The Rape of Lucretia

'What can be well with a woman who has lost her honour. In your bed, Collatinus, is the impress of another man. My body not only has been violated. My heart is innocent, and death will be my witness. Give me your solemn promise that the adulterer shall be punished- he is Sextus Tarquinius. He it is who last night came as my enemy disguised as my guest, and took his pleasure of me. That pleasure will be my death- and his too, if you are men. ' The promise was given. One after another they tried to console her. They told her she was helpless, and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind they said that sinned, not the body: without intention there could never be guilt. 'What is due to him,' Lucretia said, 'is for you to decide. As for me I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment. Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they deserve'. (I.58)

This is one of the most famous pieces of prose in Roman history- it became the centre point for Augustine's argument about virginity in the seige of Rome almost five centuries later. It is important though because Lucretia's suicide sanctifies the rebellion which sweeps away the monarchy in Rome and brings in the Republic. The story is easily told. One night at the seige of Ardea, a group of noblemen including Sextus Tarquin, were boasting of their wives. One of them proposed that they secretly visit their wives that night- all the other wives were found enjoying themselves- but Lucretia was found spinning and working. Sextus fell in love with her and a couple of days later returned to rape her. This is where it becomes interesting- because Lucretia's response to the rape was to summon her father, and her husband and their friend Brutus and deliver the speech I've quoted above. That speech became the model for the image of the virtuous classical and medieval woman in her reaction to rape- Augustine I have quoted citing it, Dante placed Lucretia in the circle of hell reserved for the virtuous pagans and Shakespeare used the text to form the basis of his Rape of Lucrece.

Analysing what Lucretia says reveals a lot about the way that women were viewed in Republican and Imperial Rome. Let us start with the simple point. Lucretia's language and Livy's for that matter during the whole episode of the rape is very visual- you can see the impress on the bed- we all know the sensation of getting into a bed that has been slept in. This vivid kind of language makes the rape more astonishing. But when it used it is used interestingly. I think there are three particular visual images to do with the rape that immediatly come to mind after reading Livy's story. The first is that Sextus puts his hand upon Lucretia's breast in order to wake her. The second is Lucretia's face when Sextus tells her that he is going to rape her- Livy gives a stage direction that her eyes widen in terror. The third is this impress on the bed. What I think is interesting is that none of them have anything to do with the actual rape- Livy is quite coy about the mechanisms of what happens. They are all though metaphors about the invasion of the household- something that Lucretia herself brings up here in the discussion of the guest and the enemy. Sextus has raped her- by invading the space reserved to Lucretia, her husband and her family. Indeed he does worse, because the way that he procures her consent is by threatening the dissolution of that unit- he tells her that he will kill her and leave her naked body next to that of a servant- something that he says and she beleives will destroy her household.

The images are interesting- but they are more interesting when combined with another aspect of what Lucretia and hence Livy is saying here. The problem that Lucretia faces at this point is that she needs to prove that the rape happened- that the household's unity and its hierarchy were fractured not from within but from without. Compare Lucretia to Helen- who it was often said was raped- the doubt remains about Helen because we never are certain that she didn't want to go off with Paris. At least ancient authors were never certain about that issue. Now Lucretia makes that issue absolutely clear. She says the punishment for lack of chastity is death- I have not been chaste- though it was not my own desire- and to prove that I will commit suicide. I will not live to benefit from the incident. By dying Lucretia creates another image which dominates over the image of the desicrated house and that is the image of the woman so intent on virtue that she would rather die than have her reputation stained.

This image of Lucretia is the image of a woman who cares more about her reputation, her household and her husband than herself. It is not neccessarily anything that any Roman woman actually ever said. Historians of the ancient world were fond of constructing the speeches that their characters should have said. Lucretia represents less a real woman than an ideal of how a woman should respond to the rape of a tyrant. For Livy, women ought to respond to that by prioritising their household and their household's possession in them- their honour- over themselves. The subjugation of women to these ideals was the way that patriachal society functioned in Rome: Roman authors mercilessly attacked women who did meet these ideals. Moving back to Lucretia- what we see is a complex exchange of shame going on through the speech. Lucretia's shame is expunged by her blood and as soon as commits suicide, she forces her menfolk through their shame to avenge her murder. Lucretia was prompted originally to succumb to Sextus by the fear of shame (the ultimate ignominy of being presumed an adultress with a slave) and then she prompts her brother, her father and her husband to kill Sextus through the shame of leaving her unavenged.

