Ergebnisse & Perspektiven des MarxismusThe following article was published in Young Spartacus No. 29, February 1975, newspaper of the Spartacus Youth League, then youth section of the Spartacist League/U.S..
By Matt Thompson and Sarah Arnold
Considerable publicity has surrounded the recent court case of Inez García, a woman from Soledad, California, who fatally shot Miguel Jimenez, the man she claims held her to the ground while a second man raped her. The shooting occurred about a half hour after the alleged rape; the rape itself was said to have followed a violent quarrel.
Inez García was brought to trial and convicted of second degree murder, while no charges were even brought against the accused rapist. The judge was the same Stanley Lawson who had two political black prisoners brought into his courtroom shackled and then pulled a gun on them when they pounded their chains on a table in protest.
García has stated her conviction that the shooting was fully justified: “my conscience is clear for having fought and killed at least one of the two men who violated my honor” (San Francisco Bay Guardian, 15 August 1974). While socialists will certainly come to the defense of a woman who is charged and prosecuted for defending herself from a rapist, the Inez García case remains clouded with unresolved unclarities: allegations that involvement in a narcotics ring and shady connections with Soledad’s small-town underworld were motivations for the killing, conflicting testimony about the alleged rape itself and evidence of García’s emotional disturbance.
Disinterested in or blurring over these unresolved questions, many feminists, radicals and liberals are simply championing Inez García as a symbol of all rape victims, a martyr for the cause of women’s liberation and an embattled heroine. “Viva Inez…. She is Fighting for Us All,” cries the masthead of Inez García Defense Committee leaflets. Despite profuse verbal militancy glorifying the shooting of Jimenez, the feminists’ response to the Inez García case has seldom gone beyond knee-jerk liberalism. One feminist journal presented Inez García with a cloying sentimentality that evoked precisely the sexist Barbie-doll stereotype of women:
“Her [García’s] relationship with her Berkeley sisters [in the Inez García Defense Committee] has been as an equal. It is, for example, her Cuban style recipe which was used for the enormously successful dinner-dance benefit [!]. A real person [!], Inez expressed pleasure at her publicity-photographs [!], one of which catches her in a rare smile.”
– Plexus, September 1974
When confronted with such an outrageous administration of capitalist “justice,” this trend of liberal opinion has no solution for dealing with problematic cases like that of Inez García other than replacing the prevailing stereotypes of the rape victim with a new set of stereotypes as a means of sheltering the victims of rape.
Regarding the contradictions of capitalist “justice,” this liberal response to the case of Inez García today recalls, ironically, the liberal campaign waged fifteen years ago to prevent the execution of the accused rapist Caryl Chessman. Arrested in 1948, Chessman was accused of being the “Red-Light Bandit” who prowled Los Angeles area lovers’ lanes, robbing couples and then forcing the women to perform fellatio on him at gun point. Under the then-existing California law, the state could secure the death penalty only by prosecuting Chessman for kidnapping under the “Little Lindberg” law. After years of court battles, Chessman became a in a left-liberal campaign for the end of capital punishment. Under capitalist “justice,” the real crime allegedly committed by Chessman – rape – was not a factor in either the prosecution’s drive for the death penalty or the liberals’ campaign in support of Chessman against capital punishment.
The Inez García case has received considerable attention largely as a result of the campaign of many feminists and some prominent liberals who are proposing various measures to guarantee a more equitable administration of justice in rape cases. But can such remedies be found that do not become ensnared in the contradictions of capitalist society and its justice? What is rape, and how will the proposed measures promising a more equitable administration of justice under capitalism intersect sex, race, class and violence in this society?
Rape is manifestly a crime which embodies all of the sexual myths, fantasies and stereotypes of this violent, deeply racist class society. When refracted through the prism of the feminist world view, however, rape simply becomes an extreme expression of “normal” heterosexual relations in a patriarchal society:
“Rape is not a special isolated act. It is not an aberration, a deviation from the norms of sexual and social behavior in this country. Rape is simply at the end of the continuum of male-aggressive, female-passive patterns, and an arbitrary line has been drawn to mark it off from the rest of such relationships…. most men in our country are potential rapists.”
– A. Medea and K. Thompson, Against Rape
Another analysis elaborates an analogous chivalry-rape dualism:
“If a male society rewards aggressive, domineering sexual behavior, it contains within itself a sexual schizophrenia. For the masculine man is also expected to prove his mettle as a protector of women…. In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationships which the mafia established with small businesses in the early part of this century: Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.”
