Sex in the '90s
Part 4
DATE RAPE, CHILD ABUSE, INCEST
by Daniel Heydon
DATE RAPE
Mythology tells us that the Roman God, Pluto, in disguise, raped the young Persephone and carried her off to Hades, where he made her his queen. This abduction was immortalized in marble by the noted sculptor Bernini in 1621 (Pluto was in Taurus then, Scorpio's opposite sign). As astrologer Liz Greene notes in her book The Astrology of Fate , whenever in mythology Pluto left his domain in Hades and made an entrance to the upper world, it was accompanied by a rape. 1 This link between Pluto and rape holds true in astrology as well, for whenever an outer planet is in Pluto's sign, Scorpio, the issue of rape is a matter of public concern.
Shortly after Neptune entered Scorpio, December 1955, Billie Holliday's 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, was published. In this book, she revealed that she had been raped by a 45-year-old neighbor when she was ten. With Uranus' entrance into Scorpio, December, 1974, the public's attention once more was focused on the issue of rape. In 1975, Joanne Little was declared not guilty of stabbing a white prison guard who tried to rape her. That same year, rape laws were changed in 9 states to offer better protection for victims of rape. Perhaps, the rape of singer Connie Francis in 1977 made the biggest headlines while Uranus was in Scorpio. She was awarded $1,475,000 from the Howard Johnson motel chain because she was not provided with a safe and secure room.
In 1975, Susan Brownmiller gave us the now classic breakthrough study of rape in our society, the best seller, Against Our Will; Men. Women. And Rape. This book changed society's perception of rape. Brownmiller attacked the concept that rape was a sex crime, arguing instead that it was a crime of violence and power over the woman. She also corrected the then prevailing Neptunian view of rape as an indicator of masculine machismo and the rapist as a heroic sexual outlaw in her chapter entitled, "The Myth of the Heroic Rapist". In this chapter, she notes how film, literature, and music, from the glamorization of Jack the Ripper to Mick Jagger's "Midnight Rambler" gave us a false idea of what was actually happening in the instance of rape.
With Pluto now in Scorpio the brutal rape of the Central Park jogger by three black teens in 1989 enraged us all, as did the earlier 1983 gang rape of a young mother on a tavern pool table by six Portuguese aliens in New Bedford, Massachusetts. This terrifying rape became the basis for the 1986 film, The Accused, for which Jodie Foster won an Academy Award. With Pluto in Scorpio in 1986, this rape was not glamorized, but rather it's horror was explicitly revealed on camera.
However, we must keep in mind that not all rapes are committed by disadvantaged urban youth or rowdy thugs, and not all victims are female. A 1991 survey of students at Stanford University revealed that 1 out of 8 men surveyed had at one time been forced to have sex by a man they knew. 2 Most of the sexually assaulted women surveyed at Stanford also knew their attackers. Indeed, we are learning in the '90s that the would-be rapist is more likely to be the clean cut acquaintance next door than a violent stranger. An emotional national debate is occurring at this moment as to what actually constitutes a rape. An editorial in the New York Post argues that if a sexual encounter, forced or not, has been preceded by a series of consensual activities — drinking, a trip to the man's home, a walk on the beach at 3 in the morning — the charge against the alleged offender should be different than one filed against the violent youths who raped and mugged the Central Park jogger. 3
Sometimes, the issue of mutual consent is clouded. If the participants are young, drinking, and aroused, they are not very good at communicating. Often, date rape occurs, because men and women tend to misread each other's signals. As Susan Estrich, author of Real Rape , says, "in many cases, the man thought it was sex, and the woman thought it was rape, and they are both telling the truth." 4 Further complicating the issue of date rape are those who make false accusations of being raped when they have other reasons for their anger. As Nancy Gibbs says in Time "rape is an abuse of power... but so are false accusations of rape." 5
1991 brought us the celebrated rape trials of both boxer Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith. Whether both these men were actually guilty of rape or falsely accused is a matter of conjecture by many in society. As Liz Smith reported in her syndicated newspaper column, 9/16/92, a rumor making the rounds in 1992 is that Mike Tyson was framed by the Mafia in his date rape encounter, because he was threatening to quit professional fighting.
