“Rape has been a constant feature of class-divided societies — a weapon of mass terror and reinforcement of patriarchal ownership and control. Rape, the violence and the threat, has enforced enslavement, racist domination, oppression of women and punishment for those who bridge or blur the partitioning of the sexes.”
— Leslie Feinberg, Lavender and Red
In liberal feminist discourse, misogynistic actions carried out by men are often posited as a result of incorrect parenting, ignorance, or a sort of collective delusion. In short, a mere behavioral-psychological question, to be solved accordingly. These liberal feminists propose actively raising boys to reject what they term “toxic masculinity,” teaching grown men to not be misogynistic, and generally focus on education as the solution to a problem of supposed lack of knowledge or of delusion.
This liberal feminist understanding of masculinity, and by extension, “toxic masculinity,” is incorrect. Masculinity is not merely something neutral, apolitical, one which can have “good” forms and “bad” forms, the latter epitomized by “toxic masculinity.” Masculinity as a semi-coherent category of behavior is something which holds the primary purpose of reproducing the gendered division of labor, both among other men, among those whose labor is exploited by patriarchy, and among those whose very existence poses problematics for patriarchy, as I have written before.
Taking this into account, we cannot accept the common liberal feminist explanation of rape occurring due to delusional, reactionary forms of masculinity imbued to men by incorrect childrearing or collective delusion of the community of men. Rape must be contextualized within the gendered division of labor, the creation and reproduction of “womanhood” as an exploited and exploitable category, and the violence of colonialism. What our intent here is to point liberal feminists toward a historical materialist analysis of sexual assault, and a proper response to its depoliticization.
“The policing of sexuality and gender expression — and the very existence of police as a repressive force — are rooted in the development of class society. Reactionary laws that narrowly defined the sexes, degraded the economic and social status of women, and justified state repression and harsh penalties for same-sex love and gender diversity were instituted around the world wherever patriarchal class rule overturned matrilineal pre-class societies. In some societies the change was slow and gradual. Labor technique over centuries became more productive, leading to the accumulation of surplus. The struggle that ensued over control of this surplus resulted in the overturning of cooperative economic and social relations. In other cases, pre-class communal societies were conquered by the armies of patriarchal ruling classes. In those instances, matrilineal kinship lines were severed abruptly. In both instances, the new world order served the dictates of patriarchal private ownership of the new social wealth.”
— Leslie Feinberg, Lavender and Red
Masculinity’s main purpose is the reproduction of the gendered division of labor. This task encompasses enforcing masculinity among other men to ensure the viability of the patriarchal order, enforcing patriarchal femininity among women to ensure they keep their exploitable position, and to generally punish those who pose a challenge to the gendered division of labor, consciously or unconsciously. Masculinity varies greatly among classes, nations, peoples, and so on, but in the patriarchal context, this basic function is key.
Masculinity, like the national bourgeoisie in colonized nations, can express progressive goals, such as the liberation of the proletariat, or of a colonized people, but that expression is limited by the walls of masculinity. For example, many radical English workers called for increases in the wages of men to a level where it could be a “family wage,” so that women and children could return to their “proper” functions in the home. They may be expressing truly revolutionary interests, but they are at the same time expressing an interest in reproducing the patriarchal gendered division of labor against disruptions to it.
Sexual assault is not an act which exists in a void. It must be contextualized within the gendered division of labor, colonialism, and imperialism. It is the most violent tool used by patriarchy and colonialism to assert its hegemony. It is quite literally terrorism. Its message is “you are helpless to stop us, you have no power” to the victims, and to those subjected to proximity to it and a culture of it, its message is “this can happen to you too, if you step out of line.” According to the NSVRC, 20% of women and 1.4% of American men will be raped in their lifetime, with 91% of American rape victims being women and 9% being men. And this is approximated with very underreported statistics, with about 63% of cases not being reported to police. For those who do take a public stand on being raped, they face disbelief, harassment, and even legal punishment. And this is only the US, looking at statistics for the population at large. It is clear from these statistics that patriarchal terrorism is very much an everyday institution, indicating that the reproduction of patriarchy constitutes a perpetual struggle.
As I have explained before, as Friedrich Engels explains in On the Origin of the Family, and as Marxist feminist authors like Silvia Federici deal with at length, the patriarchal revolution is a violent affair. Women in societies with a lack of pronounced class distinctions tend to hold relative prestige, with their control over communal production giving them power in the base, which in turn gives them power in the superstructure, where women are honored in rituals, pantheons, and culture. In the pre-patriarchal or non Euro-patriarchal gendered divisions of labor across time and space, women tend to dominate home and food production, while men dominate hunting, warfare (including direct appropriation), and commodity exchange.
The patriarchal revolution begins where men begin to seize prestige in production, through commodity production and private property (typically in the form of slaves and livestock). Or, a conquering force introduces the patriarchal order as, in their eyes, a more “civilized” social form. With the patriarchal revolution comes the struggle against women’s power, constituted in the devaluing of production for direct immediate consumption in favor of commodity production, the struggle to assert the dominance of market exchange over home production, the dispossession of women from labor tasks which grant them power, and attacks on superstructural elements which honor women.
