But what about the disparity in sexual vulnerabilities: the undeniable fact that as Brownmiller testily pointed out, if women can be raped, they can hardly "rape back"?  What happens when both sexes follow the spontaneous impulses so applauded in these old ballads and things don't go right?  Say that the man is merely boorish, and the woman isn't all that strong or all that clever or all that close to "her father's gate" -- say, in fact, that she is on the south coast of Brittany (somewhere between Vannes and Quiberon), at the age of forty hitchhiking her way though rural France....

    I'd done the same thing twenty years earlier, except that it evidently wasn't the same.  "Si tu étais vierge," I kept on hearing, as if the cocky virgin were perfectly understandable, but what was I doing as mother-of-four?  What was this game of sexual brinksmanship I was playing today?  "Tu aimes frôler le feu," a French friend said, and I don't think he meant merely solo hitchhiking but rather the daredevil spirit in which I was doing it -- the pleasure I indeed took in "skirting the flame."  Along with the pleasure of speaking a foreign language (which always made me feel as if I were playacting and could say any old thing that came into my head), it meant I could talk my way into what I suddenly realized wasn't what I wanted at all and was willing to fight like hell to get out of.

     I might been forewarned by that juggernaut of a car -- a large white American ambulance that made a U-turn and stopped, the big man at the wheel grumbling that I didn't see him waiting up ahead so he'd had to come back for me.  He says he drives this monstrous vehicle for his own pleasure during off-duty hours; he likes its power, though I don't think it holds the road nearly as well as a Peugeot or a Citroen.  But then we disagree on a lot more than cars.
    People are just things, he claims; I, at least, am something special, I say as we become embroiled in a pseudo-philosophical argument on the nature of man, and more especially, woman.  Me a meaningless cog because I don't endure like a stone?  What an unpoetic and, it seems to me, unFrench view of life!  Of course, my driver isn't really interested in philosophy but rather in sex, as he makes clear from the start, and as I make clear from the start (it's a question that comes up in the first two minutes of every ride), the answer is "no."  Is his argument that life and sex are meaningless, so why not jump into bed with the nearest available partner -- in short, that "sex is sex is sex, so get it while you can, lady" -- supposed to appeal to the older woman?  It leaves me cold; and I wonder if my driver's occupational association with death isn't perhaps a bit mindwarping.  Ah, but I am misinterpreting him, he protests when I insinuate that he must treat women like cows.  "Au contraire," he purrs, "as he would be happy to demonstrate; shall we discuss it over a glass of wine?
    We stop at a country inn, where he admits that other girls he's picked up have occasionally shared my anti-pleasure attitude.   Cold types who meant what they said -- he doesn't believe that I do.  And I must admit that while his approach is far from flattering, there's something very exciting (and very hateful) about this fleshy, heavy-footed man with the meaty hands and the cold gray eyes.  Discussing at length, and of course in French, the whys and wherefores of what I wasn't going to do with him, I seem to have talked myself into a state of curious sexual "submissiveness" -- of not saying "yes" but not quite saying "no" either, or at least not saying it with any great conviction as I stepped back into the ambulance and waited to see what would happen next.  It was rather like approaching the rapids that one had not yet decided whether to run or to portage around, coming closer and closer to the moment of being seized by the current and committed to the wild water ahead.  Moreover like the teenage girl who is just waiting to be "swept away" but isn't going to be wicked enough to prepare for it, I was proving the purity of my intentions with contraceptive unpreparedness.  Was I trying to ensure that there would be no such thing as "casual sex"?  That men would be dangerous?
    "Eh bien, my petite Jeanne!"  He pulls into a grassy lane, steps down and reaches for me.  "But this is ridiculous, monsieur.  You know very well that I don't want" -- he cuts off my words with a long, thrusting kiss, tosses a dirty car blanket onto the grass and pushes me down onto it.  Hey, wait a minute! -- I just repaired those pants.  But off they come, and worse, off come his.
