Mercy

man-hating and recrimination. Indeed, the sick-unto-death

are hard to placate, and I would not condescend to try.

W omen’s biography seeks to rescue from obscurity women

who did not belong there in the first place, women o f

achievement made invisible by an unjust, androcentric

double standard. These are noble women, not in the class

sense, because we do valorize the working class, though o f

course often these women are upper-class, and not in the

moralistic sense, although o f course they often are pure in the

sense o f emblematic. But certainly one need not labor to describe

the muck or the person indistinguishable from it. We affirm

sexually active women, yes. We will not explicate either the

condition or the lives o f sexually annihilated women— they

achieved nothing that requires our attention. The crime o f rape is

not an issue o f sex. It is an issue o f power. To recast it once again,

in a revisionist frenzy, as an issue o f freedom is painfully and

needlessly diversionary. O f course, there is a tradition in

existentialist philosophy o f seeing rape as an expression o f

freedom, a phenomenon o f freedom incarnate as it were, for the

rapist o f course, presumed male, presumed the normative

human. But certainly by now the psychological resonances o f

rape for the raped can best be dealt with in a therapeutic forum so

that the individual’s appreciation o f sex will not be distorted or

diminished— a frequent consequence o f rape that is a real

tragedy. The mechanics o f the two, rape and intercourse, have

an apparent likeness, which is unfortunate and no doubt

confusing for those insufficiently sex-positive. One is the other,

exaggerated, although, o f course, we do not know —pace St.

Augustine— which came first. St. Augustine contends that there

was sexual intercourse in the Garden but without lust, which he

saw as debilitating once he stopped indulging in it. O f course, we

all get older. The philosophical problem is one o f will. Is will

gendered? Clearly Nietzsche’s comprehension o f will never took

into account that he could be raped. Sade postulated that a

woman had a strong will— to be raped and otherwise hurt. It is

the governing pornographic conceit, indistinguishable from a

will to have sex. The problem o f female freedom is the problem

o f female will. Can a woman have freedom o f will if her will

exists outside the whole rape system: if she will not be raped or

potentially raped or, to cover Sade’s odd women, if she will not

rape. Assuming that the rapist qua rapist imposes his will, can

any woman be free abjuring rape, her will repudiating it, or is

any such will vestigial, utterly useless on the plane o f human

reality. Rape is, in that sense, more like housework than it is

like intercourse. He wants the house clean. She does not want

to clean it. Heterosexual imperatives demand that she bend her