Boys Will Be Rapists

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape By Susan Brownmiller Simon & Schuster, 472 pp., $10.95 Neither Susan Brownmiller nor Against Our Will needs much in the way of introduction. There has not been a more spectacular book-club meteor since the days of, oh, Kate Millett, anyway. You do remember Kate Millett? Cover of Time, and all that? Well, Miss Brownmiller has not only made Time’s cover, she has done so as one of 12 Women of the Year. Her book has been a Book of the Month, one of everybody’s Ten Best of 1975, and a best-seller. Two Village Voice reviewers—Eliot Fremont-Smith, of course, and some dizzy feminist—hailed it in such terms as “landmark” and “classic,” thereby announcing not only their own enthusiasm but that of posterity.

At this writing—January 26—it is still a classic, and Miss Brownmiller is still popping up on talk shows, trying to make her thesis sound scientific-like. She holds, as you may know, that rape is no mere aberration of the occasional brute or sociopath, but the act that defines the relations between the sexes: it is normal, central to the whole system of male oppression of women, producing benefits even for men who do not rape—and they know it. As she puts it in a much quoted sentence, rape is really “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” (Her italics.)

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape By Susan Brownmiller Simon & Schuster, 472 pp., $10.95 Neither Susan Brownmiller nor Against Our Will needs much in the way of introduction. There has not been a more spectacular book-club meteor since the days of, oh, Kate Millett, anyway. You do remember Kate Millett? Cover of Time, and all that? Well, Miss Brownmiller has not only made Time’s cover, she has done so as one of 12 Women of the Year. Her book has been a Book of the Month, one of everybody’s Ten Best of 1975, and a best-seller. Two Village Voice reviewers—Eliot Fremont-Smith, of course, and some dizzy feminist—hailed it in such terms as “landmark” and “classic,” thereby announcing not only their own enthusiasm but that of posterity.

At this writing—January 26—it is still a classic, and Miss Brownmiller is still popping up on talk shows, trying to make her thesis sound scientific-like. She holds, as you may know, that rape is no mere aberration of the occasional brute or sociopath, but the act that defines the relations between the sexes: it is normal, central to the whole system of male oppression of women, producing benefits even for men who do not rape—and they know it. As she puts it in a much quoted sentence, rape is really “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” (Her italics.)