can be 100, 000 others with their names on it, too, but that
doesn’t get you off the hook.
I spoke in small rooms fil ed with women, and afterward
someone would pass a hat. I remember a crowd of about fifty
in Woodstock, New York, that chipped in about $60. I slept
on the floor of whoever had asked me or organized the event,
and I ate whatever I was given - bad tabbouleh stands out
in my mind. I needed money to live on but didn’t believe in
asking for it from women, because women were poor. Women’s
centers in towns and on college campuses were poor.
Sometimes a woman would pass me a note that had a check
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Capitalist Pig
in it for $25 or some such sum; the highest I remember was
$150, and that was a fortune in my eyes.
I had to travel to wherever the speech was in the hope that
I'd be able to collect enough money to pay for my expenses.
Flo Kennedy often talked about how if you did not demand
money people would treat you badly. I did not believe that
could be true, but for the most part it was. I can remember
the gut-wrenching decision to ask for a fee up front, first $200,
then $500. A few years later I got a speaking agent, Phyllis
Langer, who had been an editor at Ms. She took a 25 percent
commission, whereas most speaking or lecture agents took a
full 33 percent. By the time I hired her, I was making in the
$ l, 500-$3, 000 range. She made sure that I got paid, that the
event was handled okay, with publicity, and that expenses were
reimbursed. She was kind and also provided perspective.
When she went to work at an agency that I didn’t particularly like, I decided to represent myself. By this time my nervousness about money had disappeared, a Darwinian adaptation, although my stage fright - which has run me ragged over the
years - never did.
I would cal whoever wanted me to speak on the phone. I'd
get an idea of how much money they could raise. I stil wanted
them to be comfortable, and it was a horror to me that anyone
would think I was ripping them off. By the time I took over
making al the ar angements myself, I had developed a fixed
set of necessities: a good hotel room in a good hotel, enough
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money for meals and ground transportation (taxis, not buses
or subways). Eventually I graduated to the best hotel I could
find, and I'd also buy myself a first-class ticket.
Representing myself, I would fold an estimate of expenses
into a fee so that the sponsor had to pay me only one amount,
after I spoke on the night that I spoke. I had developed an
aversion to having organizers vet my expenses, even though I
was scrupulous. If I watched an in-room movie, I paid for it
myself.
In the first years, I was so poor that if I spoke at a conference I usually could not afford a ticket for the inevitable concert scheduled as part of the conference. I didn’t know that I could get one for free. If I wanted a T-shirt from the conference, I couldn’t buy it. My favorite women’s movement button - “Don’t Suck. Bite” - cost too much for me to have one.
I was scraping by, and the skin was pret y torn from my
fingers.
Even during the early years, I got letters from women
telling me that I was a capitalist pig; yeah, they did begrudge
me the $60. It wasn’t personal. It was just that any money I
earned came from someone else who also didn’t have enough
money for a T-shirt. Or did she? I guess I’l never know. I
couldn’t embrace being a capitalist pig; I couldn’t accept the
fact - and it was a fact - that the more money I was paid, the
nicer people were. I couldn’t even accept the good fallout -
that charging a fee for a lecture enabled me to do benefits as
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Capitalist Pig
wel . After a while I got the hang of it and when work fel of ,
when the speaking events dried up, when someone was nasty
to me, I just raised my price. It was bad for the karma but
good for this life.
I remember that saying I was poor got me contempt, not
empathy or a few more dol ars. I remember that begging
for money especially brought out the cruelty in people. I
remember that trying to talk about poverty - you show me
yours and I'l show you mine - never brought forth anything
other than insult. Competitive poverty was the lowest negotiation, a fight to the moral death.
In hindsight it is clear to me that I never would have been
able to put in more than a quarter of a century on the road
had I not figured out what I needed. Everyone doesn’t need
what I need, but I do need what I need. Money is a hard
discipline, not easy to learn, especially for the lumpen like me.
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One Woman
I was walking down the street on a bright, sunny day in New
York City sometime in 1975. A woman almost as bright and
sunny was walking toward me. I recognized her, an acquaintance in the world of books. She had been up at my Woodstock speech, which had been about rape. I had started writing out
my speeches because of my frustration at not being able to
find venues for publication. This was cal ed “The Rape Atrocity
and the Boy Next Door, ” subsequently published in 1976 in
a collection of speeches called Our Blood: Prophecies and
Discourses on Sexual Politics. We greeted each other, and then
she started talking: she had been raped on a particular night
in a particular city years before. She had left the window open
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
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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
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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
the larger part of my adult life listening to stories of rape. At
first I listened naively, surprised that a woman walking down
the street on a bright and sunny day, someone I real y did not
know, could, after a greeting, launch into a sickening, detailed
story of a rape that had happened to her. The element of surprise never entirely went away, but later I would be certain to steel myself, balance my body, try to calm my mind. I couldn’t
move, I could barely breathe - I was afraid of hurting her, the
one woman, by a gesture that seemed dismissive or by a look
on my face that might be mistaken for incredulity.
Most of the rapes were unreported; some were inside families; each rape was in some sense a secret; one woman and then one woman and then one woman did not think she would be
believed. The political ground in society as a whole was not
welcoming. The genius of the New York Radical Feminists
was that they organized a speak-out on rape in the early 1970s
before anyone was prepared to listen. They paved the way.
