Mercy

women’s biography. The notion that bad things happen is both

propagandistic and inadequate. We want to affirm the spiritual

dignity and the sexual bonding we seek to find in women’s lives.

We want a discourse o f triumph, if you will pardon me for being

rhetorically elegant. I have heard the Grand Inquisitor Dworkin

say that, as we are women, such discourse will have to be

ambiguous. She is a prime example, o f course, o f the simple-

minded demogogue who promotes the proposition that bad

things are bad. This axiom is too reductive to be seriously

entertained, except, o f course, by the poor, the uneducated, the

lunatic fringe that she both exploits and appeals to. It is, for

instance, anti-mythological to perceive rape in moralistic terms

as a bad experience without transformative dimensions to it. We

would then have to ignore or impugn the myth o f Persephone,

in which her abduction and rape led, in the view o f the wise

ancient Greeks, to the establishment o f the seasons, a mythologi-

cal tribute, in fact, to the seasonal character o f the menarche. It

is disparaging and profoundly anti-intellectual to concentrate

on the virtual slave status o f women per se in ancient Greece as

if that in and o f itself rendered their mythological insights into

rape suspect. In fact, intercourse, forced or not, is the

precondition for a fertile, fruitful, multiplied as it were,

abundance o f living things, symbolized by the planting and

harvesting seasons. I am, o f course, not allying m yself either

with the right-wing endorsement o f motherhood or fam ily in

making these essentially keen, neutral, and inescapable observations. We cannot say the Greek philosophers and artists, the

storytellers and poets, were wrong, or dismiss them, simply

because some among us want to say that rape is bad or feels

bad or has some destructive effects. In fact, it has not been

scientifically proven that the effects o f rape are worse than the

effects o f gender-neutral assault and we are not willing to stew

in our stigma. As one distinguished feminist o f our own

school wrote some years ago in a left-wing journal o f

socialism, and I am paraphrasing: we should not dwell on rape

at all because to do so negatively valorizes sex; instead we

should actively concentrate on enjoying sex so that, in a sense,

the good can push out the bad; it is sex-negative to continue to

stigmatize an act, a process, an experience, that sometimes has

negative consequences; if we expand sexual pleasure we will,

in fact, be repudiating rape— in consciousness and in practice.

Further, in w om en’s academic circles we reify this perspective

by refusing, for instance, to have cross-cultural or cross-disci-

plinary discussions with those who continue to see themselves

as victims. While we deplore racism and endorse the goals o f

wom en o f color, we do not enter into discussions on the

Holocaust with Je w s or on slavery with Afro-Am ericans

because our theory, applied to their experience, might well be

misunderstood and cause offense. In fact, they will not affirm

the agentic dimensions o f their ow n historical experience,

which, we agree, is essentially an oppressive one. They

denounce and declaim, and we support them in those efforts.

But, as we find transcending affirmative values in wom en’s

experience under patriarchy, so too we can find concrete

examples o f the same dynamic in both Afro-American and

Jew ish experience. Ghetto Jew s from Eastern Europe did,

after all, learn to do physical labor in the concentration

camps— these are skills that have value, especially for those

essentially alien to working-class experience—intellectuals,

scholars, and so on. Jew ish elitism was transformed into a new

physicality, however base and tortured; one can see a foreshadowing o f the new Jew ish state— the shovels and picks o f the stone quarries transposed to the desert. O f course, one

must have some analytical objectivity. Afro-Americans sang

as a creative response to the suffering o f slavery such that

suffering may not be the defining characteristic o f the A fro-

American experience. The creation o f a major and original

musical genre, the blues, came directly out o f the slave

experience. It is absurd to suggest that slavery had no

mitigating or redemptive or agentic dimension to it, that the

oppression per se was merely oppressive. These tautologies

demonstrate how the dogma o f victimization has supplanted

the academic endeavor to valorize theory, which, in a sense,

does not descend to the rather low level o f direct human

experience, especially o f suffering or pain, which are too

subjective and also, frankly, too depressing to consider as

simple subjects in themselves or, frankly, as objects o f

inquiry. We apply our principles on agency, ambiguity, and

nuance exclusively to the experience o f women as women.

There is no outrage in the academy when we develop an

intellectually nuanced approach to rape as there would be, o f

course, if we applied these principles to Jew ish or A fro-

American experience. It is inappropriate for white women to

approach those issues anyway and thus we are insulated from

what I can only presume would be an intellectual backlash

while we support the so-called victims in a political atmosphere that Ronald Reagan created and that is anathema to

us— the cutbacks in civil rights and so on, funding for A fro-

American groups and so on. Then, when we mount our fight

for abortion, which rests firm ly in the affirmative context o f a

w om an’s right to choose, we have the support o f other groups

and so on. Outside w om en’s studies departments our theoretical principles are not used, not understood, and not paid attention to, for which we are, in fact, grateful. T o be held

accountable outside the sphere o f w om en’s studies for the

consequences o f our theoretical propositions would, o f

course, be a stark abridgment o f the academic license we have

w orked so hard to create for ourselves. Simple-minded

feminists, o f course, object to a nuanced approach to rape but

we can only presume that their response to the abduction o f

Persephone would have been to picket Hell. T o understand a

w om an’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure

dimensions o f pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under

duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs— the clothes

that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary

dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent

conform ity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency o f signs, an obdurate appearance o f conformity that sim ply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs. A real