If you
unwittingly go to a movie that contains a rape scene, leave the theater and demand
your money back from the manager. Let the manager know you will not pay to see women
raped. Write a letter to the president of the movie theater’s distribution company.
Feel free to incite your friends. Especially if you’re a teenager and you organize
a huge protest. The ten o’clock news likes nothing more than high-school girls causing
a ruckus in the name of social change. Even though it may seem like a faraway, remote
place, Hollywood is a very small town with very big ears.
Movies featuring women who are strong, ass-kicking controllers of destiny are not
so hard to come by these days, so it’s not like such a boycott would encumber our
movie-going habits. There are plenty of wonderful films to choose from. It’s far healthier
to watch
The Long Kiss Goodnight
five times than to bother yourself with
Showgirls
or
Kids
once.
La Femme Nikita
and
Gloria
are excellent classics.
Set it Off, Freeway, Girls Town
and
Bound
are part of a very welcome influx of excellent, cuntlovin’ movies produced in the
1990s.
Plan to attend movies that you know contain rape scenes. Go with a bunch of your friends.
Once the rape scene is underway, stand up and scream. Freak. Loudly narrate your own
version of what is happening on the screen:
“Now she is pounding his face into the metal stairs of the fire escape. Her shoe is
off. Ooo! Spiked heel to the temple!!! Look at all that blood oozing from his head!”
Etc....
When the scene is over, march to the manager. Demand your money back based on the
affront to women you were forced to witness. Continue making a huge, articulate scene
in the lobby. When all your friends get their refunds, leave quietly, but continue
to be cranky about it.
If our buying dollars are not squandered on that which does not serve us, sooner or
later, the gentlemen in Hollywood may see the light. However, in the not too unrealistic
event that gentlemen in Hollywood never see the light, our money can be used to generate
more movies that serve us. There is an
entire regiment
of women in the motion picture industry struggling very hard to deliver such products
to us. Let us, shall we, constructively focus on this branch of American cinema. At
the same time, we also can choose to offer constructive and loud criticism to the
present movie machine that makes billions of dollars off us each year.
You may have already figured this out, but the whole reason I ever felt inspired to
sit down and write this book originated with the rape of my mother. I couldn’t think
of any other way to exact vengeance on the men who hurt her, my sister and me so deeply.
I have thought long and hard about why women are objects of violence.
I’ve been through the Blaming Men phase and then I passed on to the Blaming Women
Phase. Neither phase did me, as an individual, much good. So then, I guess for sheer
lack of imagination, I blamed myself. That didn’t last long though, ’cause one night
I was falling asleep and this cherry ’68 Impala Lowrider cruised around in my head,
and it had a bumper sticker that said:
Blame is lame with a “b”
So I thought to explore an option I hadn’t considered before. I decided to love myself.
To love my cunt. To love everything it does and represents.
That seemed to do a lot of good, and led me to ask myself:
What is the result of women loving our cunts, en masse?
There is no place for rape in a society filled with women who love our cunts. Women
can be kicked when we are down, but no one is stupid or strong enough to kick us when
we are standing up, all, together.
This may sound idealistic in some regards, but cuntlove envisions no mass utopia.
Cuntlove is about the individual and her community. Cuntlove is about the power of
you, your sisters, cousins, daughters and intimate friends. Cuntlove is not distant
rhetoric found in books and debate halls. Cuntlove is in your head, on your heart,
between your legs.
Aldous Huxley, a white male writer with the ensuing sense of entitlement for which
white males are famous, said, “Liberties are not given, they’re taken.”
In the past, women have relied on individual men and patriarchal judicial systems
to fight rape.
Unfortunately, this nets exactly the same result as when I got my brothers and sister
to lean towards the Baskin Robbins as our family car approached that big, gorgeous
pink-’n-white “31 Flavors” sign.
At the time, I thought the sudden redistribution of our body weight would affect the
momentum of our Volkswagen van, forcing the parent driving to involuntarily swerve
into the parking lot. Sometimes our parents stopped in and we all got ice cream cones,
and sometimes they did not. Even though I once believed my siblings and I contributed
to the former destiny by leaning towards the Baskin Robbins, I’m willing to face the
fact now that it was, ultimately, always Mom and Pop’s call.