    "C'est trop tard.  You no longer have the right to refuse me," he says, pinning my arms to the ground.  Like hell I don't!  But he's surely cleared up my confusions in a hurry.  Suddenly, for me at least, there is nothing sexual about the conflict between us; and the harder he tries to force his way past my clenched thighs, the more he becomes an enemy to be fought tooth and nail -- or rather, to be fought with no weaponry at all and no decision to fight but simply this all-out, spontaneous muscular response.  It comes, I think, as a nasty surprise to the self-confident male who wanted a consenting female and thought that beneath my fine talk I was one.  He wasn't so far off the mark either.  Until now.  And is all this shoving and pushing and tossing me about like a rag doll supposed to be lovemaking?   "C'est ta faute.  It's your fault, you know, for making me so angry," he growls.  But I'm angry too.  Angry and afraid, as I've never felt afraid of a man before, and yet I cannot obey his insistant demand that I "give myself."    I cannot, -- it's not a muscular option -- even as I'm slammed again and again to the ground and a heavy hand tightens over my throat and the thought flashes across my darkening mind: "this is how silly women get themselves killed."
    "Donne-toi, donne-toi" -- I hear his voice through a choking mist, and when he releases my windpipe, I hear my voice too, yelling for help I suppose, though what I would say if help did come, how on earth I would explain my predicament, I have no idea.  I'm past caring.  But perhaps he cares.  Perhaps he is sobered by the violence of his own actions.  Or perhaps he simply decides that I'm more trouble than I'm worth.  In any case, he lets go of me, I put myself and my scattered clothes together, and we part, sullen enemies.
    "Méchante fille!" he calls as he drives off.  So he found me "bad stuff," did  he?  It served him right.  I hated his guts, and yet ..., well, he had a point.  I had acted badly, tardily, gracelessly -- not like my quickwitted ballad heroines and not like myself twenty years ago either.  Today, overnighting in French youth hostels again and occasionally seeing myself through the clear puritan eyes of that long-ago virtuous vagabond, indeed discussing the risks of the road with any woman of settled mind and blithely agreeing that "all you had to do was say 'no' and mean it," I felt a hypocrite.  A traitor to my own code.  For I knew that I didn't always mean it.  Perhaps I'd never altogether meant it -- that was what gave the conversational game its bite, of course  -- but at least I'd been able to leap to psychological safety before, while the man could still retreat with a measure of grace.  Today the game was getting out of hand (as I knew, or should have known, before today's ugly fight, which wasn't the first of its kind, only the most violent).  Never again, Jean, do you let things go this far ... and then bail out.  Never again do you make a fool of a man when his pants are down.
    But I'm getting ahead of myself; it takes time to make sense of violence...   Still 28 kilometers from the hostel on the tip of the Quiberon peninsula, I have lots of thinking time -- and the undemanding company of an elderly native Breton, who speaks French as a rusty school-learned language when he comes over to offer friendly hitchhiking advice and commiserate with my "bad luck" that I've landed on this stretch of lonely road...  A car stops with two local boys, who assure me gravely that the Quiberon hostel is closed and suggest other possibilities; I tell them I'll stay on the road, thank you very much... Finally a Breton fishing family stops, and I collapse on the mattress in the back of their panel truck.  "Pauvre petite, how tired you must be from carrying that heavy pack," says the wife with the pixie Celtic features.
     Tired?  Say rather in a state of appalled self-examination.  I'd made a fool of a man by being a damn fool myself, and it wasn't a victory I felt much like crowing over.  So the story I tell Christiane, who agrees to join forces with me that evening (she's had her fill of solo hitchhiking too), is much abbreviated.  "Il vous a attaquée?"  she asks, staring hard, I think, at my bruised throat (it shows no marks, however, when I check in the hostel washroom), vand I hedge, embarrassed to admit my complicity in the "attack" that was no simple assault.   No, I never wanted another victory like that.  It was too shaking -- as much for what it said about me as about the brute male who, when I stopped to think about it, hadn't used the weapons he would surely have used on another man: his fists.  In retrospect, it was even reassuring to know that he hadn't been willing to go beyond a certain point of physical violence, that I had "pushed the envelope" and come through in one piece -- unmarked (to my surprise) and unbroken (though my ribs ached for a week) but very, very shaken.
     Perhaps it's time I stopped using hitchhiking as a form of pastoral adventure?  Christiane says that we can rent bicycles from the youth hostel at Lannion, on the north coast of Brittany.  Our own two wheels, yes, that sounds like a wonderful idea...

