(3 of 5)
The rape of males in prison is also used by Brownmiller to help advance her thesis: rape is primarily an act of power, not of sex. Most penal experts agree that rape is part of the system of establishing the power structure in many jails; a prisoner will either rape or be raped. Sodomy is so important to prison society, Brownmiller says, that even if prisoners were allowed sex with visiting wives or girl friends, homosexual rape would continue.
Brownmiller is ingenious in discerning the pro-rape message in today's culture: rock stars who feature abuse of females in their routines, comic books that dwell on images of bound women, men's magazines and women's romance magazines that feed rape fantasies, the obvious hostility to women that frequently shows up in male pornography, much of it devoted to bondage and sadism. In Roger Vadim's recent film Charlotte, the heroine voluntarily submits to murder during sex. (Last week there was growing suspicion that some film producers were outdoing Vadim's fantasies; New York police and the FBI revealed that they were investigating persistent reports that underworld figures are discreetly, and at prices as high as $1,500, renting out "snuff films"—pornographic movies culminating in the actual murder of a woman.) The depth of such anti-female hostility in great numbers of normal, well-adjusted males is poorly understood by men. As Germaine Greer writes: "The men who do cruel things to women are not a class apart; they are not totally in capable of relating to women."
But in supplying a theory for under standable female resentment, Brown-miller has politicized rape in a chilling way. Rape, she insists, is somehow a conscious conspiracy among all men.
Men are the enemy, and the horrible rapes at My Lai were just incidents in "the casual continuing war against women." The line between psychopaths and normal men—all members of the same team—is erased. Rape is the real basis of the family, monogamy or any other exclusive sexual relationship be tween men and women. In sum: Brownmiller's analysis of rape may have less to do with the problem itself than with the sour antimale, anti-family attitudes currently fashionable among militant feminists.
While many of those who have studied rapists and their victims may not accept Brownmiller's heavy ideological breathing about male conspiracy, they would agree that the cultural ideal of the aggressive male has something to do with the rape rate.
They have also long accepted the the ory that hostility toward women is an important ingredient in rape.
All habitual rapists "have developed an anger and contempt for women," says Nicholas Groth, chief psychologist of the Massachusetts Center for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sexually Dan gerous Persons. But he sees the core defect as "a sense of emptiness—of being nothing, and therefore having no regard for himself or for others. When you don't have anything else—job success, friend ship, family ties—your last resort for creating your own identity is sexual aggression."