Mercy

seeking for the analytical tools— rules o f discourse that are

enhanced rather than diminished by ambiguity. We value

nuance. Dogma is anathema to the spirit o f inquiry that animates

women’s biography. The notion that bad things happen is both

propagandistic and inadequate. We want to affirm the spiritual

dignity and the sexual bonding we seek to find in women’s lives.

We want a discourse o f triumph, if you will pardon me for being

rhetorically elegant. I have heard the Grand Inquisitor Dworkin

say that, as we are women, such discourse will have to be

ambiguous. She is a prime example, o f course, o f the simple-

minded demogogue who promotes the proposition that bad

things are bad. This axiom is too reductive to be seriously

entertained, except, o f course, by the poor, the uneducated, the

lunatic fringe that she both exploits and appeals to. It is, for

instance, anti-mythological to perceive rape in moralistic terms

as a bad experience without transformative dimensions to it. We

would then have to ignore or impugn the myth o f Persephone,

in which her abduction and rape led, in the view o f the wise

ancient Greeks, to the establishment o f the seasons, a mythologi-

cal tribute, in fact, to the seasonal character o f the menarche. It

is disparaging and profoundly anti-intellectual to concentrate

on the virtual slave status o f women per se in ancient Greece as

if that in and o f itself rendered their mythological insights into

rape suspect. In fact, intercourse, forced or not, is the

precondition for a fertile, fruitful, multiplied as it were,

abundance o f living things, symbolized by the planting and

harvesting seasons. I am, o f course, not allying m yself either

with the right-wing endorsement o f motherhood or fam ily in

making these essentially keen, neutral, and inescapable observations. We cannot say the Greek philosophers and artists, the

storytellers and poets, were wrong, or dismiss them, simply

because some among us want to say that rape is bad or feels

bad or has some destructive effects. In fact, it has not been

scientifically proven that the effects o f rape are worse than the

effects o f gender-neutral assault and we are not willing to stew

in our stigma. As one distinguished feminist o f our own

school wrote some years ago in a left-wing journal o f

socialism, and I am paraphrasing: we should not dwell on rape

at all because to do so negatively valorizes sex; instead we

should actively concentrate on enjoying sex so that, in a sense,

the good can push out the bad; it is sex-negative to continue to

stigmatize an act, a process, an experience, that sometimes has

negative consequences; if we expand sexual pleasure we will,

in fact, be repudiating rape— in consciousness and in practice.

Further, in w om en’s academic circles we reify this perspective

by refusing, for instance, to have cross-cultural or cross-disci-

plinary discussions with those who continue to see themselves

as victims. While we deplore racism and endorse the goals o f