Susan Brownmiller

I think there's no question about it.

Now, the woman pushing back at that point, Susan Brownmiller with Sally Kempton on, again, The Dick Cavett Show.

Brownmiller had written a book called Against Our Will, Men, Women, and Rape, selected by the New York Public Library at the time as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

So back to the interview as Hefner's already on the defense.

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.

when this book came out.

So it was not a niche feminist publication, which there were plenty of those going on at the time, but this was very much in the mainstream.

And at the time that this book came out, at least the way Susan Brownmiller has talked about it, there was this sense that rape was not something that happened often.

She was working along with lots of other left-wing women within the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.

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.