We see in the death of Lucretia the expression of a sexist culture. As I have said, we cannot be sure that any of these events actually happened. If we dig further though into the sexism of this culture in which Livy wrote and Lucretia died- we find a deep admiration of honour and a deep fear of shame. For women this was connected to the idea that a pure woman maintained a good household: for a woman to be found in bed with a slave violated the idea of purity and also the natural hierarchy of the house, hence Lucretia's fear of that event. Livy wrote as Augustus began to launch a campaign for moral virtue in Roman society. Lucretia's worry that she might be seen as an example to the unchaste- and her unargued case that she might be doubted unless she died- was an example to call back Roman women to their duties to the household and to the state. Lucretia's death though does something else- because it reminds men of what Livy considers their natural duty to protect their womenfolk. Livy is making a final point about tyranny here too: remember why Lucretia was targetted by Sextus- it was because she alone was virtuous and spinning not partying like the wives of Tarquin's sons. The inference is obvious tyranny seeks out and destroys the family unit- it succeeded in Tarquin's sons through the destabilising form of luxury, in Lucretia's case it succeeded through rape and yet its success created in the latter case private tragedy and public civil war.

These attitudes are foreign to our experience. They are also in my view morally wrong. Yet they do tell us something interesting about the Roman world which is why I have seen fit to record them. What this demonstrates I think is a link between the political world and the private world in the mind of the Roman. The world of tyranny was a world in which the passions dominated honour, reputation became less important than desires. Tyranny is the reign of lust and pride. Republicanism rather is the reign of restraint. Tyranny furthermore is the reign of shame- Lucretia's rape is the last in a long line of insults. This is why when Brutus swears to avenge her, it is not on Sextus but upon Tarquin that he vows to take revenge- the issue goes beyond the sexual to the political. (I.58) Indeed one might argue that Lucretia's private tragedy- that of the rape- is not so important to Livy as the public tragedy, the violation of the family unit by a member of the royal family. Livy's attitude to rape is indisputedly sexist: Lucretia does not matter to him, her reputation does.

Greek Homosexuality

An interesting article about ancient Greek homosexuality. Its interesting- I can't vouch for its accuracy as this is a subject on which I'm woefully ignorant but have always been partly intrigued by given the many references in Plato to the practise. It turns out as you would expect that homosexuality in Greece evolved over the years- particularly by the end of the Athenian democracy you had people who were as the author suggests what we would recognise as homosexuals. Homosexuality for some men was a stage in development between asexual youth and the marriage bed- but others seemed to delight more in the company of men than of women. Its an interesting subject and if anyone knows more please enlighten me as to whether the assessment in the article is right or not.

Summer with Monica

Summer with Monica is one of Ingmar Bergman's earliest works. It is a wonderful film though, exhibiting the talents of a woman who was to become one of Bergman's main actresses, Harriet Andersson. The film is about the way that kids become adults and in particular about the peculiar stage in between the transition that we call the reign of the teenager. Bergman's story is a perceptive tale strung along a familiar theme- boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, there is a shotgun marriage and less familiarly it all ends with the woman, Monica, leaving. But of course this being Bergman he does more with the story than just that- his camera work is astonishing and the actors work well- in particular Andersson who really performs brilliantly and captures everything that needs to be said about Monica.

This is really Monica's picture- she is the titular character and dominates the whole landscape from the first moment when she tempts Harry, her boyfriend into a teenage kiss after seeing a movie to the last shot, Monica dominates. Andersson is well cast physically in the role- she has the right degree of physical attractiveness for the role. More than that though, she manages to capture the immaturity of Monica, I don't think I've seen many more effective performances of how a teenage girl can conventionally kiss because its what is meant. She enjoys her sensuality, her body and dances like a woman convinced of her own sexuality to jazz music, she goes out and gets boyfriends whilst her husband is out at work.

What is interesting about Monica though, and what I think needs to be brought out because in a sense it is what I think Bergman was trying to get at is the way that the marriage effects her. Its not just that she is far too young to enjoy being a mother- far too interested in dancing and having fun than in nappies and kids. Its also that her image of what traditional marriage is is not what the reality of traditional marriage in working class Sweden is. Early on in the film, Monica speaks a lot about marriage- but the marriage she imagines is a Hollywood style one where her husband works all day and then she and him go to glamorous parties and she wears gorgeous gowns in the evening. She doesn't imagine life on a low rent, with a screaming child and a husband who for no fault of his own can't provide for her desires. The world she imagined traditional marriage to be isn't the world that it turns out to be- and she seems not to wish to take any other path to live her life within.

Its difficult to compete with Andersson on this form but Lars Ekborg tries. The problem is that his character is very passive. In many ways he is the casualty of the film- left alone with a child at the end. Monica pushes him into sensuality, into sexuality, into escaping with her to an island for the summer where the conception of the child takes place (the summer of the title of the film). Ekborg is much more self contained than Andersson in his portrayel- only erupting into violence near the end of the film when he realizes that his dream of adolescent life has become a nightmare- he has impregnated and now is married to the town slut. In many ways the film is Monica's episode in Harry's life- so Harry is an everyman and Monica is the focus. The end of the film brings Ekborg more into focus- his fury and his despair come out more and more and Monica treats him abominably and he knows it and realizes it. A fantastic montage towards the end of the moments of joy they spent together comes to his mind as he grasps her letter telling him that she is about to leave him.

