Why we don't need men

Quite the most enjoyable reaction to the recent march against violence against women, and the speech I made at the end of it, was the letter sent to me under plain brown cover by a woman from Longford. "Only in the past six months have I had' peace with my Beast (sic), After 23 years of hell I hit him back with a brush, good and hard".  By Nell MCCafferty

This firm stand, clear-eyed despite the 'anti-man' smoke screen that was thrown up to confuse the occassion, is very heartening. The accusation antiiman is at once ignorant and sexually vulgar. It is ignorant because it implies that women must always be considered in relation to men, either for or against, never independent of them. Ignorance can be treated patiently, in simple steps. The lesson learned from the sight of an exclusively female march, where women put one foot independently ahead of the other, without the need of men to protect them from other men, has sunk home.

The vulgar sexual sneer in the taunt "anti-man", has yet to be so firmly dealt with, This coercively sexual challenge to prove they're not frigid has resulted in many female feeling next morning that she's been had and there's nothing she can do about it. The disstinction between coercive sexuality and rape is a legal fiction, My personal reacction to such sneers is that men as such leave me cold. They'll just have to eat their hearts out.

It is worth noting that the only time a woman is not taunted with being antiiman is after she has been raped. The supposition that she most assuredly is, is not based on an insight into the fact that rape is a male crime, reflecting on all men. The reasoning behind the reticence is that the woman is ruined forrever by not being able to sexually relate to any man, a fate worse than rape, and there is no point in adding insult to her injury.

The throwaway sentence which I used in the speech, "We are not looking for men at all" triggered off the deepest reaction and merits therefore the deeppest consideration. Some women rushed into print to declare that some of their best friends were men. They could harddly, with any propriety, have stated that they were looking for men all over the place, but they kept their options open.

The fact that I used the phrase in the context of women walking in the streets looking for fresh air, not looking for men at all, is now irrelevant. The phrase itself jangled on nerve ends up and down the country, Nonetheless it is worth repeating why I used the remark a tall.

Gay Byrne, to take a random exxample, does not feel obliged to declare, when walking near his deserted Howth Head home late at night, that he is not looking for women at all. But there is a cause and effect male theory about rape which feeds the myth that women who walk in such places are "asking for it", are somehow at fault when rape occurs, are in fact accomplices in the crime,

To refute this theory I declared on the march that thousands of women walked, no men did, and no woman was raped. Men alone are responsible for rape. Many women in the crowd reacted by calling out "Not all men are rapists", beginning a process of exoneration that is understandable given that all women have at some time related to men, be they fathers, brothers, husbands or whatever.

Where the relationship is loving a contradiction is posed which is resolved simply by stating that one's husband, one's son, is not a rapist. Arguably true. What is beyond argument is that all men are potential rapists. A weapon can be used for good or evil. The penis can be used to fertilise or to rape.

It is this instinctive knowledge which led to thousands of women taking to the Dublin streets on the night of October 13. They did not come beecause of one particular horrific rape of a young girl in the centre city area. They came because neither the incident nor the possibility of it was as isolated as some men would have us believe. Women are only too well aware of the constant threat of rape; in confronting it that night they came up against the contradiction of their living situations.

This contradiction was underlined in a scarcely noted legal submission, made some days after the march, by the Council on the Status of Women to the Minister for Justice. The Council did not ask for the rape of a wife by her husband to be considered criminal. Rape falls within the ambit of crimes against property. In Irish law a wife is the chattel or property of her husband. A man cannot commit crimes against his own property, Until Irishwomen face this contradiction in their relationships with men, Irish husbands will be free to rape at will, against the will of their wives.

The reductio ad absurdum of the argument "Not all men ... not my father.. not my son" became "Certainly not my husband". Silence followed. Into the void came the triumphalist male tootle "Sure don't you love us just the same", summed up in the perverse suggestion of one man, in a letter to the papers, that a march against rape should allow the "persecutors" to walk alongside the "persecuted", Weapon in hand, no doubt, should any broad step out of line.

It was the refusal to face all these contradictions that led, I believe, to the ferocious distortion of my line "We are not looking for men at all". In another context such a line is arguably the only solution to a recalcitrant male record of wife battering, marital desertion, wholeesale rape throughout history and across the world, encompassing a wide range of oppression from the denial of eq ual pay to the proposed denial of the conntraceptive pill to women without a marriage certificate (are widows to be designated necrophiliac?).

I was not, on this occassion, suggestting a lesbian nation. (Funny how that was never suspected. Do the Irish live in a Victorian age, unaware of such possiibillities?). But the political shorthand of my ten minute speech was translated into wide and differing tracts, dependding on the personal bias of the transslator. Actually my entire speech was shorthand for Susan Brownmiller's classic work on rape Against Our Will, and the theory she posited throws an interesting light on reactions to what I said.

"Man's structural capacity to rape", she wrote, "and women's corresponding structural vulnerability are as basic to the physiology of both our sexes as the primal act of sex itself. Had it not been for this accident of biology, an accomoodation requiring the locking together of two separate parts, penis into vagina, there would be neither copulation nor rape as we know it".

Was the march against rape seen by men as a march against copulation, or the first step leading logically to the next? Did women subconsciously regisster this possibility and hang back from the brink, shouting not all men, thereby giving men another chance?

Would that explain why Rodney Rice's radio fuminations about anti-men women change humbly in the pace of a week to a declaration that he was ashaamed about rape? Were alarm bells ringging in Gay Byrne's head when he fell in some time later with the declaration that he dare not make jokes about the prostitute who was running for Presiidency of the United States?

Susan Brownmiller is worth quoting again. "Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear". Women are now connsciously fighting back, confused maybe, but then they were confused for a while about the right to vote. The female threat, apparently, is "We are not lookking for men at all." I didn't quite mean it like that - but there is such a thing as female intuition.