MEN RAPE
Study says male students at British universities admit to rapes, sexual Oct. 29, 2021 (UPI) -- A new study is shining a light on attitudes about rape, sexual harassment and misogyny among male British students after it found that several admitted to such behaviors at more than 100 universities across the country.
The assessment, which was published this week by SAGE Journals, comprised of two different surveys -- one which surveyed about 300 students at about 100 British universities and one that polled roughly 250 students at a university in southeastern Britain.
The 27-page report, believed to be the first of its kind, found that 63 of the students said that they'd committed more than 250 sexual assaults, rapes or other aggressive incidents over the past two years.
For the surveys, the students were asked about their views on a range of sexual scenarios and their perception of women and romantic relationships.
The report, titled "Understanding Sexual Aggression in U.K. Male University Students," links toxic masculinity and sexual violence.
"Results highlighted that one in nine participants (11.4%) self-reported recent sexual aggression," the report states.
"These participants could be statistically differentiated from their non-offending peers on various established indicators of general sexual offending, of which logistic regression analyses highlighted atypical sexual fantasies, general aggression, hostility toward women and rape myth acceptance as being the most reliable predictors."
According to the study, many students who confessed to sexual crimes also admitted to holding misogynistic views, such as having fantasies about rape and sexual torture and believing that intoxicated women are responsible if they are assaulted.
According to the research,it's estimated that about one in five women in universities across developed nations will become targets of sexual violence. It recommends more prevention work on campuses to prevent sexual harm, such as using staffers to work with sexually aggressive students.
"Male sexual aggression is an international public health issue that plagues universities," the report says.
"Whole-university sexual violence campaigns have shown [great] promise -- particularly at reducing rape myth acceptance and increasing awareness of sexual violence among students -- and may also offer promising avenues for reducing rates of university-based sexual aggression."
Study finds one-third of college men would rape a woman if no one found out
by Miranda Nelson on January 13th, 2015
A sign from SlutWalk Minneapolis 2012.ALAN WILFAHRT
A new study has found that one in three college-aged men admit they would rape a woman—as long as you don't call it rape and no one finds out.
That's the finding from a team of researchers from the University of North Dakota, who surveyed 86 male college students about callous sexual attitudes, hypermasculinity, hostility towards women, and how those factors impact how they describe their own sexual behaviours.
According to the paper, "Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders", 31.7 percent of men surveyed admitted "they might use force to obtain intercourse" as long as "nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences". However, when specifically asked if they would rape a woman, 13.6 percent answered in the affirmative.
The paper found there are three general groups of men: those who are not sexual coercive, those who will use force to obtain sex but deny their actions constitute rape, and those who freely admit intentions to rape. Those who admitted they would use force showed high levels of callous sexual attitudes ("attitudes that objectify women and expect men to exhibit sexual dominance") but lower levels of hostility towards women than those men who admit having clear intentions to rape. This suggests that many college-aged men see sexual coersion as a normal or perhaps expected part of intercourse. As the researchers states, "The primary motivation in this case could be sexual gratification, accomplishment, and/or perceived compliance with sterotypical masculine gender norms."
The most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that nearly one in five U.S. women will be raped in her lifetime.
Follow Miranda Nelson on Twitter and Instagram.
by Miranda Nelson on January 13th, 2015
A sign from SlutWalk Minneapolis 2012.ALAN WILFAHRT
A new study has found that one in three college-aged men admit they would rape a woman—as long as you don't call it rape and no one finds out.
That's the finding from a team of researchers from the University of North Dakota, who surveyed 86 male college students about callous sexual attitudes, hypermasculinity, hostility towards women, and how those factors impact how they describe their own sexual behaviours.
According to the paper, "Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders", 31.7 percent of men surveyed admitted "they might use force to obtain intercourse" as long as "nobody would ever know and there wouldn't be any consequences". However, when specifically asked if they would rape a woman, 13.6 percent answered in the affirmative.
The paper found there are three general groups of men: those who are not sexual coercive, those who will use force to obtain sex but deny their actions constitute rape, and those who freely admit intentions to rape. Those who admitted they would use force showed high levels of callous sexual attitudes ("attitudes that objectify women and expect men to exhibit sexual dominance") but lower levels of hostility towards women than those men who admit having clear intentions to rape. This suggests that many college-aged men see sexual coersion as a normal or perhaps expected part of intercourse. As the researchers states, "The primary motivation in this case could be sexual gratification, accomplishment, and/or perceived compliance with sterotypical masculine gender norms."
The most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that nearly one in five U.S. women will be raped in her lifetime.
Follow Miranda Nelson on Twitter and Instagram.
