Feminist Explanations: Male Power, Hostility, and Sexual Coercion (From Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on its Nature, Causes and Prevention, P 61-73, 1991, Elizabeth Grauerholz, Mary A Koralewski, eds. -- See NCJ-128585)

• NCJ Number: 128590
• Author(s): W E Stock
• Date Published: 1991
• Length: 13 pages
• Sale Source: Lexington Books
• Publication Format: Book (Hardbound)
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This chapter applies a feminist analysis to explain the presence of sexual coercion in our society.

Abstract

It discusses rape as a power-motivated crime, male dominance and sexual coercion, sexual coercion as a learned social control of women, pornography as the cultural eroticization of sexual coercion, and sexual coercion as sexual terrorism. The feminist analysis defines sexual coercion as power-motivated and upholding a system of male dominance. The nature of sexual coercion as socially-constructed, learned behavior is linked to socialization influences that affect males, particularly pornography. A definition of the feminist approach to sexual coercion has three components: acknowledgment of the gender differential in power; acknowledgment of how these disparities in power affect all social interactions between women and men as well as individual behavior and psychological issues; and acknowledgment of the principle of hegemonic control. A discussion of sexual coercion as sexual terrorism concludes the chapter. Sexual terrorism is defined as a system by which males frighten, thereby controlling and dominating, females. Sexual terrorism has five components: ideology, propaganda, indiscriminate and amoral violence, voluntary compliance, and society's perception of the terrorist and the terrorized.