– Susan Griffin in Ramparts, September 1971
Griffin “confirms” this theory by noting that Sir Thomas Malory – the author of the classic tale of chivalry, La Morte d’Arthur – is known to have been a rapist. Like most feminists, Griffin concludes by asserting a collective guilt of all men for rape.
It is certainly possible to regard human sexual behaviour as expressing itself along a broad continuum, even though the psychology and sociology of sexual relations are murky and complex. Rape uniquely involves an act the circumstances of which determine whether it is a crime or voluntary sexual intercourse. Therefore, ambiguities about consensuality do and must occur.
Rape transforms what is normally a pleasurable intimacy and consensual activity for sexual gratification into an experience of fear, degrading submission, brutality and often injury for the victim and into an overt expression of hostility and aggression for the rapist. Between the actuality of rape and the sex act per se there are differences. These differences may be considered as discontinuities in the continuum of sexual relations. It is precisely the feminists who make the value judgment that there are no discontinuities, no differences in kind, between mutually pleasurable, consensual sexual intercourse and a victimization and violation filled with terror and degradation.
There does exist the phenomenon of completely consensual sexual intercourse, even though the consensuality might be shaped by sexist attitudes or neuroses. Sex becomes something less than fully consensual when economic coercion is involved. However, this economic coercion is expressed through a complex set of social relations, and it is often extremely difficult to determine points where a discontinuity occurs; for example, to analyse sexual transactions with respect to the consensual/coercive relationships in the nuclear family and prostitution.
Sex was clearly less than fully consensual for those bourgeois mothers who roamed the streets of inflation-ridden Germany in 1923 peddling the bodies of their daughters in return for food and a warm night’s lodging for the two of them. Men took advantage of the dire distress of these women as an opportunity for their own sexual gratification. The particular circumstances made such sexual relations different from both “duty” sex in marriage and forcible rape.
An even greater discontinuity is evident in wartime mass rape. While brutalized soldiers rape helpless female civilians in large measure for sexual satisfaction, there is usually also a dispensation for the crime. Soldiers are often given a license to rape and encouraged to view the women of the conquered nation (usually of a different racial or ethnic origin) as something less than human.
For example, during the second world war Japanese troops were continually being told by their officers that Chinese women were longing for “virile” Japanese males, because they had become tired of their “flabby” Chinese men. This undoubtedly was seen as a dispensation by the Japanese soldiers, who committed brutal mass rape in each city they entered.
Such wartime dispensation to rape is described in a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago:
“… my cell mates … were three honest, openhearted soldiers…. Still damp from the battle of the day before, yesterday they had gotten drunk, and on the outskirts of the village broke into a bath where they had noticed two raunchy broads going to bathe. The girls, half-dressed, managed to get away all right from the soldiers’ staggering, drunken legs. But one of them, it turned out, was the property of the army Chief of Counterintelligence, no less.
Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the garden and slapped on the behind – an amusement, no more. But just because this one was the ‘campaign wife’ of the Chief of Counterintelligence … these warriors … were waiting for a court-martial….”
The anti-communist renegade Solzhenitsyn, darling of the “Free World” liberals, thus justifies the mass rape by the Red Army across Germany in WWII, expressing petulant outrage only at the fact that some women were so “lucky” as to have military protection from rape and death.
The Vittorio de Sica film Two Women is a masterful portrayal of the brutality and dispensation of such wartime rape. In the film an Italian mother (Sophia Loren) and her virginal daughter, fleeing the advancing battle front of World War II Italy, take refuge in a deserted church. They are discovered by a group of soldiers who quickly surround them, separate them from each other, brutally rape them and then leave them lying unconscious drenched in semen. The sexual competitiveness of males in a sexist society, expressed in sexual jealousy and possessiveness, is suppressed during such gang rapes precisely because the victim is so degraded that she can be regarded as something less than human by the rapists.
In situations of war, racial or communal conflict there are numerous instances where revenge for casualties taken and atrocities inflicted or where a straightforward drive to subdue the conquered people is the primary motivation for mass rape. The act of rape then becomes a mode for a political crime. For example, during the holocaust of communal violence that erupted with the partition of India in 1947, rape became a means of inflicting a punishment considered worse than death. The Indian novelist Khushwant Singh has described the atrocities:
“They [Muslims] had heard of gentle-women having their veils taken off, being stripped and marched down crowded streets to be raped in the market place. Many had eluded their would-be ravishers by killing themselves…. Sikh refugees had told of women jumping into wells and burning themselves rather than fall into the hands of Muslims. Those who did not commit suicide were paraded naked in the streets, raped in public, and then murdered.”