With this revolution comes efforts by the patriarchy to produce and reproduce a new, patriarchal womanhood, one which is to be an exploited and exploitable class. And with this production and reproduction comes the exclusion of those who challenge it, especially what we today might project LGBT labels onto. The patriarchal revolution is one of forcible, defined categorization in the realm of gender and gendered labor, and with it the exclusion and punishment of those outside of it.
To reproduce its strength, patriarchy must make use of terrorism against its challengers. It can do this through exclusion from production and access to the means of subsistence, as it does today with many transgender people, through the creation of impossible ideal images as a form of social control, and, as we are concerned with here, open terror in the form of sexual assault. Rape becomes a public, mass action on the part of men during acts of conquest, within and without, though especially without. We will deal with rape in the context of colonialism later, however.
Within a patriarchal society, rape punishes “deviant” behavior in all corners of itself, not even excluding patriarchal men. LGBT people are faced by corrective rape as a constant source of terror, with sexual assault rates being far higher against them than the population at large in the US. Women subjected to the proprietary relationship of cis-heterosexual marriage have historically faced the utter exploitation of their bodies in the form of marital rape, until very recently protected by law, and still face abuse and violation by their partners. Colonized people who challenge the Euro-colonial patriarchal gender system face sexual violence even within their own community. GBT men very frequently face violation and public humiliation by other men for improperly performing the masculine division of labor.
In society at large, and especially in prison, the dominant patriarchal men exert their power through the terrorism of rape, either to punish men who fall outside of the patriarchal gendered division of labor or to “feminize” their victims into an exploitable labor division. When men face rape, whether by men or women, they are strongly discouraged from publicly attesting to it, as to be a victim of such a thing is to be cast into the “feminized” labor division, to have failed to uphold the “masculine” labor task.
This last point leads us into an examination of rape in connection to conquest. When an empire conquers another people, it tends to frame that conquest in patriarchal terms. The conquered are feminized, considered to be feminine in their weakness, and feminine in their forcible opening up for exploitation. Famously, Anglo settlers conceived of Mexican mestizes in appropriated Mexican territories as feminine. The men were seen as cowardly, weak, and lazy, while the women were seen as exotic, open for the exploitation of the Anglos. In this, the men were a symbol of the defeated people as an obstacle to the white settling of the territories, while the women were seen as a symbol of the fertile land and labor to be exploited. With this general view in their minds, colonizers begin to institute mass terror and exploitation against women, concurrent with mass terror and exploitation of homelands.
This terroristic rape was employed by imperialist Japan against Chinese people in the infamous Rape of Nanking, by the Third Reich against European Jewish people, by the US in the conquest of Indigenous homelands across North America, and countless others. In the latter case, Indigenous women in North America today face the highest rates of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of any community. Colonial terror continues against Indigenous peoples as capital seeks to appropriate more and more of what homelands they have left to make expanded reproduction viable, and that colonial terror comes to a peak in patriarchal Euro-colonial terrorism against Indigenous women. The colonial order engages in terrorism against the colonized, and against women this takes the form of the patriarchal terrorism of sexual assault.
Colonial patriarchy, in its fantastical perceptions of reality, often frets about its fears of this terrorism being turned back upon it. It uses rape to reproduce their rule of the colonized, what if colonized men used it to assert their power against the colonizers? The image of the rape of colonizer women by colonized men represents, for them, the assertion of the colony against the colonizer, a reversal of the image discussed earlier.
In the US, this has taken the form of panic around rape of white women by Indigenous, mestize, Asian, and, famously, Black men. In Europe, it is frequently expressed by reactionaries as fear of the “filthy hordes” of migrants raping European women, as is a frequent narrative about Sweden. This narrative must be contextualized in class terms, as well. The Eastern Orthodox Church famously promoted wild, fabricated tales of the Bolsheviks collectivizing women. This narrative generally represents anxieties of ruling classes about the status quo literally being flipped on its head, the tables being turned.
Obviously, such narratives are incredibly overblown, and merely reflect either delusion or conscious propaganda on the part of reactionaries. However, sexual violence is, in fact, sometimes used by colonized men against colonizer women in national struggles. Eldridge Cleaver, a one-time member of the Black Panther Party, infamously advocated the rape of white women as a revolutionary act, to the condemnation of the Party.
This does not, contrary to colonial narratives, confirm the myth of the native man out out to violate the white women, or of general decadence of the colonized. Rather, it is an example of how oppressed men express opposition to their oppression, and how that expression is limited by the framework of patriarchal masculinity. They understand that colonialism uses rape as terror against colonized women, and the colonized as a whole, to reproduce itself, so, in the framework of masculinity, they believe that it can merely be turned on its head. This is not so, rape cannot be a “revolutionary weapon” and must be forcibly condemned by all revolutionaries.
