All rights reserved. It was first published in 1980 in the anthology Take Back the Night , edited by Laura Lederer. I had been named in one of the Times editorials and thought that ethically I was entitled to some right of response. A great many men, no small number of them leftist lawyers, are apparently afraid that feminists are going to take their dirty pictures away from them. The enforced silence of women through the centuries has not.
Some elementary observations are in order.
The Constitution of the United States was written exclusively by white men who owned land. Some owned black slaves, male and female. Many more owned white women who were also chattel. The Bill of Rights was never intended to protect the civil or sexual rights of women and it has not, except occasionally by accident. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would, as a polite afterthought, extend equal protection under the law such as it is to women, is not yet part of the Constitution.