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Rape

  • ... rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

    • Audre Lorde,
    • "Age, Race, Class, and Sex," speech (1980), Sister Outsider ()
  • Pornography is the instruction; rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, battered children are the practice.

  • Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?

  • Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing / all of the time on a woman's hunched back.

  • [On rape:] Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused ...

  • It is little wonder that rape is one of the least-reported crimes. Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety.

  • Rape is not aggressive sexuality. It's sexualized aggression.

  • It's degrading and humiliating and dehumanizing. You stop being real. You lose your reality and it shatters your faith in other people's reality. Rape is a kind of murder.

  • Rape is a culturally fostered means of suppressing women. Legally we say we deplore it, but mythically we romanticize and perpetuate it, and privately we excuse and overlook it ...

  • My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future.

  • No zoologist, as far as I know, has ever observed that animals rape in their natural habitat, the wild.

  • Rape is ... nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.

  • That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent ... Rather than society's aberrants or 'spoilers of purity,' men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

  • Once in a Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister suggested a curfew; women should stay home after dark. I said, 'But it's the men who are attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay home, not the women.'

    • Golda Meir,
    • in Andrea Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape ()
  • Bad judgment and carelessness are not punishable by rape.

    • Pearl Cleage,
    • "The Other Facts of Life," Deals With the Devil ()
  • ... the attack between the thighs is only an extension of the bullet between the eyes.

  • I am ... troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped by men even when they verbally protest. It would be hard to believe that such great villainy is actually pleasant for them.

    • Christine de Pisan,
    • 1405, in Earl Jeffrey Richards, trans., The Book of the City of Ladies ()
  • Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.

  • Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one.

  • A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she has no response, it should not take place. This is an act of prostitution and is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.

  • Rapists perform for sexist males the same function that the Ku Klux Klan performed for racist whites; they keep women in their 'place' through fear.

  • A black man walking through certain white neighborhoods or a white man walking though certain black neighborhoods can understand the fear of unprovoked attack. It is the same fear a woman has when she walks down the street at night — any street, even her own. Women are always in someone else's territory.

    • Andra Medea,
    • in Andrea Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape ()
  • Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.

    • Robin Morgan,
    • "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape," Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle for a Feminist ()
  • Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine.

  • Rape is a form of mass terrorism ... The fear of rape keeps women off the streets at night. Keeps women at home. Keeps women passive and modest for fear that they be thought provocative.

    • Susan Griffin,
    • in Jo Freeman, ed., Women: A Feminist Perspective ()
  • ... more than rape itself, the fear of rape permeates our lives. And what does one do from day to day, with this experience, which says, without words and directly to the heart, your existence, your experience, may end at any moment. Your experience may end, and the best defense against this is not to be, to deny being in the body, as a self, to ... avert your gaze, make yourself, as a presence in the world, less felt.

  • That the actual rapists, making examples of a few women, in effect frighten and control all women seems obvious, even inarguable.

    • Diane Johnson,
    • "Rape," in Evelyn Ashton-Jones and Gary A. Olson, The Gender Reader ()
  • The fruits of rape prepare for birth. What should be done? Woman is free to dispose of herself. She therefore has the right to refuse maternity imposed by force. Society may not complete the barbarians' work by condemning the victim to be resigned. To uproot the seed is a right.

  • Rape is a form of violence involving the personal humiliation of the victim.

    • Ruth Herschberger,
    • "Is Rape A Myth?" (1948), in Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak, eds, Masculine/Feminine ()
  • ... under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.

  • ... in a rape situation, a jury can be made to believe a woman almost invites rape when she's wearing tight pants or jeans, whereas a man in an expensive coat doesn't suggest he should be mugged, and wearing a diamond doesn't mean you are inviting robbery.

  • Disarm rapists.

    • Anonymous,
    • feminist button, in Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, eds., Feminist Chronicles 1953-1993 ()
  • My outfit is not an invitation.

  • All men are not rapists — but almost all rapists are men.