It's happening again. Women's self-determination is being attacked head-on, on multiple fronts.
This week's news featured a year-long study of campus rape, in which the Center for Public Integrity reported that one in five women on college campuses across the country is a victim of rape or attempted rape during her college career. Yet college authorities routinely let college-boy rapists go without expulsion or suspension, let alone criminal prosecution, even in cases of repeat offenders. I repeat: Known rapists go on to graduate, while their -- oft silenced -- victims' lives are ripped apart.
There is also an increasing incidence of rape of women in the military. It seems the women are the ones punished, while the rapists either get away with it or leave with an honorable discharge. Have we forgotten how completely traumatic and damaging rape is?
I was raped, as a teenager, in the early days of the women's movement. It wasn't talked about back then. What was the point? People were likely to shrug, blame the victim, or even make jokes. Marge Piercy wrote a poem at the time, which said,
"There is no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that the wounds also bleed inside.
There is no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it..."
I remember feeling redeemed by that. When I went to the police and told them that two masked men broke the window of my lower East Side apartment and raped me at knife point, they asked if they were friends. I told them my friends entered through the door. I was a feminist, an activist, and not a virgin. No one cared. Nothing was ever done. Not even the women I worked with understood the depth of the violation. It wasn't until years later, after a lot of therapy, that I understood, myself.
My sense of safety left me that night. For twenty years, I could not hear an unidentified sound in my house without jumping. This is the sort of post-traumatic stress that a conservatively estimated twenty percent of women at co-ed schools are now facing and will continue to face if this situation is not remedied. How is it that the leaders of education, university deans, either don't know or don't care? How is it possible that women are once again feeling shamed, silenced, and unable to get justice and protection from authorities?
Before you answer that, let me point to another frontal assault. Remember, I said on multiple fronts!
Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans. A large campaign in the South has been aimed at persuading the black community that black women's right to abortion is part of a white conspiracy to kill off their race. The Georgia Right to Life Campaign just spent $20,000 on billboards targeting the African American community. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective made national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, "Black children are an endangered species," and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com. "It's a perfect storm," said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence as reasons for the high abortion rate in the black community. "There's an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it's because of voluntary activity, and it's so not the case," Ms. Ross said.
What do these two phenomena, campus rape swept under the rug, and the so-called "right to life" campaign targeting vulnerable, black women, have in common? Simply this: Our bodies.
Let me say that again: OUR bodies. Women's bodies. Messy, tempting, and not under control. That is, not under their control.
And that is paramount. Women's self determination is being attacked at the most basic level: our right to control our own bodies. That means our right to have sex and the right to say "no" to whomever and under whatever circumstances we choose; the right to bear a child and the right to say "no," whenever and under whatever circumstances we choose. Simple. Our bodies. Our right to determine what happens to them and in them.
There are a lot of arguments for and against abortion. They should all be made. Every woman should have a right to decide for herself, in her own conscience and heart, what she wants to do about her own body and an incipient, dependent life living inside it. She may even decide "wrong" and live to regret her decision. That, too, is a woman's right.
Likewise, consensual intercourse. There are a lot of arguments concerning the pros and cons of sex outside of committed, loving relationship. Every woman should hear and consider them all, and then decide, in each instance, what she wants for herself. But taking control of a woman's body and occupying it without her permission is rape, a form of terrorism, whether it's done at gunpoint, by taking advantage of her having drunk too much, or by a law forcing her to have a child against her will.
Without this basic right to control our own bodies, everything else is worthless. Take your equal pay and put it where the sun don't shine, if I don't have the right to control my own body. In all likelihood, I will be in no shape to earn that equal pay anyhow, if I am suffering post-traumatic stress from a rape, trying to figure out what I'm going to do with a kid I don't want and can't take care of, or recovering from a coat-hanger abortion. While you're at it, take the equal division of housework, the right to go to war, and the right to prosecute deadbeat dads. Without the right to control our own bodies, they're just reforms mollifying an enslaved people.
Women's bodies are the alpha and the omega of women's rights and women's dignity, the sine qua non and the front line of everything we have won over the past fifty years. But they still embarrass the powers-that-be. They're so, well, fleshy and bloody. They want to control them. When we are raped, they try to silence us. When we get pregnant, whether by our own actions or by a rape they are pretending did not happen, they want to control that, too.
I'm not a paranoid woman. I like men. I don't believe there is a vast male conspiracy out to get us. I do believe we've come a long way, baby. But I've lived long enough to know vigilance is still necessary and probably will be for a long time to come. This is where we draw a line in the sand: This is MY body. This is MY blood. It is not given for you unless I say so.