Feminist Resources

Rape

It is an extraordinary thing to try to understand and confront why it is that men believe–and men do believe–that they have the right to rape. Men may not believe it when asked. Everybody raise your hand who believes you have the right to rape. Not too many hands will go up. It’s in life that men believe they have the right to force sex, which they don’t call rape. And it is an extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to hit and to hurt. And it is an equally extraordinary thing to try to understand that men really believe that they have the right to buy a woman’s body for the purpose of having sex: that that is a right.

By Andrea Dworkin

1983

By Myrna Kostash

January 1982