    Now to the many real victims of sexual assault my account must seem wildly irrelevant.  But a rhetoric that confers instant victim status on all women, inviting all of us to share in the "violation" of a look, a whistle or a comment seems to me worse than irrelevant.  A seductively ever-expanding target of social action risks devaluing the original target; and I cannot but wonder how a privileged "sisterhood" of sexual violation, inaugurated with public "confessions" and the applause of fellow students in annual Take Back the Night college marches across the nation, strikes the average rape victim or sexual assault counselor.  Years ago I was told that some of them, at least, felt "used," -- a sentiment unlikely ever to be publicly aired, of course, especially if the Utopian cause of making all women "feel safe" raises much needed cash for sheltering abused women.  Still, listening to a radio program on the "Debbie Smith Act" -- listening to the painful testimony of this determined rape survivor, who took all the "right steps," and yet had to wait six years for the DNA evidence to be analyzed and her assailant identified -- I wondered if almost three decades of sexual "consciousness- raising" had done all that much to help Smith's crusade for better trained "first responders" and speedier handling of the evidence.  (The average "rape kit" now sits on the shelf, unanalyzed, for 18 months; the act would mandate a goal of 10 days).  I wondered, in fact, if we hadn't diverted the energies needed for real reform -- both heightened and blunted our sensibilities -- with the overkill of broad brush "victim rhetoric."
    It's imbibed today in some unexpected quarters.   Thus Thornhill and Palmer's Natural History of Rape, simplistically condemned for its evolutionary view of man, might be more fairly criticized for its view of woman.  For the authors aren't, in fact, saying that man is "born to rape"; they know, and reviewers should know, that nature vs. nurture is a long dead issue, i.e., that no one is "born" to any such anti-social behavior.  But I'm bemused at some of the authors' more convoluted explanations for human behavior and feeling, especially female feeling.  Like "why is rape traumatic for women?"  (do you guys really have to ask that?)   Or more interestingly, "why does the mental trauma of rape victims decrease as physical injuries increase?"   They call this a "surprising empirical finding," though it doesn't, when I stop to think about it, surprise me at all nor, properly viewed, does it have to be explained in terms of "proof" (that it really was rape) and convincing a "male protector" to stick around...  There's a simpler, more respectful explanation (just there's a "more respectful" explanation than simply being "confused and naive" for why so many college students whom advocacy researchers term "rape victims" would return to their "assailants," says Christina Sommers in Who Stole Feminism; perhaps, as many who refused to so classify themselves claimed, they weren't raped in the first place).  And the simpler explanation for Thornhill and Palmer's finding takes women more seriously too -- as creatures capable of acting and feeling for themselves, not just through the social prism of other people's actions and feelings.   How so?   Well, in The Women's Room Nancy Friday recounts a young girl's traumatic rape experience, and what keeps coming back to haunt the girl in this fictive account -- it's a recurring motif, too, in Brownmiller's real rape stories -- is how unable she felt at the time to resist in any way, even to run away.  Now I've felt that utter powerlessness in bad dreams: a nightmare entrapment in a body that cannot move, in muscles that refuse to work.  And that waking nightmare would haunt me too, I think, which is why arguments about the pros and cons of "fighting back" have always seemed to me to miss the point.  Win or lose, surely you feel better for fighting back?  Even if you do get hurt?  No, I'm not equating sexual resistance with physical injury in any absolute way; and no, I'm not absolutely rejecting Thornhill and Palmer's (or anyone else's) explanation of their "perverse" empirical finding.  But the convoluted answer does offend me; it may not be all wrong, but it evades strong truth.
    And it seems yet another evasion of the truth -- another stroke in the victim picture of woman -- when the authors of The Natural History of Rape cite "human anti-cuckoldry mechanisms" (jealousy, I think they mean) as part of our evolutionary heritage, and yet never once mention a male aversion for fighting females which scholars like Walter Ong and Dorothy Dinnerstein call a feature of human sexual identity ("as presently constituted," Dinnerstein would probably add; she and Ong come to the matter from radically different perspectives!)  Surely that aversion could be described in evolutionary terms.  Couldn't it even be called "species-preserving," and doesn't it make a difference to heterosexual conflict?  Thornhill and Palmer's silence on this point, echoing Brownmiller's, is eloquent.  The Natural History of Rape may explode her obvious idiocies -- her insistance, for instance, on rape as an "act of violence" with no "sexual" basis whatsoever -- but I wonder if its authors realize how deeply they and their university colleagues have imbibed her victim feminist thinking.