Having just seen this film for the first time, the images that keep coming back though aren't to do with Ekborg and his obvious despair and distress but to do with Monica. Part of the way that the relationship doesn't function is that there is a disjunction between her fantasy of the way that adulthood will come out and the reality of what that adulthood looks like. Part of the reason for that is obviously the fact that her part in that adulthood is supposed to be the inactive one- there are three particularly poignant moments in the film- one where Harry tells Monica he will study for the future when they are married. Later in the film Monica tells him that she has nothing to do but he can study, he has the camaraderie of going out with his workmates. She has to spend all day with the baby- her only route of escape is to desert him and for that she receives in the end a measure of condemnation, he receives the virtuous part but his life is ruined. Inaction in Monica's case looks attractive when the inactive life you imagine is rich and filled with interest- the reality of doing nothing but care for your kids makes this bright teenager desert her young husband. As she plaintively says 'when you are young you are supposed to have fun'.

A last grim insight that the film offers is that these characters are doomed to repeat themselves. Harry leaves his home with Monica because his work is oppressive and he spends his time at home in a home bereft of affection- his mother died when he was eight and his father is always ill. Harry at the end of the film is left holding a child- like his father he is a single parent and this child won't even have the eight years of its mother that he had. Monica too fled her home to escape both the sexual abuse she suffers in her workplace and the dirty cluttered house of her parents, filled with bottles, babies and a shortage of space and cash. She ends up though living with an unwanted baby- she ends up having learnt very little about what is ahead of her- going back to live amongst those that will abuse her. We know that Harry is a good man and she admits that he is the best she has ever known, but still she returns to her mire. Furthermore there is no reason to think she has any more insight now about the fact that whilst young love and sex are tempting- they produce results in the form of babies with which she is unable to cope. The shot that symbolizes her life comes right at the end of the film, when the camera focuses in upon her smoking a cigarette given to her by a lover in a club. The directors of the French New Wave took her independence to heart when making their own films, but I think there is a kind of decay in her look of cool, self righteous sin- she looks cool but she has lost her hope of anything. She has no myths- only sordid men trying to reach up her skirt.

On the surface this is a very upbeat film by Bergman's standards about the escape of two young lovers for a period from life and then their return. But actually it highlights some of the real difficulties that people have with growing up, with avoiding their parents' fates and furthermore with escaping the myths that definitely in Monica's case don't fulfill themselves.

Sexual Assault and the American Army

This is a shocking report about the way that female soldiers are treated in the United States Army. I don't know anything about the research done but it seems to be good quality and the author Helen Benedict cites three studies which claim that a majority of women in the United States Army have been raped or sexually assaulted during their time of service. Quotations from serving female soldiers who claim that

"There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke"

or

You walk into the chow hall and there's a bunch of guys who just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bend down, somebody will say something. It got to the point where I was afraid to walk past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. It really gets you down.

or

My team leader offered me up to $250 for a hand job. He would always make sure that we were out alone together at the beginning, and he wouldn't stop pressuring me for sex. If somebody did that to my daughter I'd want to kill the guy. But you can't fit in if you make waves about it. You rat somebody out, you're screwed. You're gonna be a loner until they eventually push you out.

are truly shocking and need investigation. Given that women are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq it seems to me self evident that they shouldn't be sacraficing that whilst risking sexual assault or worse- I don't know if this is a problem in other armed forces (the British forces have a longstanding problem with bullying and I would not be surprised that for similar reasons they would have a problem with sexual assault)- but it definitely seems like the Pentagon needs to get a grip on the situation. This is an article everyone should read in order to keep the pressure up for proper procedures to protect women who go and serve in the army.

Mythbusting

Can we now lay to rest- at least for another week- the myth that women are less aggressive and minded to die for their countries than men? This poll from Family Security Matters, a national security pressure group, shows that out of a sample of 1000 college students- 40% of the women said they were prepared to volunteer to fight in the US military whereas only 14% of the male students shared that conviction. Of course the poll may be an outlier, of course the number of students is smallish though normally polls for elections are around a couple of thousands. The poll was conducted by what looks like a reputable company. I suspect the figures are closer than the poll gives- but it is rather interesting that the gender bias that you might, on the basis of gender stereotypes imagine, was reversed.

Friendship and Love, Lewis and Plato.

I just read an interesting post on a blog I've just discovered- about homosexuality- its over here and the author, F, argues that hatred of homosexuality is tied in to the lauding of the heterosexual marriage bond and consequently to sexism. The historical case is obviously a difficult one to establish and someone better than me will no doubt do that- but I'm less interested in exploring that and rather want to explore a concept in the thought of C.S. Lewis that I think brings out something rather interesting about the intellectual strengths of the sexist view of human relationships when allied to homophobia as opposed to Plato, likewise a sexist, but with a different view of homosexuality.

