IN NEW YORK CITY in 1971 there were 18 convictions for rape. Perhaps as many as 10,000 New York women were sexually abused that year in the most violent, degrading manner conceivable, and yet only 18 men could be found guilty. How could this happen? Superficially the blame lies with legal statutes (recently changed) which demanded "conclusive" corroborating evidence. But the true answer--fantastically complex, multi-faceted--can be found in Susan Brownmiller's portentous examination of rape, Against Our Will.

Brownmiller, with extensive documentation and enviable insight, studies rape from every possible standpoint--historical, psychological, anthropological, sociological...She shatters every myth surrounding rape--myths that have prevailed since the beginning of time, myths that have rendered us incapable of viewing rape in its proper political perspective.

She opens with a detailed presentation and analysis of the role of rape in history. "Only when all accounts of rape are collected and correlated does the true underside of women's history emerge," she writes. In almost every society, women have been regarded as male-owned chattel. Because they have been thus dehumanized their violation has historically been seen, not as an attack on a person, but rather, as the defilement of another man's goods. Brownmiller writes:

Women were wholly owned subsidiaries and not independent beings. Rape could not be envisioned as a matter of female consent or refusal; nor could a definition acceptable to males be based on a male-female understanding of a female's right to her bodily integrity. Rape entered the law through the back door, as it were, as a property crime of man against man. Woman, of course, was viewed as the property.

Defiled goods are not worthy of their owners; for this reason, raped women have often been rejected by their husbands and abandoned by their families (the plight of the women of Bangladesh is a prime example). In some cultures, like that of the ancient Hebrews, victims shared the terrible fate of their attackers--being stoned to death or bound and tossed into a river to drown. Women were double losers--degraded to the status of object, yet responsible for what befell them, protectors of what object-seekers sought. And women remain double losers, though in a far more subtle way, and to a slowly diminishing extent.

Several myths arose to justify such treatment, thereby buttressing the patriarchal system. The Biblical tale of Potiphar's wife continues to be used against rape victims. Potiphar (an Egyptian) has an unnamed wife who lusts after her husband's Hebrew slave, Joseph. When virtuous Joseph refuses to succumb to her charms, she becomes enraged and falsely accuses him of rape--Joseph is thrown into jail.

WOMAN, AS MAN'S most personal and vulnerable possession, became and remained the major battleground on which men proved their superiority to one another. Sometimes, as in the days of chivalrous knights, men jousted for the hand of the other's maiden--indirect rape. More often, however, rape has not been clothed so discreetly with societal justification, rather, it has openly defied society's laws and lawmakers. Eldrige Cleaver in Soul on Ice explained what motivated him to rape this way:

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women--and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

The most devastating and massive acts of rape occur in the midst of war--violent times, times when machismo dominates. "Men who rape in war," asserts Brownmiller, "are ordinary Joes made unordinary by entry into the most exclusive male-only club in the world. Victory in arms brings group power undreamed of in civilian life. Power for men alone. The unreal situation of a world without women becomes the primary reality...A certain number of soldiers must prove their newly won superiority--prove it to a woman, to themselves, to other men."

In just one month, Japanese soldiers occupying Nanking during W.W. II raped 20,000 women. Pakistani soldiers raped perhaps as many as 400,000 women as they swept through Bangladesh. German soldiers storming across Russia sadistically abused every woman unfortunate enough to be found. When Russian soldiers reached Berlin they retaliated in kind. Brownmiller's compilation of figures and the transcripts of victims' tales are torture to read. To be forced, once again, to read accounts of the atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam makes one physically ill.

"It's funny about man's attitude toward rape in war," she writes. "Unquestionably there shall be some raping. Unconscionable, but nevertheless inevitable. When men are men, slugging it out among themselves, conquering new land, subjugating new people, driving toward victory, unquestionably there shall be some raping." Because most historians agree with this traditional view of rape as a natural, while unfortunate side-effect of war, they continually gloss over the subject, if they mention it at all. Journalists can also be indicted for their reluctance to investigate rumors of massive rapes, or to publish reports of them even when verified. Their attitude stems not only from a callous view of rape as naturally concomitant with war, but also from their instilled suspicion of female accusations of rape. It took almost 9 months for the stories of the rape of the Bengali to filter out. It took 21 months for the story of My Lai to be brought to public attention.

Both historians and journalists have been guilty of dismissing this very major consequence of war, this calculated, indiscriminate humiliation and torture of non-belligerent pawns. As Brownmiller points out, they have generally ignored rape "as tangential, inconsequential or as possessing dubious validity..."

WHO ARE THE RAPISTS of our society? According to Brownmiller,

Far from the stereotypic, psychiatric construct of mild-mannered, repressed, impotent homosexuals with an Oedipus complex, they are better understood as brutalized, violence-prone men who act out their raging hatred against the world through an object offering the least amount of physical resistance, a woman's body.

Most rapists are between the ages of 15-19. They most often assault women of the same race and same socio-economic background, generally because of proximity rather than choice.