Susan Brownmiller: Rape Alarmist or Rape Apologist?

Revisiting my never-published interview with the legendary feminist author

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In the fall of 2016, just a few weeks before the election of Donald Trump, I visited legendary journalist, author, and feminist activist Susan Brownmiller at her home in New York City. I wanted to interview her for the book that would become The Problem With Everything. The visit was interesting and a little weird. I’ll say more about it in a few paragraphs.

Brownmiller died on Saturday at age 90. After starting her career in the 1960s as a magazine researcher and television news writer, she became involved in second-wave feminist activism and in 1975 published one of the most influential books of the era.

In Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Brownmiller argued for a more dynamic interpretation of rape, suggesting that rape was not only a private crime but a weapon of war.

Deeply affected by the news of genocidal rapes committed in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, Brownmiller developed a set of ideas around the concept of rape as an assertion of power. Extrapolating from there, she concluded that “rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”

The line became the book's centerpiece and the defining statement of Brownmiller’s career. It was a career filled with controversial and often contradictory statements, and for that I found her a fascinating figure.

In 2016, at the beginning stages of research for my book The Problem With Everything, I interviewed Brownmiller for several hours at her apartment in New York City. The interview, which took place shortly before I left for a teaching stint at the University of Iowa, never made it into the book. The world changed dramatically in the ensuing years, and my inability to get a follow-up interview with Brownmiller made the first one effectively unusable.

But the initial meeting figured in earlier drafts of the book (there were many drafts) and over this past weekend, I was able to dig up the section I’d written about it. For added context at the end, I’m including a bit that came after the Brownmiller section. Every time I revisit The Problem With Everything, I’m reminded what a beast it was to write. I’m also reminded that despite the beating it took, it’s a pretty damn good book.

I’m still searching for the transcript of the actual Brownmiller interview, though I suspect it’s buried deep in the bowels of a long-ago-expired Dropbox account. If I find it, you’ll be the first to know.

From an early draft of The Problem With Everything.

A few months before I left for Iowa, I visited Susan Brownmiller at her home in New York City. Part of what I wanted to talk about involved some quotes she’d given to New York Magazine in response to a series of questions thrown at her by a reporter as she left a movie screening.

In that “interview,” which got her in trouble with the feminist blogosphere, Brownmiller, who was 81 at the time, called the current state of campus anti-rape activism “a very limited movement that doesn’t accept reality.”