The real verdict or outcome of both these courtroom dramas, however, is that these much publicized trials served the cosmic function of focusing public awareness on the Plutonian issue of rape. More than 100,000 women reported being raped in 1990, a nationwide record, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee study released March 1991. The same study indicates the rate of sexual assault is increasing four times faster than the overall crime rate. More shocking were the later statistics of that same year 1990 released April 1992, by the psychiatric department at Medical University of South Carolina, which revealed that far more rapes occurred in 1990 than the Justice Department says — a staggering figure of 683,000 rapes a year!
Reliable statistics about date or "acquaintance" rape are hard to come by. Many of these incidents go unreported and some accusations about date rape are false. Be that as it may, in a 1990 study of 6,159 students by the National Institute of Mental Health one of four college women reported being the victim of rape or attempted rape, and nearly 90 % knew the assailant, half involving dating partners.
Date rape was the subject of William Faulkner's 1931 novel, Sanctuary, which was published shortly after Pluto's discovery. Now, with Pluto in Scorpio, date rape is not only a concern on every college campus, but it has also become an emotionally charged issue that affects each and every one of us. Pluto in Scorpio is telling us that both sexual parties have a moral duty not to use sex as a weapon to inflict either psychological or physical pain. Then, mutual consent will be a given, based on mutual respect.
CHILD ABUSE
In the same year as Pluto's discovery, 1930, the German film M, starring Peter Lorre as a murderer of children, was released to international acclaim. This classic film helped to solidify in the public eye the picture of the child abuser as a loathsome perverted psychotic. For years, children were brought up with the admonition not to accept candy from strangers. With Uranus in Scorpio in 1979, the public was shocked to learn in Christina Crawford's autobiography, Mommie Dearest that her mother, the revered film star, Joan Crawford, beat her at times with a wire coat hanger.
However, it wasn't until shortly after Pluto's entrance into Scorpio November 5, 1983 that the public became aware that child abuse was more prevalent than we thought and that the child abuser was more likely to be a family member, a parish priest, a school teacher, a day care worker, or a friend of the family than a stranger or "dirty old man".
1984, the first year of Pluto's transit in Scorpio, was a pivotal year as far as an increased awareness of child abuse was concerned. The Mc Martin pre-school day center scandal March 1984 made the public aware that trusted caregivers of children are capable of violating that trust. Even though some of the accused were exonerated after a 4-year trial, the public was in panic about child abuse the full year of 1984.
Unfortunately, the Mc Martin case was not an isolated example of child abuse in 1984, as further investigations of day care centers that year revealed that abuse of children was a widespread occurrence in day care centers — witness the cases that suddenly were in the public eye, from Chicago (May 84) to Florida (Aug 84), to New Jersey (Aug 84) to Bronx, New York (Aug 84). On May 14,1984, with Pluto retrograde at 0 SC 06, Newsweek ran the cover story "Sexual Abuse — The Growing Outcry Over Child Molesting" and on August 25,1984, with Pluto at 29 LI 57, NBC followed suit with its news show, The Silent Shame; The Nature of Child Abuse. One of the main concerns of this documentary was the use of children in pornographic literature. This expose led to Denmark cracking down on the child pornographers in that country.
Would this be the end of the story, unfortunately, not. Making the headlines in magazines, such as Rolling Stone and Newsweek in 1991/2 were the shocking revelations that a new kind of child abuser had come to public awareness with Pluto's entrance into Scorpio — kids as young as the age 5 brutally molesting other children. 6
First knowledge of this horrifying news came in 1984, during the first months of Pluto's current transit of Scorpio, when a Pacific Northwest juvenile counselor, Alison Stickrod Gray, found herself face to face with a 5 year old girl who, though herself a victim of sexual abuse at age 3, had been sent to Gray's office not as a victim of sexual abuse but as a sexual offender. About the same time in Los Angeles, Kee Mac Farlane was confronted with the same horrific situation --- a 4-year-old boy who had been sexually traumatized by an 11-year-old boy in a foster home.
In the years since these first cases were discovered, there has been a flood of reports of kids molesting other kids. Because Mac Farlane was unable to find a treatment program in either the juvenile justice system or in the existing field of victim treatment in our society for someone so young as this 11 year old boy, who was both victim and victimizer, she was led to start her own program in 1985, known as SPARK (Support Program for Abuse Reactive Kids). Later, she, with co-author Dr.Carolyn Cunningham, wrote the first book on the subject, When Children Molest Other Children.
