The point of Susan Brownmiller’s piece, “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” is to make the topic of rape something that we feel comfortable talking about. She wants to make all women aware of rape and where it came from and “deny it a future” (317). She begins by explaining how the process of training women to be the victim comes at a very young age. Whenever we learn about rape when we are younger we are usually told that it is a male raping a female. Brownmiller notes, “The message becomes clear. Rape has something to do with our sex” (313). She argues that “Red Riding Hood is a parable of rape” (313) and that it tells girls to not venture far from the path and that if they are lucky a nice man might protect them. Next she continues on to say that men want to believe that all women, on some level, want to be raped. Understandably, she has an issue with this claim. Some claim that rape cannot happen against the will of a woman, and/or that it is impossible to “thread a moving needle” (314). These claims imply that forcible rape does not exist and that if a woman actually does not want to be raped she can fight to prevent it. She concludes this section of the piece by observing how our society has somehow always put the fault on the woman. In the next section she notes that we need to recognize that rape is not an impulsive crime, but one of deliberation and hostility. Women need to fight back against all that our society has told us or hinted to us throughout our lives in order to not make women the automatic victim and not let us be told that we want to be raped. We need to “redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape” (316).
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s article is about minority women and how their experiences with rape and abuse are very different than that of a white and/or upper-class/privileged woman. Her piece is divided into four main sections: introduction, structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and the conclusion. The introduction tells us how Crenshaw will “consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism” (1). The first section of her structural intersectionality section deals with battering. She argues that economic issues (such as access to jobs, housing, and wealth) often play a very key role in the experience of a colored woman. Socioeconomic factors often disempower women of color, and when you add battering to the situation, it only gets worse. She next touches on how an immigrant woman is negatively impacted. Immigrant women who are not legal residents of the United States are often put in the worst situations due to the laws that restrict their ability to leave an abusive marriage for fear of deportation. Her next section deals with structural intersectionality and rape. Rape crisis centers that help women of color are often disadvantaged from the start. Counselors are forced to deal with many other issues before dealing directly with the rape when one is reported which limits their funding. Crenshaw then moves on to the Political Intersectionality section. She begins this section by talking about the politicization of domestic violence. She tells the story of how she tried to find statistics on the rates of domestic violence by district in LA but they would not release anything, claiming that domestic violence activists do not want them released, as they will most likely reinforce racial stereotypes. Her next section, Domestic Violence and Antiracist Policies, touches on an argument that says the feminist movement has no place in the communities of color. She continues on to discuss how many minority women do not report many of the abuse they experience because they do not want to perpetuate the racial stereotypes they already face. Crenshaw continues on to her next section, Race and the Domestic Violence Lobby. In this section she laments that as long as “attempts to politicize domestic violence focus on convincing elites that this is not a ‘minority’ problem but their problem, any authentic and sensitive attention to the experiences of minority women will probably continue to be regarded as jeopardizing the movement” (9). Her next and final section, Race and Domestic Violence Support Services, tell us how one Latina woman was denied access to a shelter, even when her safety was seriously in danger, because she was not proficient in English. Crenshaw continues on to tell us how the shelter was unwilling to change their policies or let her son translate for her. She concludes the article with a few examples of Supreme Court cases and leaves us with this thought: “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics” (15).
On a side note, a friend sent me a link to a video on this website so I began looking around at other articles on it. I found this article on the homepage and thought about how shockingly it relates to what we have been talking about all semester and what we are talking about with these articles as well:
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