Interview
US feminist Susan Brownmiller on why her groundbreaking book on rape is still relevant
Some of the posters carried on the women's march were so naive – 'Women are people too' is hardly a militant slogan
The conference took place in a high school auditorium four months later – Brownmiller attended it on crutches, having sprained her ankle when she kicked a man who had goosed her in the street while she was handing out flyers for it – and by the time it was over she found she was able to look her own vulnerability “squarely in the eye”, something she had hitherto always refused to acknowledge. She realised that something important had been left out of her education: a way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength and at power. She had, in other words, changed her mind about rape, for which reason she was now determined to write a book about it, one that would deploy examples from history, psychoanalysis, criminology, mythology and popular culture in the service of illustrating her conviction that “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Was she surprised, as she embarked on this project, that no one had attempted such a thing before? “No, not really. We were uncovering so many new truths then. The early 70s was a great time for us. Women were so brilliant in their analysis.”
Against Our Will finally came out in 1975, five long years after the first of the key texts of women’s liberation: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Though it would later be attacked by, among others, the black activist Angela Davis for its attitudes to race (in his piece, Remnick writes that Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case “reads today as morally oblivious”), its reception was mostly positive and it became a bestseller (much later, with pleasing neatness, it would be included in the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century).
Some of the sisters, however, were not happy. “People in the movement were starting to say: ‘We don’t need stars’,” Brownmiller remembers. “When I announced to my consciousness-raising group that I’d finished writing it, someone said: ‘Why don’t you be the first feminist without ego who doesn’t put your name on the book?’” She clicks her teeth. “She was jealous, of course. Another time, when I was giving a talk on a college campus, a woman raised her hand and asked: ‘Why did you put your name on Against Our Will? All your ideas came from our movement, after all.’” How did she respond? “I said: what page did you write, sister?”
Did she think its publication would change things? (It is widely agreed now that not only did the book shift attitudes to rape, it may have influenced some changes in the law, including making the victim’s sexual history inadmissible.) “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I thought it would change minds all over America. But I also feel that I was part of a movement. Even as I was writing it, rape crisis centres had begun opening, legislators had begun looking at the law around a woman’s past.” In the long term, however, things did not change nearly enough. “I remember being startled when it came out that DNA samples were not being processed properly in some states, and it was pretty horrifying when it became apparent that some colleges were not going to take accusations against, say, their football players seriously on account of what their alumni might think.”
What has struck her most forcefully about the wave of allegations in recent weeks? (As I write, no fewer than 122 high-profile men stand publicly accused of assault or harassment in the US.) “Well, I’ve been astonished that these perpetrators seem to have such weird sex lives, that is very important. They’re perverts, and I think that comes from pornography.” She sighs. “Unfortunately, the pornographers were in the end a lot more successful than Women Against Pornography.” In 1978, she attended the first national feminist anti-pornography conference in the US, held in San Francisco, which was also where she first saw the dungaree-clad Andrea Dworkin in action, addressing a Take Back the Night march in an edgy part of the city (“I immediately dubbed her Rolling Thunder,” she recalls in her 1999 memoir In Our Time). Back in New York, she and other members of WAP ran educational tours of Times Square – then still horribly sleazy – at five dollars a throw, transgressive invasions that would regularly see them thrown out of strip shows, and which, in their first year, attracted some 2,500 “tourists”, among them a pair of Benedictine nuns from Erie, Pennsylvania.
Susan Brownmiller speaking as part of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, 2014.
Saying “I’ve had three illegal abortions” out loud inducted her into the power of sisterhood, and after this she became an active member of the liberation movement. She was there for the famous sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal in 1970 (a protest against not only its contents, but the fact that it was edited by a man), a demo that won the women eight pages to make their own in a forthcoming issue; and she knew all its most important figures: Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem.
It is not lost on her that Millett died almost a month to the day before the Weinstein scandal broke, nor that both Millett and Firestone (who died in 2012) struggled with their mental health. Does she fear they are almost forgotten now? “The first obituaries of Kate were very limited,” she says. “Though they got better as the days went on. After Sexual Politics, her most important book was The Loony Bin Trip (1990) [an account of her struggle with manic depression]. You’ve got to read it! It’s so powerful. But I hadn’t seen her for many years. She left New York and went off to set up her Christmas tree farm. We should have stayed in touch, of course. We were great supporters of each other. But she was leading a different kind of life.”
What about Firestone? (The author of The Dialectic of Sex had a history of schizophrenia and was almost destitute at the time of her death, which may have been caused by starvation.) “I remember the last time I saw Shulie. I was working on Against Our Will, and I had gone across the street to this health food bar, and there was this little waif standing there. ‘Shulie?’ I said. ‘Is that you?’ She recognised me. ‘Look what you’ve turned me into,’ she said. ‘Look what I’ve become.’ She blamed feminism for what had happened to her.” Brownmiller knows that it is one of the cruellest ironies that some second-wave feminists – there have been other casualties besides Firestone and Millett – were unable to thrive in the world they had helped to create. But she is grateful not to have been one of them. “I am very sane,” she says, clapping her hands. “That’s the scoop on me.”