Women can continue to sit in the car and lean, or we can climb over into the front
seat, yank the person controlling the vehicle out of the way and make a sharp-assed
left into the Baskin Robbins parking lot.
This involves something I warmly refer to as:
Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation
(C.P.R. for short)
In a climate of cuntlove, if a woman in the community is raped, other women react.
We understand there is no such thing as an isolated attack on an individual woman.
We understand that a Haitian-American sorority girl, a Norwegian-Filipina construction
worker, a Chumash/Cree librarian or a Jewish Whore is
us.
C.P.R.
is not at all dissimilar to a mafia philosophy in which a sister’s rape is a rape
of the family and cannot go unpunished. Someone has offended the honor of our family.
Naturally, then, we do something about it.
In a climate of cuntlove, no one feels “lucky” it was “some other woman” who got raped.
There is no such thing as “some other woman” when you have compassion and cuntlove
for yourself.
The basic premise of
C.P.R.
is publicly humiliating rapists. Since rapists count on a women’s shame and silence
to keep them safe and on the streets, it seems to me that an undue amount of attention
focused on rapists would seriously counter this assumption.
C.P.R.
can be employed when a woman is sure of her attacker’s identity. Since most attacks
are
not
perpetrated by strangers, this is a highly relevant factor.
There is safety and power in numbers.
A group of two hundred women walking into the place of employment of a known rapist
would have an effect. If each of these women were in possession of a dozen rotting
eggs which were deposited onto the rapist’s person, the rapist might well come to
the conclusion that he had committed a very unpopular act, one that was not appreciated
by the community. If a rapist had to walk through a crowd of angry, staring, silent
or quietly and deadly chanting women to get to his car in the grocery store parking
lot, he might feel pretty uncomfortable.
Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation
has limitless possibilities.
C.P.R.
actions can be executed without breaking too terribly many laws and without becoming
violent—the latter being true especially if women only are present. Unnecessary violence
is for stupid, unimaginative people. There are far more damaging ways to punish someone
without invoking violence.
Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation
serves history as well as the future. Women who have been raped may find enormous
satisfaction and healing by acting out in a setting with other women who are present
in total support, rage and love. In this context, we are offered a liberation from
silence, self-blame, quiet acceptance or any other negative reaction we have—in the
past—believed we needed for survival.
Men should not be included in
C.P.R.
actions. Excepting situations where men have been raped, the general male response
towards the rape of a friend, relative or lover is outraged, self-righteous indignation.
I’ve seen this reaction a number of times, and believe men react this way because
it gives them a chance to prove to themselves what good non-raping men they are. If
men really and truly want to be “good,” they can stand in the background and quietly
support their women friends and relatives while we stand up for ourselves. They can
chip in money to charter the busses we may need to transport everyone to the
C.P.R.
site.
We don’t need men to protect us.
This is between women and rapists.
More to the point, this is between women and ourselves.
Here is physics: A positive action yields a positive reaction.
At present, the cultural reaction to rape is generally a negative, shame-filled silence.
Fine, let the culture react that way.
We have the power to put something else there. Women can react in our own poetic,
imaginative way, utilizing the resources in our community. We have power in numbers,
and many, many means of communication.
Yes, indeedy.
It’s time for a cool change.
Any rapist would feel pretty dang upset to see his car packed full with rotting fish
heads and limburger cheese. Especially if it was a Jaguar XJS. Also, especially if
the 542 women responsible were crowded onto the street where he lived, insisting that
he move himself and his stinky car to another locale.
Nobody likes to be pelted with 2060 bloody tampons.
Wouldn’t you just hate like the devil to be pilloried, smeared with dogshit, forced
to kneel in front of a high-powered microphone on a raised platform and apologize
to the ten thousand women who solemnly marched by you? Boy, that would be an unpleasant
day that you might not forget right away, huh.
Perhaps some communities of women would be interested in constructing huge severed
penises and burning them on a rapist’s front lawn.
Cuntlovin Public Retaliation
is a valid cultural custom. Different tribes decide how to implement this custom
in the community.
It could be highly effective.
Most importantly, with a little love, communication, temporary organization and networking,
Cuntlovin’ Public Retaliation
is very, very possible.
It’s also very, very up to you.