will to his. There is, o f course, a sociology to housework
while there is only a pathology to rape. I am dignifying the
opposition here considerably by discussing the question o f
rape at all. Housework, as I showed above, has more to do
with wom en’s daily, ordinary bending o f will to suit a man. I
object to tying rape to wom en’s equality, in either theory or
practice, as if rape defined wom en’s experience or determined
w om en’s status. Rape is a momentary abrogation o f choice.
At its worst, it is like being hit by a car. The politicizing o f it
creates a false consciousness, one o f victimization, and a false
complaint, as if rape is a socially sanctioned male behavior on a
continuum o f socially expressed masculinity. We need to
educate men while enhancing desire. For most men, rape is a
game played with the consent o f a knowledgeable, sophisticated partner. As a game it is singularly effective in amplifying
desire. A m plifying desire is a liberatory goal. We are stuck, in
this epoch, with literalists: the female wallowers and the
feminist Jacobins. It is, o f course, no surprise to see a schizoid
discourse synthesized into a synthetic rhetoric: “ I” the raped
becomes “ I” the Jacobin. As the Jacobins wanted to destroy all
aristocrats, the feminist Jacobins want to destroy all rapists,
which, if one considers the varieties o f heterosexual play,
might well mean all men. They leave out o f their analysis
precisely the sexual stimulation produced by rape as an idea in
the same w ay they will not acknowledge the arousing and
transformative dimensions o f prostitution. To their reductive
minds prostitution is exploitation without more while those
o f us who thrive on adventure and com plexity understand that
prostitution is only an apparent oppression that permits some
women to be sexually active without bourgeois restraints.
Freedom is implicit in prostitution because sex is. Stalinists on
this issue, they see the women as degraded, because they believe
that sex degrades. They will not consider that prostitution is
freedom for women in exactly the same way existentialists
postulated that rape was a phenomenon o f freedom for men—
striking out against the authoritarian state by breaking laws and,
in opposition to all the imperatives o f a repressive society, doing
what one wants. They w on’t admit that a prostitute lives in
every woman. They w on’t admit to the arousal. Instead, they
strategically destroy desire by calling up scenarios o f childhood
sexual abuse, dispossession, poverty, and homelessness. Even
the phallic woman o f pornography has lost her erection by the
end o f the list. Rape as idea and prostitution as idea are o f
inestimable value in sexual communication. We don’t need the
Jacobins censoring our sexual souls. Meanwhile, in the academy
our influence grows while the Jacobins are on the streets,
presumably where they belong if they are sincere. I will keep
writing, applying the values o f agency, nuance, and ambiguity
