Susan Brownmiller’s Rape Myths
Susan Brownmiller’s Rape Myths The author has died, but her baseless contentions live on Janice Fiamengo Susan Brownmiller, in interview Radical feminist Susan Brownmiller died last weekend at age 90. As The Washington Post noted in its obituary, Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will : Men, Women, and Rape , published in 1975, “transformed the social and legal understanding of rape as a tool of violence and power.” It is remarkable that a book so sloppily written, thinly substantiated, and motivated by such obvious derangement could have had such a far-reaching impact, but it did. No reasonable person will want to read Brownmiller’s repulsive tract, but all should know of its spurious claims. ** “I wrote this book because I am a woman who changed her mind about rape” (p. 9). So wrote Brownmiller in a Personal Statement placed at the book’s beginning. In this preface, Brownmiller told of a shattering awakening that occurred when “I finally confron...