The victims can be almost anybody. While the preponderance of rape victims are young women between 10 and 29 years old, Brownmiller cites a D.C. General Hospital report which lists ages from 15 months to 82 years. We are all vulnerable; those who claim otherwise are foolhardy. Having grown up in a high rape area in New York City, and having escaped untouched, I used to scorn women who took (reasonable) precautions. "They can smell you're scared," I used to chide them, "You're turning yourself into an easy prey." Nobody would mess with a strapping 6-ft. woman like me, I used to think. But I was very wrong.

Brownmiller writes: "If we say conservatively that only one in five rape incidents was actually reported we arrive at a figure of 255,000 rapes and attempted rapes in these United States in 1973, a figure that I consider to be an unemotional, rock-bottom minimum."

Rape is a game of conquests, a fight for superior standing in a culture that values those on top and scorns those on bottom. Even in the case of homosexual rape in prisons, as Brownmiller points out, it is "a product of a violent subculture's definition of masculinity through physical triumph, and those who emerged as 'women' were those who were subjugated by real or threatened force."

Women are intimidated into passivity and the dictates of society pressure them to remain so. Brownmiller deftly dismisses the Freudian theories of such psychiatrists as Helen Deutsch--proponents of the myth that women are at heart masochists, who can not only "enjoy" rape, but, in fact, fantasize about it. Theories such as these both stem from and help support the myth that women "ask for it", that they are somehow to be held responsible for their own violation and humiliation. The sorrowful disgrace of this is not only that men are socialized to accept these debilitating myths, but women are as well. Women have traditionally been taught to feel ashamed, disgraced, as though they were to blame.

Women have also been taught that they have absolutely no ability to resist attack. They learn early on that as fragile, vulnerable beings they are not physically capable of warding off attackers; they are physically doomed to submit. And yet, as Brownmiller shows, physical response from a potential victim can be a major, effective deterrent to sexual attack. Women can protect themselves by overcoming their fear of self-assertion and the belief that they are forever potential victims.

WHAT ELSE can free women from the frightening specter of rape? The most immediate step, Brownmiller argues, is a complete revamping of the legal statutes that continue to make trials often unbearably humiliating for women, and conviction exceedingly difficult. "Rape, as the current law defines it," says Brownmiller, "is the forcible penetration of an act of sexual intercourse on the body of a woman not one's wife." Outmoded statutes must be replaced with a "gender-free, non-activity-specific law governing all manner of sexual assaults."

A further step she proposes is to integrate fully all law enforcement agencies, "the nation's entire lawful power structure...(which) must be stripped of male dominance and control." This is absolutely necessary, she argues, in order to eliminate machismo, and if "women are to cease being a colonized protectorate of men."

Along with these basic structural changes Brownmiller insists the entire ideology of rape must be eradicated. She has launched a campaign to suppress all pornography--"the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." Brownmiller points out that pornography is a key factor in the development of many men. It is "like rape...a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access..." She adds: "...hard-core pornography is not a celebration of sexual freedom; it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty'." The perpetuation of rape is predicated on man's ability to perceive his victims as inanimate objects he can degrade, humiliate, violate.

Some may not concur with Brownmiller's major assertion that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." Some may feel that Brownmiller places undue emphasis on this one manifestation of the subjugation of women. But rape is still the most extreme manifestation of sexist cultures; women will continue to be oppressed as long as they continue to be victims of sexual abuse--demeaned by those who attack them, demeaned by the society which doubts their word over the word of their male attackers, and demeaned by the world that insists they were born to be victims.