What effect did Against Our Will have on her life? “Well, I wasn’t a young woman. I was 40 when it came out. I guess I thought that once I’d finished doing 29 cities in 27 days, that would be it for me. I would move on. But then it was suggested I go on the college lecture circuit. I did that for two years, but it wasn’t how I wanted to live the rest of my life. I find it amazing that Gloria [Steinem] is still on tour. There is nothing more dehumanising than being on the road all the time; that’s why rock stars overdose.” (She and Steinem have an intermittently spiky relationship – Steinem was critical of Brownmiller in a 2015 interview – and she is reluctant to say more about her now: “It just sounds like sour grapes: there is Susan who is nowhere near as famous as Gloria.”)
Was it easy to get work afterwards? “I was the rape person for a while. But yes, in the end, I wrote other books [her latest, published last year, is about the high-rise garden she keeps on her balconies]. I have thought about men who have made a huge contribution to something with a book, and it seems that the world lets them do other things. But when I do, people aren’t so happy about it.”
Down the years, she lived with three different men, but she never married and she never wanted to have children. “It was easier in my day not to have children,” she says. “In the counterculture anything went. There’s so much mom-ism out there now. It’s one of men’s most powerful weapons against women.”
For a while, we talk about Trump (Hillary Clinton, she thinks, was insufficiently feminist in public, while the president was helped on his way by an awful lot of internalised misogyny) and then we get up to take in the view; it was from this window, with its panoramic view downtown, that on 9/11 she saw the second plane hit the towers. She has been renting here since the 70s, having somehow found more favour with the building’s super than the actor Judd Hirsch, who also longed to bag this particular flat – and she hopes to stay on a while yet. In fact, she is looking for a flatmate. Do I know anyone? She adjusts her sweater, more animated now even than when I arrived. The main thing is that they must not mind her smoking.
US feminist Susan Brownmiller on why her groundbreaking book on rape is still relevant
Susan Brownmiller at her home in New York: ‘Why should we be quiet? We need to hear from everyone.’ Photograph: Christopher Lane/The Observer
Against Our Will brought rape out of the shadows in 1975. As the world reels from the #MeToo allegations, Brownmiller talks about pornography, power and 70s radical feminism
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 18 Feb 2018
In the more than 40 years since its publication, Susan Brownmiller’s controversial, groundbreaking book about rape, Against Our Will, has never been out of print. It has, though, often been out of people’s minds – until now, that is. Thanks to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and all that has followed in their wake, Brownmiller’s work is suddenly crisp again, its prescience and enduring relevance noted anew by anyone old enough, or well read enough, to be familiar with it. In a piece for the New Yorker last November, the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, used the adjective “startling” to describe it. Its author, he reminded his readers, got there first when it came to illustrating that sexual coercion is less a matter of lust than of power; and she made it her business to bust the myth that women “cry rape with ease and glee”. If that fallacy still prevails, this only shows how right she was to confront it in the first place.
After the article appeared, Brownmiller, who is now 82, expected a gentle upswing in her emails, perhaps the odd visit from a journalist. But, no. There followed a period of radio silence. “Turns out my details online were wrong, or something,” she says, with a cackle, lighting yet another cigarette. In her luxuriantly carpeted penthouse flat high at the top of a tower in Greenwich Village, New York, she was left alone to watch as #MeToo rolled like a huge boulder through the national conversation. What does she make of it so far? “Oh, I think it is a wonderful rise on the part of women,” she says, unhesitatingly. “People like me thought it [harassment] was all settled, and it was astonishing to find out that it wasn’t. The need to talk out, I find promising. It’s cathartic. It’s also very sad, of course. Sexual harassment was quantified by the law long ago. It’s been hard coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what we accomplished seems somehow just to have been erased.”
She doesn’t worry, as some people do, about the lack of what we might call due process, the fact that in some instances men have been dismissed on a woman’s word, the allegations against them never having been proven, or even fully ventilated. “Why should we be quiet?” she asks. “We need to hear from everyone.” And she dislikes the attitude of her near contemporary, Germaine Greer, who regards #MeToo as so much whining: “She shouldn’t be taking that line, but that’s Germaine: with her, it’s always been, hey, this is about me.”
