just a little for the breeze. The guy climbed in and when she
awoke he had already restrained her wrists and was inside her.
We stood in that one place for an hour or so because she told
me every detail of the rape. Most of them I still remember.
I gave the same speech at a smal community col ege. At the
reception after, the host pulled me aside. She had been gang-
raped some fifteen years before. The rapists were just about to
be released from prison. She was in ter or. One key element in
their convictions was that they had taken photographs of the
rape. The prosecutor was able to use the photographs to show
the jury the brutal fact of the rape.
Some eight years later a founder of one of the early rape
crisis centers told me that she and her colleagues were seeing
increasing numbers of rapes that were photographed; the
photography was part of the rape. The photographs themselves
no longer proved that a rape had taken place. For the rapists,
they intensified pleasure during the rape and after it they were
tokens, happy reminders; but the perception of what the photograph meant had changed. No mat er how violent the rape, the photograph of it seemed to be proof of the victim’s complicity to increasing numbers of jurors.
Everywhere that I traveled, starting from my poorest days
in New York and its environs to my more lucrative days flying
around the country to my sometimes-rich - sometimes-poor
days on the international level, I had women talking to me
about having been raped; then about having been raped and
photographed. One simply cannot imagine the pain. Each
woman told the story in the same way: no detail was left out;
the clock was running and the whole story had to be told to
me, then, there, wherever we were. Six months or a year or
several years could have passed since they had come to hear
me speak; six months or fifteen years could have passed since
the rape or the rape and the photographs.
Women did not stand up after the speech and speak about
a personal experience of rape; the questions were socially
acceptable and usually abstract. It was when they saw me
somewhere, anywhere real y, but alone, that they told me,
sometimes in whispers, what had happened to them. I had to
live with what I was being told.
Like death, rape happens to one woman, an individual, a
singular person. Even in circumstances of war when there is
mass rape, each rape happens to one woman. That one woman
can be raped many times by one man or by many. I’ve spent