– Train to Pakistan
All criteria for sexuality break down when a man uses his penis as a weapon in a premeditated assault on a terrorized woman. Former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver has described how in his pre-political days he celebrated rape-as-revenge:
“Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s laws, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women – and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”
– Soul On Ice
Cleaver’s sadistic assaults were motivated by a desire to reverse the terms of centuries-long racial oppression through terrorizing and degrading white women (whose ancestors were far more likely to have been European peasants than Southern slaveowners), an act of defiance against white society.
Thus, rape at the final discontinuity ceases to be a sexual act. In the Nazi concentration camps, the fascists committed barbaric sexual atrocities that can be considered the essence of rape. In the autobiographical account Out of the Night, Jan Valtin recounts what the Nazis in one prison camp did to a Jew arrested for attempting to rape a young female Nazi.
During the night the guards of the camp mercilessly beat the Jew to death in his cell. The next morning the Jewish prisoners in the camp were brought out into the compound yard, ordered to dig a deep hole and then stand at attention before it. The other prisoners were then marched out into the yard and lined up against the compound wall. Nazi guards emerged carrying the corpse of the Jew on a stretcher. Valtin was then witness to the following:
“On the stretcher lay the mangled corpse of the Jew who had been murdered at night. His abdomen was a smear of dried blood and a clump of bloody rubbish was where his genitals had been. His face was convulsed and his eyes, wide open, were twisted upward in a glassy stare. The guard in the doctor’s garb led the stretcher crew past the lined-up prisoners, and all of us stared silently at the dead man. The corpse was naked and the gulls cruised close and screamed. At a command, the stretcher-bearers dumped their burden on the ground close to the rim of the hole.
Several of the Jews who were standing around the hole clasped their hands in front of their faces. Two others collapsed. They were cuffed and beaten until they stood straight again.
‘Pants down,’ commanded Toussaint.
The row of Jews lowered their pants. They were not men any more. They were animals without a will. They were stiff with fear.
‘Now masturbate,’ commanded Toussaint.
A few of the Jews reached for their genitals. Guards ran along their file and struck the others in their faces.
‘Masturbate, I said,’ Toussaint roared. ‘Masturbate, you swine!’
The Jews obeyed. They feebly went through the motions that were demanded of them and many of the guards wore broad grins.
‘Faster,’ Toussaint shouted. ‘You desert bandits! You lustful reptiles! Show us how you do it in your cells at night!’
The Jews pretended to masturbate faster. They knew they would be beaten if they did not. They knew they could not afford to collapse.”
The corpse was then kicked into the hole.
“Each of the other Jews was ordered to step forward and shout three times: ‘I am a race polluter.’ After shouting this three times, each Jew in turn was pushed into the hole atop the dead Jew. After he had shouted again, ‘I am a race polluter,’ he was allowed to climb out of the hole.”
This sickening brutality epitomizes the essence of rape, although the elements are manifested in a disparate form: the victim – sexually abused and dehumanized; the sex act – completely divorced from the goal of sexual gratification and a nightmare of fear; the motivation – heinous sexual and racial degradation.
Recent statistics indicate that the number of reported rapes in New York City alone has risen 103 percent over the last five years (New York Times, 2 December 1974). Rape victims, especially if they are poor as most of them are, can expect almost nothing in the way of aid or redress from the “peace-keeping” agencies of the capitalist state: the cops and the courts.
Should a woman try to report a rape to the police, the ensuing ordeal is often a painfully degrading follow-up to the sexual assault itself. Women are frequently denied immediate medical attention and are met with either indifference and disbelief or salacious interrogation by leering cops.
Until recently, the laws on rape were generally so completely inadequate that one published article about rape without exaggeration could be entitled: “What Can You Say About Laws that Tell a Man, If You Rob A Woman, You Might As Well Rape Her Too – the Rape is Free” (Redbook, September 1972). In a recent typical year, only 18 rape convictions were obtained in the courts of New York, compared with thousands of complaints (“Governor’s Approval Memorandum No. 16,” 22 May 1972).
In response to this situation, a campaign has been launched around the country for the reform of the sex offenses laws to provide for easier convictions of accused rapists. The focus of the reform agitation has been the corroboration laws, which although strictest in the state of New York are similar in many other Northern states. Previously, New York law required for conviction a witness besides the victim to identify the assailant, medically determined proof of actual penetration and proof of forcible compulsion. Rape is the only major felony in which the uncorroborated testimony of the victim has up to this point been held as inherently untrustworthy.
