My three-year-old daughter is puzzled. Why, she wants to know, did Georgie Porgie kiss the girls and make them cry? "Because he's mean," I say, with a sinking feeling, for how can this be the right answer? As the rollicking little rhyme makes all too clear, young George is a clever rogue, all pudding and pie; the tearful girls are merely boring. Mother Goose in one hand and a leaky juice box in the other, I begin the sad, infuriating task shared by all modern mothers of daughters: to raise my child to be confident, adventurous and happy in her gender in a society saturated with sexual violence and victim blaming.
Am I a humorless prude? Given what we know about today's America, certainly not. My mother could imagine rape was rare; I know it is common. She wondered if my future husband would "deserve" me; I wonder if my daughter's will put her in the hospital, or even the grave. My parents fretted over buying me a Barbie, and my husband and I will have that discussion too, one day. But whom are we kidding? What's one more sexist image in the current climate of meanspirited misogyny -- Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, Jason and Freddy, 2 Live Crew -- to which the woman-affirming alternative is supposed to be, of all people, Madonna, who dresses in armor-plated underwear and sings about liking to be spanked?
Here are some facts to curl any woman's hair. According to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past June, the rape rate is increasing four times as fast as the overall crime rate. One in five adult women has been raped, one in six by someone she knows. Between 3 million and 4 million women are beaten each year, 1 million so severely that they seek medical help. More than half of all homeless women are fleeing domestic violence. Think about that the next time a bag lady asks you for a quarter.
The one bright spot is that women have finally brought sexual violence to the front of our own consciousness. It is a triumph of modern feminism that an immense and very angry conversation is taking place among women nationwide. Society has been "sensitized": we have rape hot lines and rape shield laws, battered-women's shelters and battered-women's-syndrome legal defenses. Just how much real change is occurring, however, is open to question. Two years after the Washington police department directed officers to make arrests in domestic-violence cases, local women's groups found that the policy was rarely enforced. But at least the subject is on the table -- for women.
But what about men? Sexual violence is not about female behavior, after all. It's about male behavior. Physically, it may be women's problem; morally, it is men's. But where, outside a few campus grouplets, is their conversation taking place? Men's magazines still use the subject to titillate, as when Esquire puts the dead Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks on the cover of its "Women We Love" issue. A 10-year study suggests that more than one-third of alleged group sexual assaults on college campuses are perpetrated by athletes; fraternities are blamed for the majority of such attacks. Where are the coaches, the administrators, the alumni forever touting the value of male bonding? Where is the outrage from the good kids, the ones who don't gang-rape the drunken girl at the beer blast but hear their friends snickering about it the next day?