But she will at least admit to being infuriated by those voluble younger feminists who insist that older women should step aside, that this isn’t their time, and what they might have to say is of no interest to anyone but themselves. “Oh, it is irritating,” she says. “The world is theirs, I know that. But I’m still here, and I have got things to say.” She shakes her head. “Nobody wants to hear from people my age, even on a subject like ageing. When the New York Times talks about ageing, they mean baby boomers, not women like me.”
Brownmiller, tiny and energetic in grey leggings, with hair that she keeps conker brown, remembers writing Against Our Will “very clearly”. For months at a time, she was hunkered down in the New York Public Library, her typewriter safely installed in a room reserved for writers who smoked. “Bob Caro [the journalist best known for his biography of Lyndon B Johnson] used to sit right opposite me. He was finishing The Power Broker, and to this day he still teases me about my socks, because I used to take off my shoes to work.”
The historical material she needed, much of it relating to two world wars, was surprisingly easy to locate, she recalls. “It was all documented in the card files, usually under the word ‘atrocities’. Yes, that was the euphemism: atrocities.” Wasn’t it miserable, spending her days thinking about rape? “No!” she all but shouts. “It was exciting. Thrilling! The joy of discovery overrode any feelings of horror – and, remember, I had years to absorb it all. Later, when I was on the book tour, a reporter came to interview me. She was in a fury. ‘How could you make me feel so uncomfortable?’ she yelled. The photographer who was with her said: ‘Hey, it’s not her fault.’ But I understood. She had read it so fast. It was hard to take in.”
Against Our Will brought rape out of the shadows in 1975. As the world reels from the #MeToo allegations, Brownmiller talks about pornography, power and 70s radical feminism
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 18 Feb 2018
In the more than 40 years since its publication, Susan Brownmiller’s controversial, groundbreaking book about rape, Against Our Will, has never been out of print. It has, though, often been out of people’s minds – until now, that is. Thanks to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and all that has followed in their wake, Brownmiller’s work is suddenly crisp again, its prescience and enduring relevance noted anew by anyone old enough, or well read enough, to be familiar with it. In a piece for the New Yorker last November, the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, used the adjective “startling” to describe it. Its author, he reminded his readers, got there first when it came to illustrating that sexual coercion is less a matter of lust than of power; and she made it her business to bust the myth that women “cry rape with ease and glee”. If that fallacy still prevails, this only shows how right she was to confront it in the first place.
After the article appeared, Brownmiller, who is now 82, expected a gentle upswing in her emails, perhaps the odd visit from a journalist. But, no. There followed a period of radio silence. “Turns out my details online were wrong, or something,” she says, with a cackle, lighting yet another cigarette. In her luxuriantly carpeted penthouse flat high at the top of a tower in Greenwich Village, New York, she was left alone to watch as #MeToo rolled like a huge boulder through the national conversation. What does she make of it so far? “Oh, I think it is a wonderful rise on the part of women,” she says, unhesitatingly. “People like me thought it [harassment] was all settled, and it was astonishing to find out that it wasn’t. The need to talk out, I find promising. It’s cathartic. It’s also very sad, of course. Sexual harassment was quantified by the law long ago. It’s been hard coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what we accomplished seems somehow just to have been erased.”
She doesn’t worry, as some people do, about the lack of what we might call due process, the fact that in some instances men have been dismissed on a woman’s word, the allegations against them never having been proven, or even fully ventilated. “Why should we be quiet?” she asks. “We need to hear from everyone.” And she dislikes the attitude of her near contemporary, Germaine Greer, who regards #MeToo as so much whining: “She shouldn’t be taking that line, but that’s Germaine: with her, it’s always been, hey, this is about me.”
But she will at least admit to being infuriated by those voluble younger feminists who insist that older women should step aside, that this isn’t their time, and what they might have to say is of no interest to anyone but themselves. “Oh, it is irritating,” she says. “The world is theirs, I know that. But I’m still here, and I have got things to say.” She shakes her head. “Nobody wants to hear from people my age, even on a subject like ageing. When the New York Times talks about ageing, they mean baby boomers, not women like me.”
Brownmiller, tiny and energetic in grey leggings, with hair that she keeps conker brown, remembers writing Against Our Will “very clearly”. For months at a time, she was hunkered down in the New York Public Library, her typewriter safely installed in a room reserved for writers who smoked. “Bob Caro [the journalist best known for his biography of Lyndon B Johnson] used to sit right opposite me. He was finishing The Power Broker, and to this day he still teases me about my socks, because I used to take off my shoes to work.”
