The Male Response to Rape

By Roger Rosenblatt

Between the book reviews and the science notes, the third gang rape of the past two months. This one occurred in the Charlestown section of Boston, where seven young men have been charged with kidnaping a 17-year-old girl and raping her repeatedly for seven hours in an apartment belonging to one of the men. The incident followed the more widely publicized attack in New Bedford, Mass., some weeks earlier, in which four men raped and tormented a woman for two hours on a pool table in Big Dan's bar, while onlookers cheered. That one was preceded by yet another at the University of Pennsylvania; there a young woman has charged that she was gang-raped by five to eight fraternity brothers during a party. Class distinctions need not apply. If one is tempted to construct a hypothesis around shiftless young Irishmen in a poor city neighborhood or the unemployed Portuguese in a depressed fishing port, sociology is obliterated by the party boys from the U. of P., no different in kind or action, just privilege. All subhumans are created equal.

Reading of such incidents, women are horrified because inevitably they identify both with the victims in particular and with the entire condition of victimization, of which gang rape may be the harshest instance. But why do men recoil so strongly? The straightforward answer is that the vast majority of men disapprove of rape, and their disapproval is intensified when a gang is involved. Yet the idea of gang rape is repugnant to men for reasons of identification as well. Few men would associate themselves with those who actually "did it to her." But quite more than a few know what it is to be caught in the middle of an all-male show of power and coercion, and thus to be complicit, even at the fringes, in something their consciences abhor.

Gang rape is war. It is the war of men against women for reasons easy to guess at, or for no reasons whatever, for the sheer mindless display of physical mastery of the stronger over the weaker. In the wake of the reports from Charlestown, New Bedford and the University of Pennsylvania, conjectures are bound to arise about the frustration of contemporary man at the growing independence of women, and there may be some truth to that. But men have never needed excuses to commit rape in gangs. The Japanese in China, the Russians in Germany, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh. Read accounts of what some American soldiers did to Vietnamese village girls of 13 and 14 in places like My Lai, and it seems clear that the subject of gang rape goes a good deal deeper than modern man's humiliation.

One psychological theory has it that these acts are homosexual rituals: men in groups desire each other, yet are ashamed of their urges, and so they satisfy themselves by convening at a common target. Another theory holds that there are situations where men so seek to prove their masculinity to one another that they will do anything, including murder. An American soldier in Viet Nam described how, for no other reason than that a comrade led the way, he shot to death a girl he had raped. Sex and violence have an eerily close kinship as it is. Rape itself may be a form of murder, the destruction of someone's will and spirit. No wonder those same soldiers in Viet Nam spoke of dragging girls into the woods "for a little boom-boom." To "bang" a woman remains part of the idiom. The sound is a gun, the body a weapon. In a "gang bang," murder becomes a massacre.

Upon learning of such things at a distance, most men feel not only revulsion, but also a proper urge to enact society's revenge. Lock the bums away forever. At the same time, they can still imagine what it feels like to be present at the atrocities, even for the briefest instance; every life has analogues of its own. The essential circumstance is that of the mob, always a terrifying entity, whatever its goal. One thinks of lynch mobs before rape mobs, but all mobs have the same appearances and patterns, the same compulsion to tear things down or apart. The object of passion is sighted and pursued. The mob rises to a peak of pure hate, does what it does, then slinks away, its energy spent. Perhaps every mob commits rape in a way. Anybody who has ever seen a mob in action senses its latent sexuality--the collective panting, the empty ecstasy. Even at the outskirts, the voyeur participates. Eventually he may run or protest, but for at least one long moment he is helpless to move.

It is that moment of seemingly hypnotized attention most men know and dread. It is a moment in which they are out of control as individuals--not merely outside the law, but out of biological order. Something stirs, an ancient reflex, as if they are dragged back through history to a starting point in evolution. The mob is a pack, its prey the female. Her difference is the instigator, her frailty the goad. Rape what you cannot have. Plunder what you can never know. Mystery equals fear equals rage equals death. It is she who stands for all life's threats, she who released animal instinct in the first place. Once aroused, why stop to reason or sympathize? The savage surfaces, prevails.

Of course, this happens only occasionally, in the heat of battle or Big Dan's bar or Charlestown or the Alpha Tau Omega house, where boys were boys. But gang rape does not need to recur frequently to remind men of their own peculiar frailty. And that reminder brings terror, not the terror of the victim, to be sure, but one as benumbing in its way: that of acknowledging one's natural potential for violence and destruction. Rape need not be involved. Was not that you, so many years ago, standing on the sidelines while that other boy was bullied in the playground? Or you in the crowd that razzed the old drunk in the park? Or you in the rear when they set fire to the cat? Child's play, possibly, but boy's play primarily; and the child becomes the man. If you have cast off most of the cruelty of boyhood, still some of the fascination with cruelty remains. The fascination is a form of cruelty itself, expressionless, primeval, a fisheye in the dark.

No, that is not you boozing it up in the Charlestown apartment, or you, college boy, or you, Portuguese sailor. But isn't that you, propped neatly behind the desk, growling ever so faintly under your no-starch-in-the collar, reading intently of all the shocking gang rapes?

At the beginning of Julius Caesar, before Caesar's assassination, Casca has a premonition of disaster that he reports to Cicero: "Against the Capitol I met a lion, who glared at me, and went surly by." The implication is that in every civilization, however lofty, a lion always roams the streets; the jungle never entirely disappears. What most men fear is a lion in the soul. Women, too, perhaps, but not in the matter of rape. That is male terrain, the masculine jungle. And no man can glimpse it, even at a distance, without fury and bewilderment at his monstrous capabilities. --By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.