The first two requirements have now been dropped, and there is continued pressure for eliminating the remaining corroboration requirement – proof of forcible compulsion and the attempt to commit the rape (e.g., semen on the clothes of the victim). These corroboration requirements have in the past been the primary obstacle to more frequent convictions of accused rapists, since in many cases it is virtually impossible to meet the requirements. Thus, reform of the rape laws by elimination of these corroboration requirements would seem to hold out the possibility for a more equitable and non-discriminatory administration of justice.
Such reforms do not insure equitability, but merely shift the areas of abuse under bourgeois “justice.” Through malice or mistaken identity, innocent men (a concept which the feminists reject to one degree or another) are accused of rape. The reforms that have been proposed will mean that men can be convicted of rape on the basis of totally uncorroborated testimony.
Two recent well-publicized cases involving mistaken identity are those of Lawrence Berson and William Schranger, two New Yorkers accused of separate incidents of rape. In both cases the men were positively identified by the victims. They were released only when the actual rapists turned themselves in and confessed – an unexpected and almost unprecedented occurrence.
The proposed reforms likewise ignore the need to protect a defendant from accusations motivated by malice or revenge. Precisely because rape involves an act which under normal circumstances is voluntary, it is inevitable that ambiguities about consensuality will arise in many cases, particularly in those cases – the majority of those reported according to the estimates of several studies – where the man and woman are previously acquainted. Conviction merely on the basis of a woman’s statement that an act of intercourse was not consensual is an open invitation to victimization, since rape is the most easily fabricated of felonies.
Furthermore, in this deeply racist society rape laws have been and will continue to be used to victimize black people. In the last 40 years, 455 men have been executed for rape; 405 of them were black and 398 were convicted in the southern states (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1973). It is not coincidental that the staunchest allies of the feminists in the fight for reform of the rape laws are police officials, District Attorney’s offices and state legislatures. The trend toward making rape convictions easier by expanding the prosecutor’s rights and limiting the defendant’s rights flows not from a new-found concern for the rights and safety of women but from the campaign for “law and order” being waged by the capitalist state.
While legal-reform advocates might like to dismiss vigilante lynch mobs as past history in the South, legalized lynching certainly is not; Emmet Till was not the last black man to face death at the frenzied behest of racist public opinion. Right now, three black men – Jess Walston, Vernon Brown and Bobby Hines – await death in the gas chamber, convicted in a North Carolina court of raping a white woman. According to their defense, which is supported by Democrat Julian Bond and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the woman was offered a ride one evening by the three defendants; she voluntarily entered their car and then voluntarily had sexual intercourse with each of the three men. They dropped her off at her home in the full view of several white bystanders. Days later, under pressure from her family, she charged the men with rape.
The case is egregiously typical, and not fundamentally different from the famous 1931 Scottsboro case. The Scottsboro boys were nine black youths who were charged with raping two white girls in a freight car of a train. Despite contradictory testimony at the trial, the local court found eight of them guilty and sentenced them to death. Although not executed, the Scottsboro defendants served long prison terms and the last was not released until 1950. Under the reforms demanded by the feminists, racist frame-ups cannot but increase.
Another legal reform that has been proposed is the elimination of all rape laws, so that women could then prosecute accused rapists for assault. California has recently made a move in this direction by declaring testimony about the past sex life of the woman inadmissible evidence. Advocates of this reform can present a compelling argument. In the past, defense attorneys have so abused such testimonial evidence in order to impeach the victim’s character that the trial becomes a brutal circus with the burden of proof of innocence placed on the rape victim. The prospect of such emotional ordeals and stigmatization has in the past certainly kept many victims from prosecuting a rape case.
But prosecuting rape as an assault becomes snarled in all the ambiguities of consensuality. Time and time again the bourgeois courts have demonstrated that they have no intention of spending the time and money required to work through the tangled web of testimony in a contested case. Rape is unique as a crime in that it is the circumstances of the act which determine whether it is a crime or voluntary sexual intercourse. Attempting to reduce rape simply to assault cannot insure an equitable administration of justice. And whatever might be gained for the victim by de-traumatizing and tidying up trial procedure will be at the expense of new abuses of assault prosecution.
The soaring increase in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and assault, has made fear a part of everyday life for increasing numbers of urban residents. Law and order are prerequisites for civilized living. Yet in the hands of the bourgeois state, “law and order” translates into a justification for wanton cop brutality against ghetto residents, for smashing labor militancy and for anti-communist crusades. The administration of class-loaded, race-loaded capitalist “justice” ranges from callous indifference to the grievances of the poor, unemployed and laboring population to cold-blooded armed defense of the status quo.
