Victimization of Women

“People dominate animals, men dominate women.” Each is a relation of hierarchy, an inequality, with particularities and variations within and between them. (Cite Orange book pg. 92.) For centuries, women have been viewed and used as a man’s “property”, whether it is being used for sexual satisfaction or for the sake of bearing children and taking care of the home. Men are typically perceived as head of the household and whatever they say goes; anything to satisfy their hunger for power and control. Have women ever had a say about what they want to use their bodies for? Laws against rape may have changed over time, but men’s consistent aggressive behavior unfortunately, has not.

Dating back to the ancien régime, referring mainly to the social and political era established in France from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, there are several reported cases of women being attacked and sexually harassed by men to the point where the man’s sword was drawn. In fear of their lives, they were unable able to cry for help with a deadly weapon influencing the outcome of their situation. (Cite Book 1) The court systems “tolerated” this type of violence to the point where the perpetrator had little or few repercussions for his forceful actions.

“Sexual violence was a part of a system where violence reigned almost as a matter of course for no apparent reason [in our eyes]; children were beaten by adults, women by men or by other women, servants by their masters. Sometimes the aggressor broke his stick or his sword on his victim’s back, sometimes he killed him. It would have seemed highly artificial, in such circumstances, to isolate sexual crime from the other forms of aggression that were constantly present, or latent, in ...

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...ributions of blame in sexual assault cases. Many lay people assume that a victim will fight back physically to prevent the sexual assault, although research indicates that victims do not struggle physically for various reasons (i.e. drugged, fear, shock, coercion, etc.) In one of the first studies of its kind, it was found that women who did not show obvious resistance were less likely to be viewed as being sexually assaulted. (Cite Article 5)

“Women are the animals of the human kingdom, the mice of men’s world. Both women and animals are identified with nature rather than culture by virtue of biology. Both are imagined in male ideology to be thereby fundamentally inferior to men and humans. . . Qualities considered human and higher are denied to animals at the same time as qualities considered masculine and higher are denied to women” (MacKinnon, 2005).