Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will

Posted: Mon, Apr 6, 2026

Today

The situation:

The pervasiveness of sexual assault (& sexual harassment, domestic abuse, etc.): Often cited data are that one in six or one in five women (compared to 1 in 71 men) in the U.S. experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.
- In eight in ten cases, the perpetrator is an acquaintance.
- In nine in ten cases, the rape targets a woman.
The under-reporting of sexual assault: Data are again tricky, but something like 37% of sexual assaults and 12% of child sexual abuse are reported.
- Fear of retaliation, victim-blaming, “he said, she said,” etc.
- Also (this is MacKinnon’s point): Line between rape and “normal” sex can be thin in women’s experiences—the latter can involve quite a lot of force, coercion, non-consent, etc. So, for all the wrong reasons, the men who find it hard to distinguish rape from rough sex are right about something.

Contemporary popular understanding of rape:

Rape arises out of sexual desires/needs/impulses; it is a response to sexual “provocation” and is in some important connected to testosterone and the penis.
Rape is really easy to accuse a man of.
Rape is rare, but also the line between rape and “rough” sex is thin.
The imagined Black rapist in a dark alley.
“No” means “yes.”
Rape is a private, individual issue; it is between one man and one woman (or perhaps the woman’s husband or father).

The property theory of rape: Rape wrongs the father or husband qua property owner.

Property: The woman and her chastity.
Not a wrong against the woman herself: “crime of man against man” vs. “crime of man against woman” (Brownmiller, p. 18).
Just like you can’t steal your own property, you can’t rape your own wife.
- ~Coverture

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: “carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will.”

“Carnal knowledge” by a man through penile penetration
“A woman,” not his wife
“Forcibly” + “against his will”
- The focus is to protect men from the perceived high risk of false accusations: the utmost resistance requirement.

“The personal is political.”

Lose consent (Brownmiller): Redefine rape in terms of force.
- Rape = sexual assault.
- “Violence, not sex.”
Lose force: Redefine rape in terms of nonconsent.
- Rape = nonconsexual sex.
- This has become the prevailing understanding of our day.

Brownmiller’s analysis:

Rape and sex are categorically distinct; this is not a thin line at all.
Rape has nothing to do with sexual attraction, physically or psychologically; rape is more like physical assault—literally, sexual assault.
- Rather, rape is “man’s basic weapon of force against women,” “nothing more or less than a conscious-process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (pp. 14–15).
- This gets around victim-blaming: Sexual attractiveness/“provocation” is irrelevant.
False accusations are also irrelevant; “all men” are complicit in rape anyway.
Rape is everywhere.
Rape is a political issue; it is between men as a gender and women as a gender.

Brownmiller then traces rape to:

The lack of estrous cycles in human females (pp. 12–13).
“Man’s structural capacity to rape and woman’s corresponding structural vulnerability” (p. 13).
The inability of women to “retaliate in kind” (p. 14, her emphasis).
“By anatomical fiat—the inescapable construction of their genital organs—the human male was a natural predator and the human female served as his natural prey” (p. 16).

Some issues for discussion:

Is this biology?
- Is the penis, or really any body part, by nature a weapon?
- Brownmiller thinks that women are “structurally” incapable of rape only because she presumes a certain definition of what sex is?
Is rape not sexual?
- Surely, rape as a form of violence is still different from other forms of violence, and that difference has to do with sex?
- Rape messes up survivor’s relationship with sex in profound ways, etc.
Is there anything we can do about it?
- No hope whatsoever for a way out?
- Lesbian separatism??
- Blames biology for a political problem?

In-class activity: The poems by Sharon Olds and torrin a. greathouse.