Lewis in his book the Four Loves argues that there are four distinct kinds of love which can meld together and spill out of each other- he argues that they are affection, friendship, sexual love and spiritual love. The last one obviously as a devout Christian he argues is the one that a devout religious person feels towards God. The first three of those loves Lewis anatomises in all their detail and he argues they can coexist- they can be found together- but that they are separate. In particular he argues this with relation to friendship and sexual love- he does acknowledge that women and men can fall in love through being friends but he argues that that's atypical and more often than not women and men can't fall in love through friendship and probably aren't friends in their relationships.

Lewis's friendship is based upon his feelings about his own friendships in Oxford- he thought that those friendships were the model for friendship as a whole. Friendship for Lewis was based on shared interests- and he thought that friendship between men and women on that basis was unlikely- women would prefer to discuss pots, men Plato.

Plato had a very different attitude- Plato thought that sexual love and friendship were bonded together- he argued that sexual love quite often depended on the rationality of the lover- Plato viewed love as being a relationship between young boys and older men- his ideal of love was not marriage but was this kind of homosexual relationship. Now obviously Plato recognised that marraige existed- but there is a further interesting aspect to this which is that Plato also thought that women could be rational, to a lesser extent than men but they could be and thus Plato's love and friendship aren't as distinct as Lewis's and this leads to a conceptual change in the way that Plato views women.

Both Plato and Lewis would today rightly be described as sexist. But because Plato saw sexual love as embracing properly both homosexual and heterosexual forms of love and because he understood that the highest sexual love (from which I hasten to add he excluded most male-female love) included a love of rationality, you could argue that Plato's idea of women became much more moderate than Lewis's, his sexism more moderate because of his idea of love. Because Plato didn't want to separate friendship with a man from love of a woman as much as Lewis because of his acceptance for love from men to men, you could argue that his homophilia made him more receptive to the idea that women were rational than Lewis's homophobia.

I don't really stand securely on this as the number of coulds used in this post reflects so I'm willing to abandon it. Here however is the idea: if you beleive that people's friendships are based on shared interests and shared rationality and you beleive that love is irrational and full of desire then that creates an interesting issue around homosexuality. If you beleive that homosexuality is forbidden and that women and men can't be friends- you are saying that there is one relationship friendship for men and men or women and women and another relationship sex for men and women. If you beleive on the other hand that its possible to love and be friends with a man and that its possible to love a woman in the same way that you love a man- instantly you create the position whereby women and men can both be objects of the same kind of love. And if you say like Plato that I can love a man because he is intelligent then I can feel the same sexual passion for a woman because she is intelligent. Building up the barriers between the ways that its possible to imagine someone loving a member of the same or the opposite sex means building up the barriers between the ways that we regard the same or the opposite sex. In some sense understanding love between men and women comes down to understanding men and women and if you beleive that love can only be felt as an irrational desire by a man for a woman or vice versa, then you are saying something about the ways that men and women can communicate or in this case can't. If like Plato you beleive I can love a man or a woman in the same way- then you are saying that there is something similar about men or women.

This post doesn't say that statistically homophobes are also sexists, nor does it say that historically that's always been true. All I am saying is that if we take Plato and Lewis's arguments about friendship and sexual love, we can use them to show that homophobia and sexism easily coexist. Dividing the world into two halves- superior (men) and inferior (women) is easier if you divide the ways that a man can relate to those two groups into friendship (felt for men) and sexual passion (felt for women), it becomes more difficult if you say that someone can feel friendship or sexual passion for anyone regardless of the group that they come from.

Interesting light on Gay Marriage and Children

I merely flag this up as providing some interesting evidence that there is almost no distinction between a heterosexual couple and a gay couple for bringing up kids. The research looks impressive and the final words must go to the American Psychological Association which said that

Not a single study has found children to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents

As I say this is not an area of expertise for me so I'm unwilling to make much comment upon it but it is at least an interesting statement and it ties in with what I have to say my own prejudice tells me with regard to the idea that two parents of the same sex would be as capable as two parents of different sexes to bring up kids.

A Woman in Berlin: A diary of the fall of the Nazi Regime

In 1945 German resistance to the Russians, British and Americans finally collapsed. It was the Russians who reached Berlin first, arriving in the capitol in late April and early May 1945. What then followed has become well known in the last couple of years. Going by Anthony Beevor's estimates its assumed that around 2 million women were raped in 1945 by the invading Russian forces, that figure includes Poles and Russian women who were with the Russian army. In Berlin the figure was somewhere between 95,000 and 130,000 women, many of them raped several times, many of them gang raped. The explanations for this orgy of sexual violence have been found in the trauma of the Soviet soldier, who had both come through the killing fields of the Eastern Front, the most vicious front of the most vicious war in human history, and who had earlier endured the long reign of Stalinist terror at home. When added to the 6 million Jews, who contrary to Iranian propaganda, were slaughtered in the Holocaust, the millions of soldiers dieing on each front, the massacres in China and the gulags in Russia, these rapes seem like a final installment in the chronicle of horror unleashed on Eurasia by the German and Russian dictatorships.

