A Woman Scorned

Our responses to acquaintance rape, anthropology professor Sanday (Fraternity Gang Rape) proposes, are products of a complicated history of beliefs about human sexuality. Victorian standards helped foster the practice of using a rape complainant's past to undermine her character and credibility, while our culture's attraction to rugged masculinity often generates more sympathy for defendants in rape trials than for their accusers. Here Sanday traces the often contradictory beliefs about female sexuality and female autonomy that emerged from different eras of American history and discusses their impact on contemporary evaluations of accusations of acquaintance rape. Taking up recent controversial cases such as those of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith, Sanday explores the various ideologies of gender and sexuality that made America's responses to these cases both heated and ambivalent. Her analysis of past and present attitudes toward acquaintance rape is insightful and persuasive. (Mar.)