their frontline defense. If I can do it, they can do it. The so-called
rapists in my university are educated men. We like sex and to
each his own. In my mind I have the Jacobin under me, and in
m y nuanced world she likes it. I am not simple-minded. Rape
so-called is her problem, not mine. I have been hurt but it was
a long time ago. I’m not the same girl.
Author’s Note
In a study o f 930 randomly selected adult women in San
Francisco in 1978 funded by the National Institute for Mental
Health, Diana Russell found that forty-four percent o f the
wom en had experienced rape or attempted rape as defined by
California state law at least once. The legal definition o f rape in
California and most other states was: forced intercourse (i. e.
penile-vaginal penetration), intercourse obtained by threat o f
force, or intercourse completed when the woman was
drugged, unconscious, asleep, or otherwise totally helpless
and hence unable to consent. N o other form o f sexual assault
was included in the definition; therefore, no other form o f
sexual assault was included in the statistic. O f the forty-four
percent, fully half had experienced more than one such attack,
the number o f attacks ranging from two to nine. Pair and
group rapes, regardless o f the number o f assailants, were
counted as one attack. Multiple attacks by the same person
were counted as one attack. See Diana E. H. Russell,
Inc., Publishers, 1986.
Linda Marchiano, slave name Linda Lovelace, “ star” o f the
pornographic film
taught self-hypnosis by the man who pimped her, to suppress
the gag response in her throat. She taught herself to relax
her throat muscles in order to minimize the pain o f deep
thrusting to the bottom o f her throat. She was brought into
prostitution and pornography through seduction and gang
rape, a not uncommon combination. Her lover turned her
over without warning to five men in a motel room to whom
he had sold her without her knowledge. Neither her screams
nor her begging stopped them. She was beaten on an almost
daily basis, humiliated, threatened, including with guns, kept
captive and sleep-deprived, and forced to do sex acts ranging
from “ deep throat” oral sex to intercourse and sodom y to
being penetrated by objects both vaginally and anally to
bestiality. Her escape from sexual slavery and her subsequent