Repression and the Roots of Rape

Samuel R. Delany writes, in his essay "Pornography and Censorship" [1] of two sexual encounters: the first between on Harold Norse and W.H. Auden and the second between Delany and a musician friend:

In the early eighties, some years after Auden's death in 1973, in the gay press Harold Norse published a journal account of an afternoon's sex with Auden. I do not have the article to hand. But memory tells me that the encounter involved a pounce by the older poet; the coupling was brief, desperate, and — while, by Norse's description, the encounter was consensual in that he had known certainly that the pick-up was sexual — nevertheless the physical exchange between them verged on rape. The word that remains with me from the writer is that he found the experience "appalling."

My autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Plume/New American Library, 1988), gives an account of a similar sexual encounter that happened to me about 1960, which, to my mind, has many things in common with Norse's encounter with Auden. When i was eighteen, while we were at the piano bench together, a musician friend in his late thirties, with whom I was collaborating on an opera, suddenly, and clearly in a state of great distress, pounced on me and physically dragged me to his bed. So I know first-hand the sort of thing Norse was recounting.

Delany goes on to write:

In a population that basically feels that Sex is Bad — or at best a necessary evil — often sex will occur, whether within the bounds of marriage or outside it, only at those moments of extreme need, and then in a paroxysm of guilt, so that the sexual incident itself is likely to be infrequent, desperate, brutal, and brief — and satisfactory, if such a word can even be used for an act which, in their different ways, both "perpetrator" and "victim" probably come to dread — for only the most basal needs of the more aggressive partner.

Within such a populace, where this is the basic sexual model and where this is the sort of act arousal leads to, it's small wonder that situations of arousal in general — which include the pornographic — are thought by all concerned to be basically Bad Things.

The fear of pornography is summed up in the anti-sex-feminist's canard, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." And Delany's anecdotal evidence certainly calls into question another feminist slogan, that "rape is violence, not sex." Some rape is sex as an instrument of violence; but by no means all.

Sex in this pouncing mode is certainly violent, or coercive at the very least. This approach to sex is, ultimately, that of many sexually motivated serial killers. [2]

But this mode of sexual behavior exists apart from pornography; and it flourishes and spreads itself wide under conditions of sexual repression. What's more, this mode of sexual behavior is itself a motivation for sexual repression. If all, or even most, sex is rape-like, then it is obviously something to be repressed!

And without anyone explicitly wanting or desiring a society where rape serves, among other things, as a tool of social control of women, the social control nevertheless is exerted. The individual rapist is not aiming to keep all women in a state of permanent terror; but every individual woman must always fear that every individual man is a potential rapist, and so the terror persists. And, as we have seen in the program of anti-sex-feminists, the omnipresent terror of rape is a motivation for campaigns of sexual repression.

(This mode of sexuality is rape, but it is certainly not the only sort of rape there is. Some rape explicitly is an overt tool of terror and social control, for example the systematic and widespread rape campaigns by soldiers in the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia or the ongoing civil wars in West Africa.)

When sex is shameful and rape victims are shamed, those victims are silenced -- and rape, by its taboo nature, becomes a problem we cannot address because we cannot talk about it sensibly. Contrariwise, in an atmosphere of sexual openness, we can talk openly of rape, and in doing so work more effectively against it. True sexual freedom includes the freedom to comfortably decline to participate in sexual activity every bit as much as it includes the freedom to participate. And as such, true sexual freedom is itself freedom from rape.

If the practice is rape, the theory that underlies the practice is sexual repression.

This is why irredentist sex-phobes like the Warriors for Innocence pose such a clear and present threat: despite their stated intent of protecting children from rape, their stated method is the wholesale suppression of information, including information in support of survivors of childhood rape. By imposing fearful silence, they mandate that victims' cries must go unheard. And this is one reason why the thoughtles capitulation of Six Apart's Barak Berkowitz to WFI is so deeply disturbing, and why his equally thoughtless backpedaling is ultimately unsatisfying.

Avedon Carol writes about the ways in which imagined or invented sex crime against children is used to punish society's identified villains when real crimes are unprovable or never occurred in the first place. Greg Costikyan warns of a law making its way through the New York state legislature that would brand as child molesters people who sell to minors video games with violent or sexual content. Garance Franke-Ruta is pushing an intolerable extension of the definition of children. And now WFI is using child sex hysteria as a cover to attack same-sex erotica.

I am terribly afraid of the re-emergence of a full-scale moral panic over child sexuality, with witch-hunts, show trials, and ruined lives. The anti-sex creeps are pulling hard on the Overton Window of sexuality. Those of us who live on the opposite fringe are in grave danger, and the people now in the middle may soon find themselves on the uncomfortable fringe.

Make no mistake: the world the anti-sex creeps are working for is a world of misery in which sexual trauma would be compounded and redoubled, with its victims smothered by a blanket of silence.

[1] Delany, Samuel R.: "Pornography and Censorship," in Shorter views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary, Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

[2] Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Shachtman: Whoever Fights Monsters, St. Martin's Press, 1992.