Against Our Will

Yeah.

So people ask me about my journey sometimes, and I remember, like it was yesterday, really, reading Susan Brown Miller, Against Our Will.

Mm-hmm.

And if people want to read it, it's still out there.

And then on top of that substratum, that cultural substratum, feminism built the demonization of masculinity, especially of masculine sexuality.

And so we can go back to Susan Griffin and Susan Brownmiller In the early 1970s, Brown Miller famously declared in her book Against Our Will, Men, Women and Rape, that rape is nothing less than a conscious program of intimidation by which all men can keep all women in a state of fear and notice the word conscious so she claimed that rapists act on behalf of all men because all men prefer women to be terrified and when there are rapists in our culture it keeps women terrified and that allegedly benefits men so that was the idea in 1975 and people accepted that nonsense and then it went on from there and we had Andrea Dworkin in the early 1980s, claiming that not only rape, but all heterosexual sexuality was the pure, sterile expression of male contempt for women.

And when we finally got to about 1989 with Catherine MacKinnon, a colleague of Dworkin's, who claimed she was also a professor of law, who claimed that the only difference between normal sex and rape was that the normal happened so often it was impossible to get anybody to see anything wrong with it.

So that was the climate that developed, stoked by feminist anger in the 1970s and 1980s, and it has now percolated out into the general culture so that we believe that male sexuality in general is objectifying, it's predatory, and it's abusive.

We see women like Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American activist who claimed that women should practice preemptive violence against men.

She doesn't get any pushback for that.

I mean, she gets some, but she still does her book tour and is widely applauded.

We have legal theorists like Marianne Franks saying that we need a redistribution of violence so that women commit more violence against men in order to make men afraid, allegedly, so that men will stop committing violence against women if they're afraid of women, and that women who commit violence against men should be treated more leniently in the criminal justice system.

So I definitely remembered sort of some groundbreaking works from the, from the 1970s.

And the one I was thinking about specifically is Against Our Will just by Susan Brownmiller.

So this was published in 1975 and it was a huge bestseller.

Like Susan Brownmiller was one of time's people of the year.

I mean, something else I'm very interested in is the way in which Christian cultures conceptualize this, which is very differently.

In basically all times and places, rape exists as a legal wrong, but normally ... and Susan Brownmiller's classic book, Against Our Will, is very good on this, even if I disagree with some of her arguments.

Normally, it's conceptualized as a crime committed against a woman's male owner, um, her father or her husband or whatever, rather against the woman herself, which of course means that if you don't have a male owner, or you don't have a male owner with any kind of power, you're basically unrapeable in law.

And one of the innovations of Christian moral thinking is to understand women as precious as themselves, as individuals, and having spiritual equality with men, which means that even if you are a slave, even if you're poor or a prostitute or any of these, in any of these social categories, you can still be wronged in that way.