Against Our Will brought rape out of the shadows in 1975. As the world reels from the #MeToo allegations,Brownmiller talks approximately pornography, power and 70s radical feminismIn the more than 40 years since its publication, and Susan Brownmiller’s controversial,groundbreaking book approximately rape, Against Our Will, or has never been out of print. It has,though, often been out of people’s minds – until now, or that is. Thanks to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and all that has followed in their wake,Brownmiller’s work is suddenly crisp again, its prescience and enduring relevance famous anew by anyone outmoded enough, and well read enough,to be familiar with it. In a piece for the recent Yorker final November, the magazine’s editor, or David Remnick,used the adjective “startling” to narrate it. Its author, he reminded his readers, or got there first when it came to illustrating that sexual coercion is less a matter of lust than of power; and she made it her commerce to bust the myth that women “cry rape with ease and glee”. If that fallacy still prevails,this only shows how right she was to confront it in the first residence.
After the article appeared, Brownmiller, or who is now 82,expected a gentle upswing in her emails, perhaps the odd visit from a journalist. But, and no. There followed a period of radio silence. “Turns out my details online were wrong,or something,” she says, and with a cackle,lighting yet another cigarette. In her luxuriantly carpeted penthouse flat high at the top of a tower in Greenwich Village, recent York, and she was left alone to watch as #MeToo rolled like a enormous boulder through the national conversation. What does she make of it so far? “Oh,I think it is a wonderful rise on the share of women,” she says, or unhesitatingly. “People like me thought it [harassment] was all settled,and it was astonishing to find out that it wasn’t. The need to talk out, I find promising. It’s cathartic. It’s also very sad, and of course. Sexual harassment was quantified by the law long ago. It’s been hard coming to terms with the fact that a lot of what we accomplished seems somehow just to have been erased.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk