Rape
I'm reading Dworkin's Pornography at the moment and a quotation she uses jumped out at me.
If we think talking it all out has brought us [men and women] closer together in the last few years, we have only to broach the subject of rape. Men seem incapable of understanding what rape means to a woman - the sense of total violation, or the mere threat of rape as a lifelong shadow over her freedom of movement....
The central division is between the sense of rape as an act of hostility and aggression, as women see and know and experience it, and rape as an erotic act, as fantasized by men.
(Film critic Molly Haskell, at the end of a decade of vigorous feminism in the US.)
The reason this statement jumped out at me is because in every conversation I've had with a man about rape, sexual harrassment and molestion, he will always say SOMETHING that confirms it.
Brick wall, meet head.
If we think talking it all out has brought us [men and women] closer together in the last few years, we have only to broach the subject of rape. Men seem incapable of understanding what rape means to a woman - the sense of total violation, or the mere threat of rape as a lifelong shadow over her freedom of movement....
The central division is between the sense of rape as an act of hostility and aggression, as women see and know and experience it, and rape as an erotic act, as fantasized by men.
(Film critic Molly Haskell, at the end of a decade of vigorous feminism in the US.)
The reason this statement jumped out at me is because in every conversation I've had with a man about rape, sexual harrassment and molestion, he will always say SOMETHING that confirms it.
Brick wall, meet head.
posted by jo22 at 9:54 AM
3 Comments:
Your fear is valid Whiztle. What they usually say is something that reveals their deep-seated belief that women/girls must want it. This belief is promoted through pornography, art, and literature written by men. Men believe their own lies rather than listen to women who actually know what they're talking about.
Males have not eroticised - very little.
We live in an erotic sit-com, written by, produced and directed by men. They choose the wardrobe and the actors and they call ‘action’ - and then they believe it to be true.
Well we're just going to have to write our own sit-com, without the canned laughter.
Post a Comment
<< Home