The historical material she needed, much of it relating to two world wars, was surprisingly easy to locate, she recalls. “It was all documented in the card files, usually under the word ‘atrocities’. Yes, that was the euphemism: atrocities.” Wasn’t it miserable, spending her days thinking about rape? “No!” she all but shouts. “It was exciting. Thrilling! The joy of discovery overrode any feelings of horror – and, remember, I had years to absorb it all. Later, when I was on the book tour, a reporter came to interview me. She was in a fury. ‘How could you make me feel so uncomfortable?’ she yelled. The photographer who was with her said: ‘Hey, it’s not her fault.’ But I understood. She had read it so fast. It was hard to take in.”
Susan Brownmiller in 1975, the year Against Our Will was published. Photograph: Denver Post/Getty Images
The idea for the book grew out of Brownmiller’s activism, specifically, the consciousness-raising group to which she belonged in the early 70s, the New York Radical Feminists. One evening, one of its newer members, Diane Crothers, arrived bearing a copy of the Berkeley feminist magazine It Ain’t Me Babe, which earlier that year had printed a long account by a young female artist of being raped by two Vietnam veterans while hitchhiking home from her first women’s meeting. The issue Crothers had in her hand brought news of a stunning retaliatory action against the assault of a dancer by some men at a bachelor party, carried out by group called the Contra Costa Anti-Rape Squad #14. On the day of the wedding, this group had stuck flyers on the windscreens of guests’ cars, detailing what had gone on. “Sounds ugly?” asked the writer of these flyers. “Well, it is. It goes on all the time, one way or another. These pigs know the law won’t touch them, they can always insist the woman is a liar or a slut or crazy. [But] we women are learning to see through that nonsense. We hope you learn to, too.”
After everyone had read this story, Crothers announced that rape was an important feminist issue and that it should be explored by the group. Brownmiller, a journalist, wasn’t convinced. Like many people then, she thought rape was a “deviant” crime, one that any alert woman could surely avoid if she tried. But others disagreed. They wanted to talk. One woman, Sarah Pines, quietly began to describe how she had also been raped while hitchhiking. The worst part of her ordeal, she said, had been at the police station. “Aww, who’d want to rape you?” teased one police officer. Another insisted – does this sound familiar? – that she was too calm to be credible. The men involved were eventually given suspended sentences.
It was while listening to Pines, and to those who followed her, that Brownmiller began to see rape in another light, and when the talking was over she proposed that the group hold a conference on the subject, with research papers and panel discussions. “But I was a laggard,” she says, with a laugh. “The others told me: no, we will have a speak-out first, and then a conference.” The speak-out was held in a church, 30 women took part, and their experiences ran the gamut from street harassment to rape. One woman described how she had been raped by her therapist; another how she had been assaulted in her apartment after opening her door to a man who said he was delivering a package; yet another how she was molested by a junior doctor on a date arranged by his aunt and her mother.
The idea for the book grew out of Brownmiller’s activism, specifically, the consciousness-raising group to which she belonged in the early 70s, the New York Radical Feminists. One evening, one of its newer members, Diane Crothers, arrived bearing a copy of the Berkeley feminist magazine It Ain’t Me Babe, which earlier that year had printed a long account by a young female artist of being raped by two Vietnam veterans while hitchhiking home from her first women’s meeting. The issue Crothers had in her hand brought news of a stunning retaliatory action against the assault of a dancer by some men at a bachelor party, carried out by group called the Contra Costa Anti-Rape Squad #14. On the day of the wedding, this group had stuck flyers on the windscreens of guests’ cars, detailing what had gone on. “Sounds ugly?” asked the writer of these flyers. “Well, it is. It goes on all the time, one way or another. These pigs know the law won’t touch them, they can always insist the woman is a liar or a slut or crazy. [But] we women are learning to see through that nonsense. We hope you learn to, too.”
After everyone had read this story, Crothers announced that rape was an important feminist issue and that it should be explored by the group. Brownmiller, a journalist, wasn’t convinced. Like many people then, she thought rape was a “deviant” crime, one that any alert woman could surely avoid if she tried. But others disagreed. They wanted to talk. One woman, Sarah Pines, quietly began to describe how she had also been raped while hitchhiking. The worst part of her ordeal, she said, had been at the police station. “Aww, who’d want to rape you?” teased one police officer. Another insisted – does this sound familiar? – that she was too calm to be credible. The men involved were eventually given suspended sentences.
It was while listening to Pines, and to those who followed her, that Brownmiller began to see rape in another light, and when the talking was over she proposed that the group hold a conference on the subject, with research papers and panel discussions. “But I was a laggard,” she says, with a laugh. “The others told me: no, we will have a speak-out first, and then a conference.” The speak-out was held in a church, 30 women took part, and their experiences ran the gamut from street harassment to rape. One woman described how she had been raped by her therapist; another how she had been assaulted in her apartment after opening her door to a man who said he was delivering a package; yet another how she was molested by a junior doctor on a date arranged by his aunt and her mother.
