A Politically Incorrect Feminist by Phyllis Chesler

Author:Phyllis Chesler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

10  Do Women of Color Have the Right to Kill White Male Rapists in Self-Defense? Do Lesbians Have the Right to Custody of Their Children?

In my pre-feminist days, sexual harassment and rape were so common, so pervasive, so accepted that they were virtually invisible. The shame, the stench, stuck to the victim or to the whistle-blower; the abuser almost never experienced the consequences of his actions. In fact, he was almost never even named, and when he was, all ranks closed to protect him and to destroy his accuser.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the great men (and the few token women) of the academy did not study sexual violence. Yet in the 1970s, they claimed to be the experts and characterized as exaggerated and man-hating the grassroots feminist exposés of sexual violence against women.

Back then, like most young women, I was sexually harassed—by professors, employers, and strangers on street corners. Also like others of my generation, I was bred to accept it, keep quiet about it, and blame myself if something about these peculiar arrangements bothered me. For years I did this, until the feminist movement in the late 1960s allowed me to analyze my situation in feminist terms.

As every woman knows, hell hath no fury like a man spurned.

In the late 1960s, after we had had dinner together, the head of a department at a prestigious medical school tried to rape me. I was a graduate student and we’d met at his suggestion (I’m guilty, I confess: I went, I ate) to discuss how he could assist me in getting my research funded. In the decidedly nonamorous scuffle that ensued I broke one of his ribs, and although I helped him to a nearby hospital, he never helped me get my research funded.

In the early 1970s a professor arrived to rate my college’s curriculum for a national review board. I admit it; I did it again: I accepted his invitation to a dinner party with well-known intellectuals and their wives. My equally ambitious heterosexual male counterparts also accepted dinner invitations, but they didn’t have to face sexual harassment at the hands of their heterosexual mentors. I had the audacity to reject this professor’s every subsequent social and sexual advance. He retaliated by arranging for the publication of a scathing review of Women and Madness.

Neither of these professors were overcome with love for me. They treated me as they did because I was a woman.

It was nothing personal. Prejudice rarely is.

* * *

I will always remember the 1970s as the decade in which three important lawsuits tested a victim’s right to self-defense against a rapist or a drunken neighborhood intruder and pedophile. These cases were about gender, class, and race. They garnered huge amounts of publicity and were understood as feminist causes.

I always tried to bring these cases into my lectures. My knowledge of them allowed me to understand the Aileen Wuornos case in 1991—allegedly, the first female serial killer. I was able to see Wuornos as a woman who may have killed a rapist in self-defense, not only as a prostituted woman who became a serial killer.

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