For years, it was thought that adults who themselves had been molested as children grew up and then became child molesters. Society had no idea that some kids soon after they were molested in turn molested other children. Pluto in Scorpio is bringing us more insights into the causes and cures of child abuse, yet there are many questions still to be answered — for example, there are some cases of children, who have not been molested themselves, inflicting horrors on other Kids.
Each year of Pluto's presence in Scorpio brings new and more shocking stories of child abuse: from the couple that starved their 13 year old son to death in Fort Worth Texas in 1991; to the much publicized Steinberg case in New York 1987, which led to the death of 6 year oid Lisa; to the 1990 HBO movie Judgment about a pre-pubescent boy who was molested by his parish priest (one of many stories that have come to light in the 90's about priests and ministers as sexual molesters); to the North Carolina day-care operator who received 12 life terms for sexually abusing 12 pre-schoolers in 1991.
More and more people in the '90s are breaking the silence and speaking out about their personal memories of child abuse. Writer Richard Rhodes gave us his critically appraised 1990 biography A Hole in the World, a story of triumph and survival over a childhood marred by an abusive step mother. The Beach Boys' Brian Wilson published his 1991 autobiography In My Body, in which he also tells of life with an abusive father. Singer Sinead O'Connor also in 1991 told her story of a life of frequent beatings by her violent mother to Spin magazine in 1991. Roseanne Cash in her 1991 Central Park concert sang This World. a song about child abuse. The trio, Wilson Phillips, made up of the two daughters of Beach Boy Brian Wilson and one daughter of John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, on their 1992 album Shadows and Light sing Where Are You?, a song based on Chynna Phillips' memories of being sexually molested as a child (The assailant was not a family member).
In an effort to encourage more people to speak out about child abuse and to help both the victim and abuser to get help, the documentary Scared Si1ent. hosted by Oprah Winfrey, herself a victim of child abuse, was simultaneously broadcast on CBS, NBC, and PBS on September 4, 1992. As Winfrey notes, child abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the '90s, with a 1000 new cases being reported daily. She adds, abuse within the family often remains an unspoken horror because children will endure almost anything to keep the family together.
Indeed, there are many suffering in silence, their voices yet unheard. Perhaps, Suzanne Vega sings for all of these children in her 1987 hit song Luka. As critic Stephen Holden notes in the New York Times about Suzanne Vega singing Luka : in her "first-person monologue of a battered child, she projected a cheerful stoicism ... the suppression of fear, rage or self-pity in her voice suggested a character who was resilient but numbed." In Suzanne Vega's words," They only hit until you cry / And after that you don't ask why / You just don't argue anymore."7
In William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, which was published in 1929, shortly before Pluto's discovery in 1930, Quentin's awareness of the genuiness of his sexual longings for his sister Caddy, in his mind, was tantamount to actually committing incest and before the novel's end he commits suicide. With Uranus in Scorpio, the terrifying dark secret that lay at the bottom of the 1974 mystery-murder film Chinatown was incest. Though Scorpio is the sign of secrets, with Pluto here, even the most sinister and darkest of secrets are now coming to light.
This is especially true, when we consider the groundbreaking TV movie Something about Amelia, a sensitively depicted story about a father who commits incest with his daughter and subsequently is rehabilitated. Something About Amelia, for which Roxana Zal won an Emmy, for her portrayal of Amelia, was first broadcast January 14,1984, with Pluto at 1 SC 46. This TV movie was one of most widely viewed programs in television history and it awakened the general public to the fact that incest is more common than we thought. It also did away with some of the stereotypical thinking about the subject. But, equally important, it showed there is hope for both the victim of incest and the victimizer — a message that has now become prominent with Pluto currently in Scorpio.
If we take a look at Steven Spielberg's 1985 The Color Purple , based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize winning 1982 story of an Afro-American's harsh and brutal life in a poverty-stricken South, we marvel at the triumph of the human spirit over adversity in the example of her heroine Celie, as played by Whoopi Goldberg, in this her first film performance. Certainly, the odds were against this character, who not only twice was made pregnant by her incestuous father, but also endured and survived a marriage with an abusive husband, to later enjoy a healing and a coming to terms with her individuality — a remarkable performance by Goldberg about a remarkable human being in a remarkable film.