    At the heart of this thinking lies an uneasy consciousness of male muscle, male size, and above all, the unilateral male capacity to rape.   And it cannot be denied that men have the equipment for the job.  They alone have the external, "magical" organ that Brownmiller sees as an instrument of gender terror, which means that they also have the capacity to look (and doubtless feel) very, very foolish.  In a primal way that women, with their hidden sexuality, can scarcely imagine, men are vulnerable to mockery.  When the magic doesn't "work" they are mightily afraid, I suspect, of being laughed at.
    Brownmiller ignores this flip side of theatrically impressive male sexual force; she ignores the vulnerability to which my attention was drawn when my fourth child started asking questions about sex and sounding more than a little apprehensive about the whole thing.  It was a note I had not heard from his three sisters, and it started me thinking about fears that boys rarely voice.  I also reread Stendhal's le Rouge et le Noir and found myself much more sympathetic to its main character, whom I once thought a "perfect monster" for his time-tabled seduction of the mistress of the house (sitting with her under the linden tree, he gives himself until the clock strikes to take her hand).  Julien Sorel now seems to me merely young and ambitious and desperately afraid he will lose his nerve.  I don't see ordinary grown men in that pitiable light -- it would not be a sexual turn-on!-- but I do suspect that they're just as keen on avoiding a real fight as I am.  I suspect that for most men the very thought of making love to a woman who is suddenly all knees and elbows, all sharp joints and clenched muscles, is a nightmare.
    I suspect it would be a distasteful scene for most men even if they felt they could prevail with force alone -- even if victim feminists were right about successful sexual resistance requiring matching muscle power.  That assumption is patently wrong, however.  The man I resisted so belatedly was twice my size and built like a linebacker.   He outmatched me by a country mile and according to Deutsch's odd view of sex (as an act of male violence that "woman, being weaker, could not successfully resist") ought to have had no trouble getting his way.  Instead, angry and humiliated, he gave up (as did an earlier man on the same trip).  I don't think I was encountering a rash of rapists, or that the man who so thoroughly frightened me made a practise of forcing himself upon helpless hitchhikers.  In fact, he was responding not to any presumed helplessness on my part (a trait the French barely tolerate) but to my spirit of erotic debate, his very anger showing how deceived he felt when I stiffened into all-out resistance.  The next time he met an argumentative woman I bet his actions were a little less precipitate!
    Now I submit that the mere possibility of any such humiliating outcome is a large part of why men don't generally drop their pants until they are absolutely sure of female cooperation.  It's not a ploy that will win a fence-sitting female over -- or attract crowds of women either, as in the New Orleans Mardi Gras festivities, I'm told, a few men found out for themselves.  In the spirit of the occasion, and perhaps in envy of women who drew crowds of men by simply dropping their tops, they dropped their pants ... and women fled.  (The rare male stripping that provokes female applause is, of course, a staged event, done as it were from behind a protective barrier.)  Clearly, the exposed male is vulnerable to humiliation (not to mention injury!) in many ways, and "erectile dysfunction," which we are now told is absolutely no cause for shame or embarrassment, is only one way that the male sexual "magic" may not work; another is with strenuous female resistance.  Whether consciously contemplated or not -- and indeed many nice men have probably never wondered if the women they declined to "take advantage of" mightn't be perfectly capable of defending themselves -- it's a possibility that can only deepen the nightmare for which there is no Viagra.   The nightmare of resisted "overboldness."

    Like the authors of The Natural History of Rape, Brownmiller ignores something else too: the way deepseated male inhibitions help even the playing field.  For sex is a tricky operation.  It requires a fitting together of vulnerable body parts, and to achieve that "fit" I submit that human men, like other animal males, are commonly inhibited about the degree and kind of force they are willing to use.  So I wasn't smashed to a pulp.  Being a "sex object" didn't mean I was treated with gentleness or reverence or gallantry but it surely meant I was treated differently than any man who had so provoked my driver's aggressive force would have been; and retrospectively -- very retrospectively indeed -- that was reassuring.