Understanding though the specific details of each victim that we can elucidates the status of every victim. Instead of feeling statistics, we can start to feel pain. The pain of the rapes that happened over Germany in 1945 struck very deep and this diary of a woman journalist brings that out. The anonymous diary titled A woman in Berlin conveys something of what it felt to be a woman alive in Berlin as the Soviet men rolled through. The grim humour, better one woman jokes a Russki on top than a Yank overhead, echoes throughout a tale that is filled with repeated atrocity. This is a chronicle of unreleived sexual violence. She is raped by soldiers, officers, gangraped by groups of Russians and lives in perpetual fear. Her friends too endure massive hardship- one nineteen year old girl was raped by three different soldiers one after the other, then she had marmalade smeared into her hair and coffee grains scattered over her face. The repetitive nature of the violence offered numbs the senses, but its the physical details which shocked me again and again, take for instance this description of a rape:

The one shoving me is an older man with grey stubble, reeking of alcohol and horses. He carefully closes the door behind him, and not finding any key, slides the wing chair against the door. He seems not even to see his prey, so that when he strikes she is all the more startled as he knocks her onto the bedstead. Eyes closed, teeth clenched. No sound. Only an involuntary grinding of teeth when my underclothes are ripped apart. The last untorn ones I had. Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger's hands expertly pulling apart my jaw. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth

It isn't pleasant to read, I assure you it isn't pleasant to write, even though all I'm doing is copying it out of a book, but how much worse to have experienced that again and again and again. The book takes us through the journey of someone who suffers repeatedly in this way- it changes the woman and it changes her friends. It gives them for a start a kind of collective identity as women and a collective despair with men. As they queue up once stability is restored to collect ration books and get jobs, the chat amongst the women is of how many times they've been raped and how they will deal with their husbands about it. Fears of sexual disease and pregnancy also proliferate- our diarist notes that conversation became coarser, that things unmentionable before became mentionable. And also running throughout is another theme, that the experience changed completely her and other women's reactions to men. The fear created lasted long after authority was restored- she notes that when she goes out in the evening, she never sees women. Also in her eyes, men become diminished, parasites or rapists. She is unbeleivably, unimaginably fair to many Russians that she meets who don't deal badly with her- I can think of three men she mentions by name- and all three are recorded scrupulously fairly. Very few times does she unleash a generalised hatred despite her experiences of all men or all Russians- a hatred I am sure that lesser mortals such as myself would find easy to slip into. Despite this the psychological damage is emmense and the diary is a record of the damage done even to someone who sought to protect her own personality under enormous stress.

Men being powerless, what we see is that women begin to adapt various survival strategies. Our heroine turns herself into a virtual prostitute, protecting her own building and her partners in her flat by sleeping with Russian officers as they move in and out of Berlin. Her prostitution is exploited by others- most importantly by her male co-lodger who seems to do nothing but eat and complain. The violence of prostitution is also key to this book: our heroine at one point hurts so much bodily that she has to beg her Russian officer to be gentle, but she can't ask him to stop making love to her for fear that then a source of protection and food would fade away. The sense of blissful relief that she evokes when she ends her diary and is able to sleep on her own in her own clean sheets is one of the most powerful images of the whole book- it makes the stretching out of limbs seem like another Eden, a demi paradise.

Coping strategies through this book are emmense- I've mentioned the physical coping strategy of prostitution but she coped in other ways too. She coped in part by becoming numb- time and time again she refers to the need just to keep on living, not to enjoy or appreciate life but just to keep going. Fascinatingly, in a way that illustrates her education, she draws upon that: using images out of Horace, Virgil, Aeschylus, Shakespeare and others to understand her situation. Furthermore filtered through the book are her own memories of her own past- the moment she met a Dutch Jew in Paris, her lover, her first kiss and other moments which she uses to make analogies to present situations, even if depressing analogies. These are her psychological resources.

This is one of the most amazing documents of wartime Europe I have ever read. Beevor thinks that its genuine and I see no reason to doubt that assessment from a leading historian of the period. It is such a rich source. The internalisation of Nazi propaganda is fascinating to see- we deal in this book with a worldly and intelligent woman yet even she is stunned that the Soviets can provide better rations than the Nazis. The speed with which the Germans turned on Adolf is also interesting- she mentions that defeat made people hate the government- look what your Adolf did to us they repeat to one Nazi. The unbeleivable thing though about this diary is its record of continual and terrible atrocity, these women were not killed but they were smashed, violated in the sovereignty of their own persons.

There is one last question that does need addressing whenever one thinks or writes about this kind of subject and that is the nature of German war guilt. I can feel some in my audience twinge at the thought of prioritising the German loss over Jewish and other losses in World War Two. The film Downfall has been criticised for this. This document is different- the German crimes in the war are alluded to, interestingly they are used by a man to dismiss woman's suffering as a fair exchange for the suffering the Germans' committed in the East- an intriguing bargain to say the least and one that made me as a man shiver at the moral complacency of the comment.

