Word: sexualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEA MUSGRAVE, 47, has written chamber music, ballet and opera. "Music is a human art, not a sexual one," she says. "Sex is no more important than eye color." When Britain's Musgrave talks about "space music," she is not referring to synthetic sci-fi sounds but to compositions in which the players are directed to move about the concert hall...
...have absolutely no ability to resist attack. They learn early on that as fragile, vulnerable beings they are not physically capable of warding off attackers; they are physically doomed to submit. And yet, as Brownmiller shows, physical response from a potential victim can be a major, effective deterrent to sexual attack. Women can protect themselves by overcoming their fear of self-assertion and the belief that they are forever potential victims...
...frightening specter of rape? The most immediate step, Brownmiller argues, is a complete revamping of the legal statutes that continue to make trials often unbearably humiliating for women, and conviction exceedingly difficult. "Rape, as the current law defines it," says Brownmiller, "is the forcible penetration of an act of sexual intercourse on the body of a woman not one's wife." Outmoded statutes must be replaced with a "gender-free, non-activity-specific law governing all manner of sexual assaults...
...launched a campaign to suppress all pornography--"the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." Brownmiller points out that pornography is a key factor in the development of many men. It is "like rape...a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access..." She adds: "...hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty'." The perpetuation of rape is predicated on man's ability to perceive his victims as inanimate...
...women in a state of fear." Some may feel that Brownmiller places undue emphasis on this one manifestation of the subjugation of women. But rape is still the most extreme manifestation of sexist cultures; women will continue to be oppressed as long as they continue to be victims of sexual abuse--demeaned by those who attack them, demeaned by the society which doubts their word over the word of their male attackers, and demeaned by the world that insists they were born to be victims...