A Few Reads for Sunday

 A small Idaho town gets inundated with religious crackpots of the Doug Wilson ilk.

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Obituary:  Journalist, author, and political activist, Susan Brownmiller, 90, one of the original second wave feminists, died yesterday after being ill.  This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her famous work, Against Our Will.   It was considered a landmark book for it tackled the issue of rape.  The book became a bestseller.

Snip:

In her 1999 memoir "In Our Time," Brownmiller likened the writing of "Against Our Will" to "shooting an arrow into a bulls-eye in very slow motion." Brownmiller started the book in the early 1970s after hearing stories from friends that made her shriek “with dismay.” It was chosen as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and considered newsworthy enough for Brownmiller to be interviewed on the "Today" show by Barbara Walters. In 1976, Time magazine placed her picture on its cover, along with Billie Jean King, Betty Ford and nine others as "Women of the Year."

Brownmiller's book inspired survivors to tell their stories, women to organize rape crisis centers and helped lead to the passage of marital rape laws. It was also received with fear, confusion and anger. Brownmiller remembered a newspaper reporter shouting at her, "You have no right to disturb my mind like this!"

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Women Have the Right To Freedom of Movement

Some comments I made following the controversial interview second-wave feminist Susan Brownmiller made the other day about rape:

Women are far more likely to be raped by their husbands or their significant others than they are by strangers. Yet they are told to be watchful of the boogeyman in the bushes and can't do one thing alone. They are catcalled on the street by rude men because the message being conveyed by these jerks is you have no right to be on the streets alone. You have to have a man as a security guard, I guess, in these jerks' minds. That is not living a life at all. It is not living at all if you have to be paranoid. This is why 90 percent of the comments here are utterly stupid even if they think they are conveying "common sense." The older I get, the less tolerant I am of stupid beliefs. Restricting women's freedom of movement in the remote chance they are ever raped by strangers is not okay. And the rape culture is really all about restricting women's right to their own space, to self-determination.

I don't know how many times I was told over my 60 years by my sisters, by my mother, by co-workers, by friends, by acquaintances, that I should never ride my bike alone, I should never jog alone, I should never hike alone, I should never go to the movies alone, I should never walk in the dark alone, I should never travel alone, I should not live alone, I should never do one single thing alone. It infuriated me to hear this garbage nonstop, but I did all of those things and MORE on my own. I was not going to not enjoy life because of a remote risk somebody might rape me. I was not going to stop living because of this idiocy. ALL women should do the same.

Brownmiller is wrong on both this issue and domestic violence issues. She apparently hasn't read her own book since she sent it to the publisher 40 years ago. The current rape activism is a natural outgrowth of what she wrote. It is long overdue to put the blame where it squarely belongs, and that is on the men who rape.

Susan Brownmiller Is Of a Different Generation

and nothing is more indicative of that fact than her recent remarks about college rape culture. In her time, it was just assumed rape was there, there was no hope to change men, and that it was up to women to avoid situations where rape could happen. In other words, women were told they should never go out alone, travel alone, eat alone, live alone, or do anything else alone because some boogeyman was going to grab them and rape them.

The fact is victims are not to blame for being victimized. The blame rests SOLELY on the perpetrators.

You want to reduce or eliminate rape? Start raising men to respect women, that women's bodies are not men's to do whatever the hell they want. Restrict access to porn, which is extremely damaging to male-female relationships.

Women have the right to go wherever they want, whenever they want. Men have NO right whatsoever to violate their personal space.

How hard is that to understand, people?

Brownmiller is 80 years old, which is hard to believe.

Update: Fixed link.