But this document does not seek to be a total account- this is a diary and we can't treat it like a history- this is a diary of one woman's experience in Berlin from April to June 1945, it includes what she experienced and not what she didn't. What she describes was a reality of acute suffering and it is just that it becomes part of our record of the war, though it is a mere part. There are of course grim ironies within all this- one couple that she records suffering hugely are a Jewish couple who somehow had managed to survive the Nazi regime by hiding and then on the moment of their release, the man is shot and woman abused. In a further irony, as Linda Grant commented in a Guardian review of the book, these same troops who raped this woman may well have been amongst the troops that liberated Auschwitz. We need to read documents like this- not because they obscure the other suffering of the second world war or the guilt of Germany for inaugurating the Holocaust- but because they illuminate the very nature of suffering itself. This woman, whoever she was, was a casualty of the second world war and her diary gives us an insight into how the victims of that or indeed any conflict feel in their degredation.

The Second World War and its horrors (even the ultimate horror of the Holocaust) are almost cauterised, cleansed by their names, by the statistics, but being brought face to face through three hundred pages with the gashes upon the soul inflicted by repeated rape and gang rape, not to mention prostitution, makes one turn back to all the evil atrocities of the period and suddenly realise they weren't numbers on a scorecard of infamy, but souls tortured, and in many cases murdered. Each person had their own separate individuality and each one suffered in ways we cannot even imagine, to perceive one person's suffering gives us an emmense insight into what that kind of experience is like.

I have failed in my account of how this book effected me and why everyone should read it- like other great works about that most terrible period in European history- like Solzhenitsyn or The Pianist or Primo Levi or indeed many others, it makes you want to cry. The repeated terror both leaves you wishing to comprehend and realising you never will because though you can share the words, you can't share the experience. We live in a world where rape is still too common everywhere. Moreover we live in a world where rape used as atrocity and gang rape used as atrocity like this are still happening, in places in Africa and other areas of the world, and the only thing that I as a male blogger from Europe can do is leave you with a final and to me heartbreaking quotation- this is our diarist reflecting on what she would live for after the war,

When I was young the red flag seemed like such a bright beacon, but there's no way back to that now, not for me; the sum of tears is constant in Moscow, too. And I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I beleive in progress? Yes to bigger and better bombs. The happiness of the greatest number? Yes for Petka [a rapist] and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure for people who comb out the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment? I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again, I would always be anxious I could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence. Perhaps Art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes for those that have the calling but I don't. I'm just an ordinary labourer I have to be satisfied with that... What's left is just to wait for the end.

I don't think I really need to add anymore except for the fact that I have failed to do either a tragic period or a tragic book the justice they deserve in these few lines.

Prostitutes in Ipswich

Ellee Seymour on her blog has recently highlighted the deaths of two prostitutes in Ipswich, she has added her voice to those calling for a temporary amnesty for prostitutes in the city so as to enable them to give evidence without fear of arrest. Given that it seems that a third body has now been found, the situation seems even more grave than when Ellee made her call. It seems more likely there may be a serial killer on the loose, targetting prostitutes.

I don't want to get here into the argument for or against criminalisation of prostitution. There are important arguments both for and against, and some of the academic evidence for example about the way that strippers are abused makes one stop and think about what would happen if prostitution were legalised. Having said that prostitution is a self regarding act, or a contractual one, and it is difficult therefore to justify its prohibition. It certainly can't be said to be in the same class as murder and if we were to justify its illegality I wonder whether the criminality of a prostitute is more like the criminality of someone who sells themselves into slavery than that of a murderer. But we must not, whatever we think of that question, believe that prostitutes are anything other than, in the majority of cases, incredibly vulnerable women who live lives of danger and exploitation. By virtue of being prostitutes they do not lose their humanity.

Its impossible to know at this point in time what form this murder inquiry should take without more intimate knowledge of the case or of policing methods, but if an amnesty would be helpful, there is no argument that I can see against granting it temporarily until this bloody murderer or these bloody murderers are caught.

LATER There was a brief item on the Today program this morning which contains some new details. I am no expert in this case but I would reccomend anyone who is interested in this case to go over to Ellee's blog as she has covered this for longer and in much more detail than I have.

African Rape

The Umpire has already alerted the Blogosphere to one set of almost forgotten but still continuing atrocities in Tibet. The phenomenen documented below though is possibly more obscure than Tibet, yet its extent may be just as bad or even worse.

