who can’t be tired out or bought of . Each woman needs to
take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear,
accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart;
with every wave of fatigue, one needs another platoon of
strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take
more land, to make it safe for women. I’m willing to count the
inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced
into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world’s true
orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and
dignity.
Counting
Are there really women who have to worry about a fourth
generation’s becoming prostitutes? How many are there? Are
there five, or 2, 000, or 20 million? Are they in one place - for
instance, the Pacific Northwest, where the woman I quoted
lives - or are they in some sociological stratum that can be isolated and studied, or are they al in Thailand or the Philippines or Albania? Are there too many or too few, because in either
case one need not feel responsible? Too many means it’s too
hard to do anything about it; too few means why bother. Is it
possible that there is one adult woman in the United States
who does not know whether or not a baby’s body should be
penetrated with an object, or are there so many that they
cannot be counted - only their form of saying 'I don’t know”
comes in the guise of labeling the penetration 'speech” or
“free speech”?
A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close friend on
television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at a
university. He said that he was willing to concede that rapes
did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then
I realized that his statement was a definition of “white” in
motion - not even “white male” but white in a country built
on white ownership of blacks and white genocide of reds and
white-indentured servitude of Asians and women, including
white women, and brown migrant labor. He thought that
maybe 3 percent of women in the United States had been raped,
whereas the best research shows a quarter to a third. The male
interviewer agreed with this percentage pulled out of thin air:
it sounded right to both of them, and neither of them felt
required to fund a study or read the already existing research
material. Their authority was behind their number, and in the
United States authority is white. Whatever trouble these
two particular men have had in their lives, neither has had
to try to stop a fourth generation, their own child, from prostituting.