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The genius of Susan Brownmil er’s book Against Our Will:
Men, Women and Rape was that it gave rape a history. The
genius of the women’s movement was in demanding that rape
be addressed as a social policy issue. A consequence of that
demand was legal reform, some but not enough. The rules of
evidence shamelessly favor the accused rapist(s) and destroy the
dignity of the rape victim. The rape victim is stil suspect - this
is a prejudice against women as deep as any antiblack prejudice. She lied, she lied, she lied: women lie. The bite marks on her back show that she liked rough sex, not that a sexual predator had chewed up her back. That she went with her school chum to Central Park and her death - she was strangled with
her bra - proved that she liked rough sex. One woman was
tortured and raped by her husband; he was so arrogant that
he videotaped a half hour, including his use of a knife on her
breasts. The jury, which had eight women on it, acquit ed -
they thought that he needed help. He. Needed. Help.
In the old days - or, to use the beautiful black expression,
“back in the day” - it was presumed that the woman was
sexually provocative or was trying to destroy the man with a
phony charge of rape. Now in the United States the question
is repeated ad nauseam: is she credible? For this question to
have any meaning, one would have to believe that rapists
pick their victims based on the victims' credibility. “Oh, she’s
credible; I'l rape her. ” Or, “No, she’s not credible; I’l wait
until a credible one comes by. ”
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The raped woman stil stands accused in the media, especial y if she has named the rapist. For one woman to say "I was raped" is easier than for one woman, Juanita Broderick,
to say “I was raped by William Jefferson Clinton. " Ms.
Broderick told us that she was raped and by whom; no one
has held him accountable in any way that matters.
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It Takes a Vil age
It happens so often that I, at least, cannot keep track of it.
A woman is only believed if and when other women come
forward to say the man or men raped them, too. The oddness
of this should be transparent: if I'm robbed and my neighbor
isn’t, I’m still robbed - there is no legal or social agreement
that in order for me, the victim of a robbery, to be believed,
the burglar has to have robbed my neighbors. As writer Chris
Matthews said, “There are banks that Willy Sut on didn’t rob. ”
I remember an early, ter ible case in which a woman with a
history of mental upheaval due to her father’s incestuous rape
of her was raped by her psychiatrist. She had no credibility,
as they say, and the jury was doing a full-tilt boogie toward
vindicating the accused.
No one noticed a famous character actor who came to the
trial every day. The actor sat quietly and used her formidable
skil to help herself disappear. As the case was heading to the
exactly the same thing had happened to her - father-daughter
incest and rape by this same psychiatrist. The actor testified
and the media printed pictures of her. Because of the actor’s
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Heartbreak
familiarity to a large audience and the obvious ter or she felt
in exposing herself, the jury did not find for the rapist. How
do I know that the ter or was real? I talked with her.
In that case what no one seemed to understand was why the
victim, raped twice now by persons who were supposed to
protect and care for her, raped twice now by figures of power
and authority, was unstable - of course she was. Since she had
no credibility precisely because of the ef ects of the two rapes
on her, she needed rescue by the actor. Once the actor testified,
there were other women prepared to testify, and it was because
of the other women waiting in the wings that the defense
collapsed. In fact, the psychiatrist knew by virtue of his learning and expertise that incested women were staggeringly vulnerable and easy to shame; he bet his reputation and
professional life that shame would shut them up no mat er
how egregious his sexual abuse of them.
It takes a vil age of women to nail a rapist. Some rapists of
children have molested or assaulted hundreds of children before
they are caught for their first offense. Rapists of adult women
are high-brow and low-brow, white trash and black trash,
cunning and brutal, smart and stupid; some are high achievers;
some are rich; some are famous. Since the woman is always
on trial - this time to be evaluated on her credibility - there
almost always needs to be more than one of her to attest to
the abuser’s predatory patterns.
This was one of the great roles that rape crisis centers played:
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It Takes a Vil age
pat erns would emerge; women who could not bring themselves to go to the law could provide a lot of data on active rapists; even wi
thout appearing in court, the knowledge that
there were other victims might give a prosecutor some bal s
in bringing a case and trying to get a conviction for the one
woman, by definition not credible enough. In the early days,
it was still thought that women could not argue court cases,
so there were virtually no female prosecutors.
Each time the women’s movement achieves success in providing a way for a woman to speak out, in court or in the media, the prorape constituency lobbies against her: against her
credibility. It’s as if we’re going to have a vote on it, the new
reality TV: are we for her or against her? Is she a liar or - let’s
be kind - merely disturbed? In the United States it is increasingly common to have the lawyers defending the accused rapist on television talk shows. The victim is slimed; the jury pool is
contaminated; what happens to the woman after the trial is
lost; she’s gone, disappeared, as if her larynx had been ripped
out of her throat and even her shadow had been rent.
The credibility issue is gender specific: it’s amazing how
with al the rapes there are so few rapists. If one follows the
misogynistic reporting on rape, one has to conclude that maybe
there are five guys. The worst thing about a legal system that
puts the worth of the accused above the worth of the victim
is that the creep almost always looks clean: somebody’s father,
somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. Don’t you care? we used
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Heartbreak
to ask; she’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister. The
answer was unequivocal: no, we don’t give a fuck. Worse was
the saccharine sweetness of those who pretended to care about
somebody’s mother, somebody’s sister. I’ve heard at least a
dozen criminal defense lawyers say, “I have a sister; I have a
daughter; I have a wife.” The rapists they defend use the same
locution. They want us to believe that the problem is that this
one woman wasn’t raped and the accused didn’t do it. Even
though criminal defense lawyers will admit that they rarely