This is a disturbing report from Salon about rape in Africa. Its not a story that you come across often- but it does strike me that its worth airing- especially as I would expect that much of this is sex without condoms and much of it seems to be underage sex. The difficulty of gathering statistics especially in rural countries blighted by civil war like the Congo or Angola makes data unreliable. Given the statistics cited here for South Africa- I'd fear to know what the rate was in the Congo for instance. This is a truly sobering moment- one that Marcella Chester and her bloggers about sexual violence would probably know more about than I. Read the story.

LATER Typically Marcella got there before me on this- she reports a figure of a quarter of a million rapes in the Congo over the last four years, some of which resulted not merely in the terrible aftereffects of the rape but also in (presumably vaginal or anal) fistulas (defined medically as the abnormal passage between organs that don't connect normally.) Words fail me to express the horror both of Marcella's report, of the New York Times report, of the Newsweek report and the Salon report (follow the links from Salon and Marcella to get to the Newsweek and NYT articles), upon which this article is based.

I can't express enough with words to describe this continuing calamity.

Psycho-sexual terrorism

Until now I'd been unaware of the American thinker, Ellen Willis, and have just become aware of her, thanks to Professor Cutler's blog which contains some interesting thoughts about the right, left and her place within that dichotomy. Despite this ignorance, and in the grand tradition of political blogging, I want to comment on something that Willis wrote in response to the terrorist phenomena which has permeated so much of political discussion for understandable reasons since the events of September 11th 2001.

Willis's essay on the mass psychology of terrorism is definitely one to read. She charts more interestingly than most theorists have at the moment the psychosis of terrorism. By linking terrorist atrocity to threatened sexuality, to threatened identity, she provides a much more coherent and interesting case for why young men and women become terrorists than has been provided in the past. Simple economic explanations such as that advanced here by Marwan Bishara fail to explain why citizens from so many countries with different economic expectations and also citizens from so many classes turn to terrorism to express their rage. Willis's analysis of the threat provided by "modernity" makes more sense of this phenomenon and links it rather more cogently to the violent rhetoric of other religions. Willis is right therefore to argue that there is a psychological background to what is going on and the psychological explanations she provides make a lot of sense- the threat especially to sexuality from female liberation is something that is often underplayed and underexposed as a source for the frustrations of modern politics. The fact that men, to paraphrase Dean Acheson on Britain, have lost an empire and not yet found a role, has led to all sorts of instabilities within the modern world- instabilities that Willis is right to note emerge in different contexts and are connected to other rationales.

Willis's analysis is not however complete. Part of the problem lies in the way that we in our society deal with the religious impulse within human kind. Psychological research done by many practitioners throughout the world has found that religious experience is an almost universal feature of the human psyche. Almost 10% of the population claim to have heard voices at some point, the number of Americans claiming to have been abducted by aliens stands at around 4 million, my own research into the New Model Army in 17th Century England shows that one of the ways that people cope with extreme situations and mass casualties is to fall back upon religion. As Richard Noll's anthropological research of Native American Shamans showed the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the state of Shamanism share simularities- indeed Richard Bentall has claimed that one of the distinguishing factors about more traditional societies is that they deal with some varieties of delusional belief in a different way to the way that modern societies do. In that sense the capacity of modern society to deal with delusion as opposed to older societies has been diminished and one of the consequences might be the terrorism we all perceive.

One of the problems with her article is that missing that aspect misses the timelessness of this phenomenen. The Children's Crusade, the Assassins in early Islam and many others illustrate that beleivers in a cause have often been casual about the loss of their own or other's lives. Terrorism is as much a function of technology as it is of modernity and can't be linked as simply as she has linked it to psychosexual frustration.

Despite these caveats, Willis has picked up on something interesting- the sexual rhetoric of the Islamist or indeed of some rightwing Christians and Jews is fascinating. Her article as a brief survey isn't able to deal with the nuances of the situation- the American reaction to modernity is not the same as the Egyptian- though Said Qutb and Pat Robertson would be revolted and were revolted by the same aspects of American modernisation. Each kind of reaction comes attached to its own cultural context and economic context- those contexts influence the ways that that reaction is pursued. Furthermore each reaction comes with its own individual context- I react in a different way from you to the reordering of society.

Willis's paper is interesting and worth reading. She delineates one of the most important changes in the history of the world, a change in many ways which we are still living through and whose implications will govern the rest of our lives. That change has yet to find a mould in which to settle itself- our structures are largely those evolved within patriachal society- but they are evolving under new pressures and one of the birthpangs of the modern World may well be the emergeance of terrorism- we should just be cautious about being too absolute in our claims about this.

Boys

Interesting article here about the problems of boys in education which notes that many of them in the US aren't the problems of men but the problems of men from lower class and ethnic minority backgrounds and very few of them have anything to do with feminist attacks on men.

