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From: cja@lzwi.UUCP (C.E.JACKSON)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: _TNOBO_ - A Review
Message-ID: <133@lzwi.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-May-85 14:05:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: lzwi.133
Posted: Mon May 13 14:05:12 1985
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> _TNOBO_ - A Review______________________________________________________________
> ...  When we got our copy of _TNOBO_, I cracked it open,
> expecting another _Against_Our_Will_ (in which author Susan Brownmiller postu-
> lates a worldwide conspiracy of *all*men* to dominate women through rape).

Let's be fair--Brownmiller never says that all men are joined in some 
sort of conscious plot to rape women. She makes the following points:
1) Most societies in the world are male-dominated.
2) Rape is weapon that men *can* use to intimidate women.
3) The fear of rape has the effect of reinforcing male dominance
because women feel that they cannot move about as freely as
men--whenever women are in a situation when they might wish to
question/defy male authorities they must do so with the
knowledge that men might rape them. Even police departments (hardly
homes of radical feminists) agree that rapes are perpetrated
by individual men who wish to humiliate/dominate/attack their
victims *because* those victims are women.
4) Virtually all men are potential rapists--that is, men have
that weapon that they *can* use against women whom they find
threatening. [Note: Saying that people *can* do something is
not the same thing as saying they *will*. Brownmiller got a
lot of flack about that statement because people thought that
she was saying that all men *would* rape women.]  Women have
no comparable weapon against men.

After building her argument to this point, Brownmiller then
asserts that rape has the effect of repressing women.
If she uses the word "conspiracy" at all (& I'd be interested
to see you cite an instance in which she does, because I can't
find it) it is in the sense of the third definition of
"conspiracy" (from the American Heritage Dictionary): " A
combining or acting together, as if by evil design: ex.--a
conspiracy of natural forces."
She is most assuredly not talking about the kind of overt,
conscious planning that most people associate with the word
"conspiracy."

> ...  Unfortunately, the up-to-date sta-
> tistics on things like violence against women are not encouraging.  The "1 woman
> in 9 will be raped in her lifetime" statistic is now up to 1 in 3.

It's interesting that you cite this statistic because it supports 
Brownmiller's contention that men are more likely to use rape
to dominate women when women assert their independence (as
they have been doing since the original OBO was published).

I think Brownmiller got a bum rap when her book first came
out. The male-dominated press misunderstood the statement
about all males being potential rapists & panned the whole
book. Many of the people whom I've heard criticize it have
never even read it.
> :::::::::::::::: Jym Dyer

C. E. Jackson
...ihnp4!lznv!cja (for reasons too silly to explain,the address above 
[lzwi] is incorrect--don't use it)