Some of the posters carried on the women's march were so naive – 'Women are people too' is hardly a militant slogan
The conference took place in a high school auditorium four months later – Brownmiller attended it on crutches, having sprained her ankle when she kicked a man who had goosed her in the street while she was handing out flyers for it – and by the time it was over she found she was able to look her own vulnerability “squarely in the eye”, something she had hitherto always refused to acknowledge. She realised that something important had been left out of her education: a way of looking at male-female relations, at sex, at strength and at power. She had, in other words, changed her mind about rape, for which reason she was now determined to write a book about it, one that would deploy examples from history, psychoanalysis, criminology, mythology and popular culture in the service of illustrating her conviction that “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Was she surprised, as she embarked on this project, that no one had attempted such a thing before? “No, not really. We were uncovering so many new truths then. The early 70s was a great time for us. Women were so brilliant in their analysis.”
Against Our Will finally came out in 1975, five long years after the first of the key texts of women’s liberation: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Though it would later be attacked by, among others, the black activist Angela Davis for its attitudes to race (in his piece, Remnick writes that Brownmiller’s treatment of the Emmett Till case “reads today as morally oblivious”), its reception was mostly positive and it became a bestseller (much later, with pleasing neatness, it would be included in the New York Public Library’s Books of the Century).
Some of the sisters, however, were not happy. “People in the movement were starting to say: ‘We don’t need stars’,” Brownmiller remembers. “When I announced to my consciousness-raising group that I’d finished writing it, someone said: ‘Why don’t you be the first feminist without ego who doesn’t put your name on the book?’” She clicks her teeth. “She was jealous, of course. Another time, when I was giving a talk on a college campus, a woman raised her hand and asked: ‘Why did you put your name on Against Our Will? All your ideas came from our movement, after all.’” How did she respond? “I said: what page did you write, sister?”
Did she think its publication would change things? (It is widely agreed now that not only did the book shift attitudes to rape, it may have influenced some changes in the law, including making the victim’s sexual history inadmissible.) “Oh, yeah,” she says. “I thought it would change minds all over America. But I also feel that I was part of a movement. Even as I was writing it, rape crisis centres had begun opening, legislators had begun looking at the law around a woman’s past.” In the long term, however, things did not change nearly enough. “I remember being startled when it came out that DNA samples were not being processed properly in some states, and it was pretty horrifying when it became apparent that some colleges were not going to take accusations against, say, their football players seriously on account of what their alumni might think.”
What has struck her most forcefully about the wave of allegations in recent weeks? (As I write, no fewer than 122 high-profile men stand publicly accused of assault or harassment in the US.) “Well, I’ve been astonished that these perpetrators seem to have such weird sex lives, that is very important. They’re perverts, and I think that comes from pornography.” She sighs. “Unfortunately, the pornographers were in the end a lot more successful than Women Against Pornography.” In 1978, she attended the first national feminist anti-pornography conference in the US, held in San Francisco, which was also where she first saw the dungaree-clad Andrea Dworkin in action, addressing a Take Back the Night march in an edgy part of the city (“I immediately dubbed her Rolling Thunder,” she recalls in her 1999 memoir In Our Time). Back in New York, she and other members of WAP ran educational tours of Times Square – then still horribly sleazy – at five dollars a throw, transgressive invasions that would regularly see them thrown out of strip shows, and which, in their first year, attracted some 2,500 “tourists”, among them a pair of Benedictine nuns from Erie, Pennsylvania.
Susan Brownmiller leading a Women Against Pornography tour of Times Square, New York, in 1979. Photograph: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times/Redux/New York Times / Redux / eyevine
But she also thinks it is important that the details of the assaults now being described almost every day don’t distract from the real issues at hand, however memorably ghastly. “I don’t think there has been enough reportage yet about women who work, say, in factories and restaurants,” she says. “I would like to see more of that kind of thing. And there are other things going on, too. I didn’t go to the women’s march this year, but I was on the first one, and my sign was about abortion: KEEP IT SAFE AND LEGAL, it said. Because if Roe v Wade goes, that is it for us – and it has never been more under threat since this crazed person got to be president. You know, some of the posters people carried on the march were so naive. I saw one that said: WOMEN ARE PEOPLE TOO.” She allows herself a disdainful snort. “I mean, come on! That’s hardly a militant slogan, is it?”
Brownmiller grew up in Brooklyn, an only child; her father, a dress salesman in the garment district, had come to America from the Polish shtetl where he was born, where he had married her much younger mother, a secretary. “He didn’t want me to go to college,” she says. “He knew he didn’t have the money to support me, and he was really too frightened to be proud of me later on.” She laughs. “I remember when I told him that Simon & Schuster were publishing me, he said: ‘So, they bought it. That doesn’t mean they’re going to publish it.’” What about her mother? “When I started writing for the Village Voice, all she had to say was: ‘Couldn’t they make your name a little larger?’”