Prostitution at Westminster

Yet another interesting post by a member of the History and Policy Website. Julia Laite from Cambridge discusses the changing and in particular unchanging face of the law on prostitution. A couple of things emerge from her discussion, firstly that legislation upon prostitutes encourages waves of violence and hatred against prostitutes- she links for instance late 19th Century violence against street walkers with the proffusion of late 19th Century acts about prostitution. The second thing that she suggests is that British law has as the Government thinks been far too aggressive when it comes to deciding that a place where two or three prostitutes live together is a brothel. Such measures encourage women to live apart in vulnerability and recruit pimps of various kinds. Thirdly she points out some truly horrific figures on the conviction of pimps- in 1900 despite a bill having been passed a couple of years earlier against profiting from prostitution only 160 pimps were punished as opposed to 7,000 prostitutes. The one pity about this article is that possibly for reasons of space we never hear from any of the actual prostitutes- this article is one compiled from the outside by the politician or protester looking in and whilst it is happy to annex and argue about the experience of prostitution doesn't actually give us any statements from actual prostitutes. This is an interesting article and well worth reading, it obviously doesn't and can't include much information about prostitution, but it does give some historical background, that's worth a look and consideration.

Family Breakdown: the Historical Perspective

The History and Policy website is a valuable effort to bring a longer perspective to the problems of our day. I would quibble that often the articles are too short and seem to rush to policy implications but then again their audience, civil servants and politicians, need short and concise thought not long and over elaborate musings. The offerings this week concentrate very much upon the field of child support. Both Thomas Nutt and Tanya Evans have produced interesting papers which tend towards similar conclusions- both see child care in a long perspective Nutt focusing on the simularities between the new arrangements in the UK and the poor law drafted in the sixteenth century and Evans upon the failure to implement successive proposals from the 1970s on.

The problem though is that both these articles are institutional and they illustrate the flaws of institutional history over the long duree. The point about the situation now and the difficulties of forcing payment from fathers is that the problem is not merely the practical one of finding payment. Whereas Evans in particular is right that in the past that problem was grave because of the stigma attached to women who gave birth to illegitimate children, she and Nutt forget that in the present climate the strongest rhetorical argument about the position of fathers rests upon the equality of the sexes- its about access and the right of fathers to have a relationship with their children rather than about the evils of mothers. Consequently the debate has shifted rhetorically and consequently some of the problems that Evans and Nutt observe have become even more complicated: we now have demands from both parents for access and for funds.

Despite this both articles are well worth reading for an understanding of the context to this issue and a brief review barely gives a flavour to either article.

Sex Discrimination in the Workplace in Vienna

This is an interesting statistical study by Doris Weichselbaumer of the University of Linz in Austria about discrimination in the workplace. Weichselbaumer looks at data and attempts to strip out perceived differences between men and women as well as other factors to assess discrimination- how far women are rejected for jobs because of the sheer fact that they are a woman.

Her method was to submit three applications one of a man, one of a "tomboy" and one of a feminine woman to various firms (277 in total- divided between traditionally masculine and feminine types of work). She found that the "tomboy" despite displaying on her application various forms of masculine behaviour and being surveyed elsewhere with a control group as someone with masculine characteristics was still treated as a woman- that outweighed in many people's eyes the fact that she seemed to have all the roughness of a man. Its interesting because her study purports to show that it is sex difference and not character difference that loses or gains people jobs against people of a different sex- i.e. its not because a male personality type, aggressive, ambitious etc is preferred but because men are preferred.

To be honest, I am not competent to assess the methodology of the study. One of the ways of interpreting it might be to say that employers are so blind to the distinctions within sexes that when called to put their money down and employ someone they will rigidly attach sex and gender to each other, no matter what the evidence in front of them. Based on her data, Weichselbaumer doesn't go that far, but its a worthwhile thought and whatever she does think about why this state of affairs exists, it is her belief based upon her study that she has proved that discrimination exists regardless of a person's suitability for a job whether on their CV or in their character.

Whether she has or not I leave to those more competent with statistics than myself (being to further the cause, a man who understands little of statistics but loves Jane Austen) but this is a study worthy of attention.

(Oh and a note of acknowledgement to Crooked Timber's discussion on gender for furnishing me with the web address for the article.)

I should issue a disclaimer at the end of this article that there are other studies out there and as this is not an academic article nor am I an expert in this field, I cannot state that I know many of them- so anyone that wants to put more my way is perfectly free to.

Women in Hollywood in Noir

Just heard a noir historian say that in Noir films from the forties you can almost immediatly say that a woman who works is going to be the nicest person in the picture, the woman who doesnt but wants to make her way up by her sexual attraction to men is going to be the nastiest.

This probably reflects the consistant fear of people in this case men of a loss of independence through their desire for sex. The kind of fear that arises in all of us, a sort of suspicious jealousy- and maybe that has as in film noir an occasional political overtone where the position of the sexes in a sexist view of the world (either way) is one of the dependance of the inferior on the superior to avoid the ultimate terror- the dependance of the superior on the inferior, which may as we conventionally think be economic but might also be sexual. It probably explains the huge animus say that fundamentalism has not merely towards work, but also more visibly and more emotionally towards women behaving as coquettes.