Still, some moviegoers may have been left with the feeling that in the mean environment of the main character's upbringing, in which incest was just another sordid fact of daily life, that Alice Walker's South was the same South that inspired the sometimes gothic fiction that we associate with writers such as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Conner, Carson Mc Cullers, and Tennessee Williams — all of whom have written of either aberrant characters or characters victimized by the sheer horror of their environmental circumstances.
Though The Color Purple 's immediate literary forbearer was the equally magnificent I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1972) — multi-talented Maya Angelou's personal memoir of what Susan Brownwiller, in her Against Our Will calls, "the most moving and painful account of childhood rape that ever was put to paper," the catastrophic circumstances of her early life are beyond most readers' experiences. 8
And this is why Something. About Amelia is so noteworthy. The Color Purple and I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings are works of art and testaments to the endurance of the human spirit that evoke in the reader the same incredible awe that we reserve for those who survived the holocaust. These are larger than life figures. In Something about Amelia we have incest for the middle class (I don't mean these words as a disparagement), but rather here we marvel how a proper refined office worker (as played by Ted Danson), who has many likable qualities, could come to these circumstances.
We see incest here affecting the whole family, and we see that family pull together. There are no villains here, which makes it all the more remarkable to us that incest could occur at all in Something About Amelia, our stereotype casting of victim-victimizer is blown away here. Guilt doesn't make the abuser commit suicide, or the viewing audience breathe a sigh of relief that the victimized daughter has finally gotten away from this awful man -- for he is not an awful man, even though what he did was horrific. Both victim and victimizer stay around for the healing that must occur if this family is to survive, if this father/daughter relationship is to be reborn.
Much work is going on in the '90s to heal the survivors of incest. So painful are the repressed memories of early incest, that many victims of incest do not recall these experiences until much later in life. Though much ado has been made of the fact that celebrities like Roseanne Arnold, La Toya Jackson, Man Derber Atler, a former Miss America, have in a chain reaction come forward in 1991 to speak of their childhood misfortunes, some members of the media have callowly dismissed these confessions as publicity stunts.
But Roseanne Arnold, Van Derber Alter, et.al. are typical of the typical incest survivor. Since Pluto entered Scorpio, laws have been changed in many states to account for the fact that many victims of incest do not recall their experiences until years later (typically, between ages 29-50). Consequently, the statute of limitations has been changed in incest cases, thanks to the pioneering work of incest-law reform advocates Patti and Kelly Barton, Shari Karney, and Mary R. Williams in 1985/6, whose patient labors began to pay off in 1988, when Washington became the first state to allow victims to bring suit for up to three years after the memory returns. 9 A dozen other states have since followed Washington's example. Books such as The Courage to Heal , by Ellen Bass/Laura Davis(1988) and Allies in Healing (1991) by Laura Davis recently have been written to help the incest survivor reclaim his or her life.
Many victims of incest have been reaching out to help others victims of incest. Some may feel that these are examples of "misery loving company" — but it does help to have someone to talk to. Ask Oprah Winfrey, one of the first to speak out on this subject in 1985 and now a leading spokesperson on any form of child abuse. It was upon hearing someone else's true story of being molested by a parent on her own talk show that, for Oprah, it suddenly all had to come out. On national TV, with tears rolling down her cheeks, Oprah Winfrey unashamedly told the world that she too had been a victim of incest.
She spoke out in the same year that she received the public's deserved admiration for her performance in The Color Purple , where she played Sophia, a character with a zest of life, whose spirit is crushed because of a severe beating. No one whoever saw this film will forget the pain engraved in Oprah's eyes, when we first see Sophia after the beating. In retrospect, you just know she drew on her own experience of being abused to give such a meaningful performance.
Footnotes
1. Liz Greene, The Astro!ooy of Fate (York Beach, Maine, Samuel Weiser Inc., 1984), p. 40.
2.National Enquirer, September 24, 1991, p.23.
3. As reported by Nancy Gibbs in "When Is It Rape?", Time June 3, 1991, pps. 48-53.
4. ibid .
5. ibid .
6. The information reported here on kids abusing other kids was derived from Newsweek’s "When Kids Molest Kids", March 30, 1992 and Sara Terry's "Sins of the Innocent", Rolling Stone , October 31, 1992.
7. Susan Brownwiller, Against Our Will; Men. Women, and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1976, p.302.
8. See "Incest and the Law" by Carol Lynn Mithers, The New York Times Magazine, October 21, 1990 for a full account of early attempts to reform incest laws