If one is a victim of grievous injury such as rape and knows that the chances for equitable redress through the agencies of the capitalist state are virtually nil, the compulsion to “take the law into your own hands” is strong and even reasonable. Recognizing that the cops and courts have done little to stop rape, militant feminists have for some time exhorted women to learn self-defense techniques as a measure of protection against physical victimization.
The case of Inez García is only one of a spate of cases to receive national publicity and press coverage in the last several months where a woman attacked by an alleged rapist managed to kill or seriously injure her assailant in retaliation. Another case is that of Joanne Little, a black woman prisoner in a North Carolina jail. A prison guard, threatening her with an ice pick, allegedly attempted to rape her in her cell; as he was committing the rape she seized the weapon, stabbed him several times and then fled the jail. She turned herself in eight days later and now faces murder charges.
The feminists who regard all rape as a political crime thus consider self-defense a political act of liberation. As one feminist newspaper put it:
“Within the patriarchal society, women who ‘take the law into their own hands’ are defying their assigned role of passivity, and to break away from an established role is a political act.”
– off our backs, November 1974
Many militant feminists are now advocating vigilantism as deterrence and retaliation for rapes.
However compelling is the argument of the feminist militants, the proposal to “take the law into your own hands” runs into the very same contradictions as the liberal feminists’ cry for “law and order” to stop sharply rising incidents of rape.
Marxists recognize that this is a class-divided society and that the state will defend its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence. Concerning retributive violence, the feminists are left pondering, “How we do it without getting caught is the next question” (off our backs, November 1974).
Moreover, this is a racially divided society, and thus “grievous injury,” on the scales of bourgeois morality, will have a definite racial bias: a southern white married woman discovered embracing her neighbor will draw one sort of response, but the black man suspected of even showing affection toward the same woman may expect a much different treatment. Therefore, any sanction to “take the law into your own hands” will turn into a license to terrorize and murder black people on behalf of the prevailing, racist social values. Vigilantism will turn into an extra-legal prop for the authorities, which writ large is not simply a lynch mob, but a fascist movement.
The glib feminists perhaps consider it “symbolic” vigilante terror to shout and to spray-paint on alley walls the slogan, “Castrate Rapists!” But there are white racists in this society who are awaiting the social and political conjuncture when they will act on precisely such calls for torture. Castration for accused rapists was a punishment practiced by the southern slaveocracy, in all its decadence and with its insistence that blacks were not human beings but chattel. Eventually, as Eugene Genovese has noted, even the slaveholders abandoned castration as a torture for the crime of rape: “The punishment for rape remained death; punishment by castration receded, although in Missouri it survived into the late antebellum period”1 (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made). As their battle cry, the feminists have taken up a punishment that sickened even the most brutal slavedrivers and slaveowners!
The currently popular film Death Wish has as its theme just the kind of vigilantism desired by the militant feminists advocating “rape squads.” In the film a man whose wife is fatally beaten and daughter viciously raped and whose great personal tragedy receives little concern from the police vows to bring the “wisdom” of the frontier West to New York City. The protagonist thus begins an individual campaign of blasting muggers and prowling rapists off the streets and subways.
In the film the protagonist’s crusade leaps into the headlines and is received with sympathy and even enthusiasm by broad layers of public opinion yearning for law and order. Significantly, the movie audiences, whatever their social and racial composition, have been described as identifying closely with the vigilante and have cheered as he shoots down the muggers and rapists. Death Wish makes a direct and visceral appeal to what is undeniably a growing reaction among both whites and blacks in large urban centers to the crime and random lumpen violence which are making urban life a nightmare.
The movie producers have made a glaringly obvious attempt to present racial “balance,” including a racially integrated cast of muggers. Real vigilantism in a city like New York will turn into attacks on racial minorities and will trigger race riots, not “safe streets.”
Within the confines of capitalist society and through the “justice” of the bourgeois state, the search for an equitable administration of justice for the crime of rape is caught in a maze with no exit. Each proposed solution, from legal reform to direct vigilante retribution, runs into flat contradictions arising out of the intersection of sex, race and class in this capitalist society.
The juridical basis of the development of the present system of rape laws is a moral code, based on the institution of the nuclear family, that regards a “violation” of a woman to be a decline in her “property value.” Only in a workers state will men and women stand in full equality before the law, the administration of which will be a part of the creation and maintenance of a social fabric of well-being for the population as a whole.