She went to college regardless, having bagged herself a scholarship, but dropped out after two years, after which she slowly built a career in journalism for herself; by the time she was in her early 30s she was a reporter for the Village Voice, a freelance writer for various glossy magazines, and a full-time network news writer at ABC-TV, a lone woman in a “defiantly male preserve of clacking typewriters and cranking moviolas”. It was tough – even her friendlier colleagues liked to remind her how lucky she was to be in possession of a “man’s job” – and it was lonely. Betty Friedan had already published The Feminine Mystique (1963), which Brownmiller had gobbled up, recognising aspects of herself on every page. But the revolution had yet to fully get under way. For the time being, it revealed itself only in women’s wardrobes: no more garters and girdles, tights rather than stockings, flatter shoes. Furiously, she “Pucci’d and Gucci’d”, hoping the camouflage would help her fit in, that she could somehow make a go of it as an upwardly mobile female striver.
It was abortion that gave her what she has since called her feminist baptism. In 1968, she and her friend Jan Goodman (four years previously, they had gone to Mississippi together to join the civil rights movement as summer volunteers), went to a decrepit office building on Broadway and East Eleventh Street, where they then took the elevator to Room 412. “They’re talking about women,” Goodman had been telling her, and so it proved. Inside, the New York Radical Women were attempting a little light consciousness-raising; two weeks earlier, this same group had staged their first national protest, unfurling a banner that read WOMEN’S LIBERATION at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
The talk that night moved seamlessly from childbirth to abortion, which was then still illegal. Brownmiller listened, aware it would be her turn soon, and all she could think was: one abortion? These young women were talking about having had one abortion? She had already had three, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico. When she did finally come to speak, what she wanted to say first was that she was lucky to be alive – at which point, her eyes filled with tears. She could not, it seemed, find the words to tell the women how badly things had gone the second time around: before she had finally found a clinic in San Juan that could perform a safe, surgical D&C, she had been to Harlem, where a woman had offered to use a wire hanger, and she had fled a Baltimore basement where a nervous doctor waited until midnight before he injected her with a truth drug (to check she was not a police agent) only to then offer her a saline injection, something he must have known could have killed her.
But she also thinks it is important that the details of the assaults now being described almost every day don’t distract from the real issues at hand, however memorably ghastly. “I don’t think there has been enough reportage yet about women who work, say, in factories and restaurants,” she says. “I would like to see more of that kind of thing. And there are other things going on, too. I didn’t go to the women’s march this year, but I was on the first one, and my sign was about abortion: KEEP IT SAFE AND LEGAL, it said. Because if Roe v Wade goes, that is it for us – and it has never been more under threat since this crazed person got to be president. You know, some of the posters people carried on the march were so naive. I saw one that said: WOMEN ARE PEOPLE TOO.” She allows herself a disdainful snort. “I mean, come on! That’s hardly a militant slogan, is it?”
Brownmiller grew up in Brooklyn, an only child; her father, a dress salesman in the garment district, had come to America from the Polish shtetl where he was born, where he had married her much younger mother, a secretary. “He didn’t want me to go to college,” she says. “He knew he didn’t have the money to support me, and he was really too frightened to be proud of me later on.” She laughs. “I remember when I told him that Simon & Schuster were publishing me, he said: ‘So, they bought it. That doesn’t mean they’re going to publish it.’” What about her mother? “When I started writing for the Village Voice, all she had to say was: ‘Couldn’t they make your name a little larger?’”
She went to college regardless, having bagged herself a scholarship, but dropped out after two years, after which she slowly built a career in journalism for herself; by the time she was in her early 30s she was a reporter for the Village Voice, a freelance writer for various glossy magazines, and a full-time network news writer at ABC-TV, a lone woman in a “defiantly male preserve of clacking typewriters and cranking moviolas”. It was tough – even her friendlier colleagues liked to remind her how lucky she was to be in possession of a “man’s job” – and it was lonely. Betty Friedan had already published The Feminine Mystique (1963), which Brownmiller had gobbled up, recognising aspects of herself on every page. But the revolution had yet to fully get under way. For the time being, it revealed itself only in women’s wardrobes: no more garters and girdles, tights rather than stockings, flatter shoes. Furiously, she “Pucci’d and Gucci’d”, hoping the camouflage would help her fit in, that she could somehow make a go of it as an upwardly mobile female striver.