    That there are men who enjoy knocking women about -- even men who derive a twisted sexual pleasure from maiming and killing women -- I do not doubt (and count myself lucky never to have drawn that kind of attention).  But I still think boys learn early on, principally from other boys, that hitting girls is a "sissy" thing to do.  Even where hitting is seen as a tool of marital discipline, "real" fighting is done against other men -- and for deep reason, says Walter Ong.  Noting the "predilection of males for fighting other males" as well as the male "distaste" for fighting females, he theorizes that "woman is a threat psychologically already, and to own by fighting her that she is also a physical threat would devastate the male ego" -- a point vastly expanded upon as part of Dorothy Dinnerstein's whole feminist argument in The Mermaid and the Minotaur.   Dinnerstein persuades me that, unmoderated, "mother-centered" early human childhood makes for considerable "human malaise."   But I am not persuaded that even the most enlightened shared parenting would, or indeed should, eliminate a special mother-child early bond; nor am I persuaded that the sexual consequences of this "animal" bonding (much strengthened, as Dinnerstein says, by the power of human memory) are altogether unhealthy.   Indeed I am much heartened to read an article in our local newspaper about a high school wrestler who refuses to engage in scheduled coed matches unless, he says, from his forfeiting the match his team will lose the meet.   The boy doesn't explain himself very well; he isn't inventing any slick excuses; he can only say that "it doesn't feel right."
    Apparently the male inhibition against serious heterosexual combat isn't dead yet; and perhaps Brownmiller's astonishing blindness to it merely reflects the inarticulate deeprootedness of the thing.  She says that when her instructor in a women's self defense class bared his chest and "invited us to hit him ... none of us could make physical contact ... but the men had no such inhibition" -- never asking herself, as she rails against cultural inhibitions, what would have happened had she bared her chest and said to her instructor, "hit me!"  How hard could any of the men have hit her?  Not very hard at all, suggest Pascale, Moon and Tanner, who dismiss the inhibition, however, as a manifestation of oppressive "male chauvinism."   They can only complain (in "Self Defense for Women," Sisterhood Is Powerful) that the men in their martial arts class "tried to avoid all physical contact with us ... when the Sensei [master instructor] makes the rounds to test our 'stance' by touching the 'butt' and thigh muscles, he just doesn't touch ours... Finally, the free-fighting exercise we do is ridiculous. One man refused to make any physical contact at all and stayed at least five feet away, punching at the air."
    To be sure, Pascale et al. have a point.   How can you ever learn to stand up for yourself if you're treated as a piece of fine china?  And I have two responses: first, surprise that these women should have chosen such a predictably, even exaggeratedly, traditional class, and then dismay at the assumption that they needed any such formal instruction.   Didn't they grow up with boys?   Doesn't childhood play entail some shoving and pushing, with little girls often giving as good as they take?   (My little granddaughter, in fact, gives rather better than she takes.)  And a third response, too, is perhaps in order.   I cannot speak for Japanese men, but the teenage American boy who says that wrestling with girls "doesn't feel right" isn't necessarily confessing to a cloistered upbringing; he may well have once roughhoused with little girls, as I roughhoused with my brothers, and as I once shared the family bathroom with them too ... until my older brother started locking me out, "hogging" it all to himself, I thought as I pounded on the bathroom door, wondering that our mother permitted such obviously selfish behavior.   She didn't try to explain either; that would have been wasted breath, though it's clear enough to me now what was happening: that sexual awareness has behavioral consequences which wise parents (and wise societies) respect.
    Growing up with brothers, I learned to my chagrin that after a certain age they were better at hitting and shoving and pushing than me; but I also learned that they would not fight all-out against me as I could, if provoked, still fight all-out against them.  It gave me an "edge," I thought, in what for a long time seemed the entirely hypothetical event of "sexual aggression" (against a scrawny teenager once asked to dance "because you don't have all those other guys cutting in"? -- no, it didn't seem likely).   Years later, that "edge" was part of my favorite fantasy.  Over and over in heroic daydream, evading or defying any attempt to warn me off, I walked down that country road where the three murdered civil rights workers had been taken.   I wasn't sure just how my opening line to the KKK lynchers would play out -- there were divergent scripts, and I never quite settled on the right intonation, the right feeling (blazing anger or icy contempt?) for "just what do you guys think you're doing?" -- but being a girl was clearly critical to my facing down the "protectors of Southern Womanhood."   If those louts wanted to kill, they'd have to kill me too... and I didn't think they'd have the nerve. ("Have had the nerve" I mean, for of course the murders were long done, and I'd been nowhere near the state of Mississippi, nowhere near saving anyone...)
    The discovery that men could desire me was disturbing, exciting, and sometimes just plain annoying; I seem to remember an Italian park bench and a man who provoked me into kicking him on the shins ("piano, piano," he protested, backing hastily away).  But scary?  Not until I stumbled at forty onto the scene I could so easily have avoided, even, I think, as a solo female hitchhiker.  For I still think no normal man or woman knowingly embarks upon that ugly scene.  I still think I brought it on myself, like a gymnast changing her mind in mid-air -- almost always a recipe for disaster.

