NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/soc/feminism/3386

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-25 | 7.1 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: something young might find interesting
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Date: 25 Jan 93 23:34:19 GMT


The following is from Naomi Wolf's _The Beauty Myth_:

[Wolf, Naomi. _The Beauty Myth_. Chatto & Windus, London, 1991.  W.
Morrow, New York, 1991.]

In 1986, UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth reported that 30% of college men
said that they would commit rape if they could be sure of getting away
with it.  When the survey changed the word "rape" to "force a woman into
having sex," 58% said they would do so.  Ms. Magazine commissioned a
study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health of 6,100
undergraduates, male and female, in 32 college campuses across the
United States.  In the year prior to the Ms., survey, 2,971 college men
had commited 187 rapes, 157 attempted rapes, 327 acts of sexual
coercion, and 854 attempts at unwanted sexual contact.  The Ms. study
concluded that "scenes in movies and TV that reflect violence and force
in sexual relationships relate directly to acquaintance rape."

In another survey of 114 undergraduate men, these replies emerged:

"I like to dominate a woman." 91.3%
"I enjoy the conquest part of sex." 86.1% (I didn't know there WAS a
   "conquest" part of sex.--JC)
"Some women look like they're just asking to be raped." 83.5%
"I get excited when a woman struggles over sex." 63.5%
"It would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman." 61.7%

In the Ms. survey, one college man in twelve, or 8% of the respondents,
had raped of tried to rape a woman since age 14 (the only consistent
difference between this group and those who had not assaulted women was
that the former said they read pornography "very frequently").
Researchers at Emory and Auburn Universities in the United States found
that 30% of male college students rated faces of women displaying
emotional distress -- pain, fear -- to be more sexually attractive than
the faces showing pleasure; of those respondents, 60% had commited acts
of sexual aggression.

Women are faring badly.  In the Ms. study, one in four women respondents
had had an experience that met the American legal definition of rape or
attempted rape.  Among the 3,187 women surveyed, in the preceding year,
there had been 328 rapes and 534 attempted rapes; 837 women were
subjected to sexual coercion, and 2,024 experienced episodes of unwanted
sexual contact.  Date rape shows, more than rape by a stranger, the
confusion that has been generated in the young between sex and violence.
Of the women raped, 84% knew the attacker, and 57% were raped on dates.
Date rape, thus is more common than left-handedness, alcoholism, and
heart attacks.  In 1982, an Auburn University study found that 25% of
undergraduate women had had at least one experience of rape; 93% of
those were by acquaintances.  Of Auburn men, 61% had forced sexual
contact on a woman against her will.  A St. Cloud State University study
in 1982 showed that 29% of the women students had been raped.  20% of
women students at the University of South Dakota had been date-raped;
at Brown University, 16% had been date-raped.  11% of Brown men said
that they had forced sex on a woman.  The same year at Auburn
University, 15% of male undergraduates said that they had raped a woman
on a date.

Women are 4 times more likely to be raped by an acquaintance than a
stranger.  Sexual violence is seen as normal by young women as well as
young men: "Study after study has shown that women who are raped by men
don't even identify their experience as rape"; only 27% in the Ms. study
did so.  Does their inability to call what happened to them "rape" mean
that they escape the aftereffects of rape?  30% of raped young women,
whether or not they consider their experience rape, considered suicide
afterward.  31% sought psychotherapy, and 82% said the experience had
permanenty changed them.  41% of the raped women said they expected to
be raped again.  Posttraumatic stress syndrome was identified as a
psychological disorder in 1980, and is now recognized as common among
rape survivors.  The women who don't call rape by its name still suffer
the same depression, self-hatred, and suicidal impulses as women who do.
Their experiences are likely to imprint young women sexually: In the Ms.
study, 41% of the raped young women were virgins; 38% were between 14
and 17 at the time of the attack.  For both the rapists and the victims
in the study, the average age at the time of the rape was 18 and 1/2
years old.  College women are having relationships that include
physical violence: Between 21 and 30% of young people report violence
from their dating partner.

Among younger adolescents, the trend is even worse.  In a UCLA study of
14 to 18 year olds, the researchers wrote that "we appear to have
uncovered some rather distressing indications that a new generation is
entering into the adult world of relationships carrying along shocking
outmoded baggage."  More than 50% of the boys and nearly half of the
girls thought it was okay for a man to rape a woman if he was sexually
aroused by her.  A recent survey in Toronto reports that children are
learning dominance and
submission patterns at an earlier age: One in 7 boys in grade 13
reported having refused to take no for an answer, and one in four girls
of the same age reported having been sexually forced.  80% of the
teenage girls reported that they'd already been involved with violent
relationships.  According to Susan G. Cole, "In spite of hopes to the
contrary, pornography and mass culture and working to collapse sexuality
with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female
submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way it
is.  This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they
are behaving within socially accepted norms."

Cultural representation of glamorized degradation has created a
situation among the young in which boys rape girls and girls get raped
AS A NORMAL COURSE OF EVENTS (italicized passages will be capitalized).
The boys may even be unaware that what they are dfoing is wrong; violent
sexual imagery may well have raised a generation of young men who can
rape women without even knowing it.  In 1987, a young New York woman,
Jennifer Levin, was murdered in Central Park after sadomasochistic sex;
a classmate remarked drily to a friend that that was the only kind of
sex that anyone he knew was having.  In 1989, five New York teenagers
raped and savagely battered a young woman jogger.  The papers were full
of stunned questions: Was it race?  Was it class?  No one noticed that
in the fantasy subculture fed to the young, IT WAS NORMAL.


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