It was abortion that gave her what she has since called her feminist baptism. In 1968, she and her friend Jan Goodman (four years previously, they had gone to Mississippi together to join the civil rights movement as summer volunteers), went to a decrepit office building on Broadway and East Eleventh Street, where they then took the elevator to Room 412. “They’re talking about women,” Goodman had been telling her, and so it proved. Inside, the New York Radical Women were attempting a little light consciousness-raising; two weeks earlier, this same group had staged their first national protest, unfurling a banner that read WOMEN’S LIBERATION at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City.
The talk that night moved seamlessly from childbirth to abortion, which was then still illegal. Brownmiller listened, aware it would be her turn soon, and all she could think was: one abortion? These young women were talking about having had one abortion? She had already had three, one in Cuba and two in Puerto Rico. When she did finally come to speak, what she wanted to say first was that she was lucky to be alive – at which point, her eyes filled with tears. She could not, it seemed, find the words to tell the women how badly things had gone the second time around: before she had finally found a clinic in San Juan that could perform a safe, surgical D&C, she had been to Harlem, where a woman had offered to use a wire hanger, and she had fled a Baltimore basement where a nervous doctor waited until midnight before he injected her with a truth drug (to check she was not a police agent) only to then offer her a saline injection, something he must have known could have killed her.
Susan Brownmiller speaking as part of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, 2014.
Saying “I’ve had three illegal abortions” out loud inducted her into the power of sisterhood, and after this she became an active member of the liberation movement. She was there for the famous sit-in at the Ladies Home Journal in 1970 (a protest against not only its contents, but the fact that it was edited by a man), a demo that won the women eight pages to make their own in a forthcoming issue; and she knew all its most important figures: Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem.
It is not lost on her that Millett died almost a month to the day before the Weinstein scandal broke, nor that both Millett and Firestone (who died in 2012) struggled with their mental health. Does she fear they are almost forgotten now? “The first obituaries of Kate were very limited,” she says. “Though they got better as the days went on. After Sexual Politics, her most important book was The Loony Bin Trip (1990) [an account of her struggle with manic depression]. You’ve got to read it! It’s so powerful. But I hadn’t seen her for many years. She left New York and went off to set up her Christmas tree farm. We should have stayed in touch, of course. We were great supporters of each other. But she was leading a different kind of life.”
What about Firestone? (The author of The Dialectic of Sex had a history of schizophrenia and was almost destitute at the time of her death, which may have been caused by starvation.) “I remember the last time I saw Shulie. I was working on Against Our Will, and I had gone across the street to this health food bar, and there was this little waif standing there. ‘Shulie?’ I said. ‘Is that you?’ She recognised me. ‘Look what you’ve turned me into,’ she said. ‘Look what I’ve become.’ She blamed feminism for what had happened to her.” Brownmiller knows that it is one of the cruellest ironies that some second-wave feminists – there have been other casualties besides Firestone and Millett – were unable to thrive in the world they had helped to create. But she is grateful not to have been one of them. “I am very sane,” she says, clapping her hands. “That’s the scoop on me.”
What effect did Against Our Will have on her life? “Well, I wasn’t a young woman. I was 40 when it came out. I guess I thought that once I’d finished doing 29 cities in 27 days, that would be it for me. I would move on. But then it was suggested I go on the college lecture circuit. I did that for two years, but it wasn’t how I wanted to live the rest of my life. I find it amazing that Gloria [Steinem] is still on tour. There is nothing more dehumanising than being on the road all the time; that’s why rock stars overdose.” (She and Steinem have an intermittently spiky relationship – Steinem was critical of Brownmiller in a 2015 interview – and she is reluctant to say more about her now: “It just sounds like sour grapes: there is Susan who is nowhere near as famous as Gloria.”)
Was it easy to get work afterwards? “I was the rape person for a while. But yes, in the end, I wrote other books [her latest, published last year, is about the high-rise garden she keeps on her balconies]. I have thought about men who have made a huge contribution to something with a book, and it seems that the world lets them do other things. But when I do, people aren’t so happy about it.”
Down the years, she lived with three different men, but she never married and she never wanted to have children. “It was easier in my day not to have children,” she says. “In the counterculture anything went. There’s so much mom-ism out there now. It’s one of men’s most powerful weapons against women.”
For a while, we talk about Trump (Hillary Clinton, she thinks, was insufficiently feminist in public, while the president was helped on his way by an awful lot of internalised misogyny) and then we get up to take in the view; it was from this window, with its panoramic view downtown, that on 9/11 she saw the second plane hit the towers. She has been renting here since the 70s, having somehow found more favour with the building’s super than the actor Judd Hirsch, who also longed to bag this particular flat – and she hopes to stay on a while yet. In fact, she is looking for a flatmate. Do I know anyone? She adjusts her sweater, more animated now even than when I arrived. The main thing is that they must not mind her smoking.
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