Word: raped
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book's thesis, startling to those who have not closely followed recent trends in the feminist movement: rape is not a random act by deviant or troubled men, but a worldwide social mechanism by which men control women. Says Brownmiller: "It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear. Rather than society's aberrants or 'spoilers of purity,' men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world...
...Brownmiller's view, civilization is in fact built upon rape. When primitive man realized he could force intercourse while women could not, "this single factor may have been sufficient to have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape. When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it . . . Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone...
...thinks that early woman struck "the risky bargain" of accepting domination by a single male to prevent wholesale rape, thus leading to a rudimentary mate-protectorate and then to patriarchy. Women became property, acquired either through raiding other tribes or purchasing a daughter from a father in one's own tribe. Rape entered the law as a property crime. Brownmiller insists that to this day the law treats rape primarily as a violation of male rights of possession. Today rape is aggression against the female's "owner" as well as a reminder of male dominance...
...piling up historical and anthropological data, Brownmiller paints a convincing and awesome portrait of men's cruelty to women. The ancient Babylonians and Hebrews routinely executed married rape victims along with those who attacked them. The Hebrews also stoned to death any virgin raped within the city walls-on grounds that sound suspiciously modern: if the virgin had not wanted the sex, she would have screamed and been rescued in time. An Assyrian whose virgin daughter was raped was entitled to gain justice by raping the attacker's wife. The chivalry of medieval knights included the notion that...
...Brownmiller argues, women are usually the biggest losers-the targets of savage rape, mutilation and torture, or simply part of the natural rewards enjoyed by invaders. She also sees rape as a conscious military tactic to break the will of a civilian population (e.g., the actions of the German army in Belgium and France at the start of World War I). Gang rape appears throughout history as a recurring punishment. The Mundurucu Indians of Brazil prescribed gang rape for any woman who spied on the sacred musical instruments used by men. Missourians gang-raped Mormon women in driving the sect...