    Clearly, when the myth goes wrong -- when "boldness" leads not to enchantment but to visceral revulsion -- it can go very, very wrong.  Once man has taken a heavyfooted step too far and roused only revulsion, I don't think it makes much difference (to her feelings about him) whether he "succeeds" or not.   Rape, in short, excites no confusion of female feeling; or at least, I didn't think so before I read Brownmiller, who describes rape, unequivocally, as a "profound violation of a woman's body" and then cites without comment an investigative report that when "confronted with a threat to her life or physical well-being [italics mine], the victim was not willing to resist or fight.  Apparently Brownmiller doesn't see the contradiction: that this "profound violation of a woman's body" is not perceived as a threat to her "physical well-being."  Not responded to, but remembered, it would seem, with haunting horror.
    There's a troubling disconnect here between female feeling and action.  Or perhaps I should say a tamping down of spontaneous strong, "muscular" feeling (i.e., transmuted into action).  And anthropologist Carole Vance suggests that it doesn't just come as a reaction of violence.  As she says in her introduction to a compendium of maverick feminist voices, Pleasure and Danger (1984),

    "Horrific results of gender inequality may include not only brute violence but the internalized control of women's impulses, poisoning desire at its very root with self-doubt and anxiety.  The subtle connection between how patriarchy interferes with female desire and how women experience their own passion as dangerous is emerging as a critical issue to be explored."

    Indeed there is something here that almost twenty years later still needs exploring, though not, I think, in the prescribed feminist framework.   For if "brute violence" (which strikes men too, of course) may sometimes reflect a cultural pathology, I am not convinced that the pathology consists of "gender inequality" or of that catch-all for feminist blame, "patriarchy," either.   And I am even less inclined to see any such simple, ideological cause behind an "internalized control of women's sexual impulses, poisoning desire at its very root with self-doubt and anxiety."
    I view it rather, in part at least, as fallout from a quarter century of escalating rape rhetoric, which not so unwittingly decrees the very sexual oppression it decries.   "Feminist consciousness is the consciousness of victimization ... to come to see oneself as a victim," says self-proclaimed expert in "the phenomenology of feminist consciousness" Sandra Bartky.   Helping women to this end, practitioners of a runaway rhetoric have played fast and loose with statistics on male violence (inventing them if necessary, says Christina Sommers); at least one researcher has felt pressure "to have rape be as prevalent as possible," while the "popular view that higher numbers are necessarily more accurate" has gone largely unchallenged. High numbers make good copy, of course, as well as helping the "cause."  And alarmist language, properly interpreting phenomena that women might not otherwise find sufficiently threatening -- that they might even have the bad taste, on occasion, to find ego-bolstering (a chubby friend of my sister, out for a morning run in her "sweats" some years ago, said she got a wolf whistle from construction workers across the road and "it made her day") -- well, that language surely helps raise "feminist" consciousness too!  Thus, not content with revealing monstrosity in the rude blue collar wolf whistle, a runaway rape rhetoric now reveals it in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Professor Susan McClary at the University of Minnesota tells students to listen for "the point of recapitulation in the first movement ... one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release").
    I can well believe that the so-called "date rape crisis" has infected many sensitive young women with "self-doubt and anxiety"; I can believe Sommers' claim that "hysteria on campus over the male threat to women's safety and dignity runs higher every year" and Camille Paglia's view, "especially on Ivy League campuses, [of] a trend toward feebler women who hide behind rules and legislation the minute sexual tension arises."  I can even believe (sadly) a report on the web of a young woman so fearful of "laundromat rape" that she dashes in and out of the facility, waiting for her clothes first to wash and then to dry while huddled in her locked car feeling "victimized"!
    An extreme case, yes, and the tip of a believable cultural pathology.   With a chameleon of the imagination like sex, so obviously vulnerable to doubts and fears, one can hardly wonder at it, or wonder either that the "poisoning" runs so deep.  Vance's gut-level words are on target, even if her theoretical framework seems "off."   Her focus strikes home.  There is a critical issue of "pleasure and danger," or in my terms, of "magic and misadventure" in the realm of eroticism ("a realm stalked by ghosts," says Camille Paglia; "the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.")   And perhaps it's time to revisit the enchantment side.