Rape is not a tool of individual or selective terror, it is one of collective terror. If a colonized man advocates or uses rape as a tool, it is also an act against colonized women, as it tells them that he is willing to exercise such terror against women. It is not necessary to engage in such acts for decolonization. Only the destruction of colonial relations themselves and the assertion of the terms of natives over non-natives is necessary, and that does not necessitate patriarchal terror. In fact, patriarchal terror must be relentlessly struggled against.
Patriarchal power structures in general use sexual assault as a tool to reproduce themselves, and such structures are reified in the actions of the individuals acting within and under them. In Mexico, August of 2019, multiple police officers were suspended for repeated cases of raping women. Mexican women took to the streets in the hundreds, revolting against the terrorism the patriarchal Mexican state allows and even employs against them and demanding that it take legitimate action to combat the prevalence of rape by police. In Mexico, the police reproduce not only a bourgeois order, but a colonial order as well. The order is reified in them, as servants of that order, in their exploitation and violation of Mexican women, who are devalued and victimized. Rape is used by such forces to disempower women, to terrorize communities, and to reproduce exploitation.
Silvia Federici famously identifies the destruction of the commons as not only a war against communal production, but also with the associated power of women. In this war, women face the terror of sexual assault, as in all patriarchal revolutions. The rapist sees their actions as legitimate use of force, an assertion of ownership (collective or individual), a punishing of degeneracy, an answer to an invitation. It is no coincidence that their self-image corresponds to the self-image of conquering armies, as the collective of rapists are exactly that.
Those whom face the terror of rape do not simply sit passively as victims and accept their fate. In the US, the primarily bourgeoisie-led #MeToo movement is the most well known example, but it isn’t the only one. There is the aforementioned case of Mexico, there is the case of a mob of 200 Indian women killing the serial killer and rapist Akku Yadav, protests in India calling for similar action against other rapists, protests in Chile against police sexual assault within protests against the neoliberal regime, student movements pressuring colleges to take a decisive stand on sexual assault, and more. In the patriarchal system, rape is typically only paid heed when it is seen as a violation of a man’s property, while a single, sexually active women being victimized is seen as her fault. This must be rejected, and radical action against rape terrorism must be adopted.
Communist Parties, both those vying for power and those in power, must recognize rape as patriarchal terror, and act accordingly. Rape cannot merely be treated as another crime, equivalent to murder in the course of a robbery. Nor can it be looked at through moral lenses. Rape must be recognized as class terrorism, an act to reproduce patriarchal power. In the case of revolutions against patriarchy, it represents counterrevolution, reaction seeking to reassert itself. It is directly parallel, even interconnected, with the bourgeoisie’s struggle to keep its grasp on power, or to restore it. It must be repressed accordingly.
We call for militias in connection to the Party, for those exploited and punished by the patriarchal order, for self-defense and for struggle against patriarchy. The party must aid women and the LGBT community in registering for ownership of weapons for self-defense against patriarchal terror, must build health and community support programs for support and prevention, aid in the legal and community defense of rape victims, and institute a program against patriarchal terror, including rape.
This latter action means they must organize self-defense of communities against rapists for prevention, teach lessons in recognizing warning signs (such as how to identify if a drink has been spiked, how to organize social functions in a manner which prevents rape, and how to tip people off that someone is a rapist), and promote active terrorization of rapists.
This includes forcing them out of employment however possible, especially by publicizing their crimes in a highly visible way (without, of course, identifying victims who wish not to be identified), by harassing them wherever they show their faces, by encouraging disdain of them in the community, and by generally isolating them. Programs, in short, must organize: prevention, repression of rapists and attempted rapists, and support of victims in all facets of life. We cannot rely on the bourgeois colonial state in these issues, as it not only does not help the victims where it does not benefit them, but twists the issue to justify further repression of the colonized.
Where Communist Parties hold power, they must wage a struggle of Red Terror against these reactionaries, repressing them with means just as, if not more, iron-fisted as are used against the bourgeoisie and colonizers. This does not necessarily only mean execution, as it didn’t mean for repression of counterrevolutionaries.
It also means general isolation, of course on a much larger scale, such as by imprisoning them (not with the intent of “reform,” but a campaign of mitigating their threat and instituting terror of other patriarchs). Concurrent to this campaign of terror, the Party must struggle relentlessly against the patriarchal gendered division of labor, offering full support for and incorporation of movements for liberation by those exploited and punished by it.
In short, a war of terror against and elimination of the patriarchal division of labor is called for in all corners of society, especially the terroristic tool of rape. We cannot exercise “pity” or “empathy” for the patriarchal terrorists out of some bourgeois moral calling. We do not make a call for this out of moralism, but out of the interests of the literal billions of people exploited and cast out of society by the patriarchal gendered division of labor.
Revolution is not made by playing nice for the sake of playing nice. Revolution is the destruction of old social relations and the construction of new ones, and cannot pay heed to the concerns of moralizers who worry about the oppressed being “just as bad” as their oppressors for revolting against them. We pay heed to legitimate concerns of effectiveness of tactics, not those who would have us bend to the poor reactionaries.
As Karl Marx once said in Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
“We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror”
