Comments Elsewhere

Excellent post, Amanda. This is part of the reason that I very quickly came to hate the way that University panels on rape would always feel obliged to invite a campus cop as one of the “experts” on rape. Their (that is, his) talk would inevitably consist of a bunch of know-nothing hectoring of young women to keep to well-lit areas (there was very little talk of the University shelling out to improve the lighting of course), to keep their keys out for slashing an attacker and jog without headphones on. I’m sure that’s decent advice, but it’s not like they haven’t already posted this all over campus, it makes stopping rape a matter of constraint on individual women rather than working together for the freedom of all women, and it generally wasn’t even the point of the damn panel. (They were almost always convened by the sexual assault counseling center to talk about acquaintance rape. But, of course, the campus counseling center is hostage to campus bureaucratic politics, so they have to invite a cop to make sure that everyone feels like their “expertise” is being respected.)

Anyway, this post reminded me of the passage in Susan Brownmiller’s chapter on “the police-blotter rapist,” i.e. men who rape or gang-rape relative strangers in everyday circumstances:

The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or “spoilers of purity,” men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

— Against Our Will (1975), p. 209.