>The predatory male, and in the extreme the rapist, is a nuisance or a danger. But embarrassment or injury are above all rooted in all the misery and solitude of the victims. They are provocations, injurious responses painfully felt because they cannot fulfill, a caricature of the hope of something else. If the rapist were Tarzan, perhaps he would be forgiven. But the kerb crawler rarely has the appearance or the manners of a Prince Charming. His “prey” sees her own misery reflected in his.
>Rape as an act, but more frequently as fantasy, is the product of the form of relations between the sexes and the contradictions therein. It is the politicisation of an old, more or less obsessional female fear, a fear which covers a desire for sexuality which cannot acknowledge or assert itself.
>Rape fantasies and dreams about housebreaking express sexual fear clothed in the fear of aggression. But this isn’t only fear, just as it is not only passivity; fantasy is also an action. Desire takes form by discharging responsibility and blame on to the aggressor. In his way the latter embodies desire itself. He is desire, but coming in from the outside. Just as the active male fantasy, and even rape itself, are products of impotence, the passive fantasy in woman is also an expression of her need for action; she acts out her desire and so deals with the reality which refuses her this right.
>In the active fantasy, the desire for and refusal of the other find an outlet in domination and aggression. It is as much a question of self-defence as it is of attack, self-protection from the risk and anguish of refusal by the other with an attitude which makes neither acceptation or refusal possible. Desires, fantasies and various forms of sado-masochistic behaviour are not the product of a primary attitude which has been superficially glossed over by civilisation, and is tending to re — emerge. The image of the pre-historic woman as a prey pulled along by the hair and who, one suspects, enjoys it. No, they are the product of man’s liberation from his real needs, which then come back to haunt him in a distorted form. Abandon, the submission which a loving relationship implies, unaccepted because it is in contradiction with a whole way of life, returns in the form of an exterior domination that is violent, imposed, feared and desired at the same time.