While I think she intended her first sentence, and the beginning part of her writing, to be shocking, I found she went too far. She claimed that ALL men were consciously using their penises as weapons and that ALL women were kept in a constant state of fear (pg 312). I disagree completely with her notion that all women live in "a constant state of intimidation" and that they see the threat of rape in every man. For me, this is preposterous! To make such a generalization is a rash misjudgment, and as a woman I have personally never felt this way and I refuse to believe that every man, my friends included, consciously use a threat of rape to maintain a domination over women. Along these lines, I also dont think that all men hold the notion that "women want to be raped" as a true statement. For the most part, I give men more credit that Brownmiller and think that most men dont believe women "are asking for it" or that there is such a thing as a "heroic rapist."
Because of my initial rejection of Brownmiller's argument, I was unable to get much out of her writing. However, I did appreciate near the conclusion of her passage, where she discusses the politicization of rape. I thought her appeal to make rape a "speakable" crime is important. By being able to talk about it, I think the stigma of rape can be lessened, if not disappear. While I maintain that most men do not think the way Brownmiller described, i concede that some men do. Hopefully, by speaking out and making rape an important issue, the number of those men will diminish (and ideally be decimated)!
Hillary, I also had a huge issue with Brownmiller's ideas in this piece. While you focused on her generalization to all men, I really couldn't get past a different issue: the idea that all women secretly want to be raped. I have never heard of this idea before, and maybe that makes me naive, but nonetheless, I couldn't get past this notion. In class, we talked a lot about how women don't necessarily want to be raped in the sense of a stranger jumping out of the bushes, but that women want to be sexually dominated. The idea of "rape fantasy" doesn't sit well with me either, though. Maybe I'm just different, but there is truly nothing appealing about a rape fantasy to me. I think that our class discussion was too focused on the idea that women want to be raped, because while some women may fantasize about that sort of thing, I do not think that generalizes to all women. Brownmiller made a mistake by generalizing that all men want to dominate women with their penises (using them as weapons), but she also made a mistake by generalizing that all women want to be dominated in bed my men.
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