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Seventeen years ago, the feminist polemicist Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room, in which she stated, "All men are rapists." Then with that inflammatory metaphorical extension that is typical of women's-movement rhetoric, she went on: "They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes." The raping, in other words, is literal, figurative, pervasive. If we stick to the literal for a moment, it would be more logical to say, "All men are car thieves." Far more men are car thieves than are rapists. But it is women's vulnerability to rape that cries out. Rape is the ur-crime that unites women. Fine. But the charge that "all men are rapists" is a slander and an outrage. It is also not true -- all men are not even potential rapists. All- men-are-rapists is a moral stupidity as well, since it annuls the distinction between a decent man, who does not rape, and a barbarian, who does. If there is no difference between the two men, then there is no meaning | to civilization.
A borderless outrage at rape, wife battering, child abuse by men and other enormities produces a kind of capillary effect: a seepage of disgust that merges the proposition "All men are rapists" with "All men are jerks" and makes the two offenses somehow coequal. Andrea Dworkin has simplified the discussion by asserting that every act of sex between a man and a woman, no matter what, is rape. (Some feminists edge nervously away from Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who are the Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan of feminism, extremists who are convenient targets for antifeminists.)
A kind of Cultural Revolution zealotry has led some rape-crisis hysterics on college campuses to post photographs of male students, selected entirely at random, and labeled POTENTIAL RAPIST. Some women who have not been raped refer to themselves as "potential survivors" -- a trope that takes American victim-wailing up to a higher octave. Asked by the Washington Post to define the "two kinds of people in the world," one contestant wrote, "Women and rapists." (What would the Washington Post have thought of a contestant who divided the world between "men and whores"?)
The psychology produces a technique of gender slur that might be called Worst Case Synecdoche: All men are assumed to be as bad as the very worst among them. The rapist is Everyman.
Men-are-monsters feminism is not quite proposing to send all men to the gas chambers, but it is a morally feckless and unhappy business to indulge oneself in this direction. It savors a little of the century's worst, most destructive political habit -- condemning an entire category of individuals, such as intellectuals in Cambodia.
What explains male violence toward women? The fact men can get away with it so often? Some residual infantile anger at Mother? The inherent viciousness of men? Or, more plausibly, their sense of powerlessness? Whatever the deeper cause, violence against women has become a habit (though most men do not indulge) and has taken on a dark life of its own.