From the February/March 1996 issue of Mass RAIL, a publication of the Massachusetts Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL), a part of the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM). The article, which concerns a date rape case at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, may be interpreted as a bewildered attempt by the traditional, "hard" Marxist Left to come to terms with young turks.

Popular pseudo-feminist Katie Koestner spoke about her date rape to a packed room of several hundred. In 1990, after she had dated a man for a week and a half, he raped her in her college dorm room. The District Attorney wouldn't prosecute the man. Koestner then asked her college to take disciplinary action; the man was banned from Koestner's dorm for the semester.

Now Koestner is on a tour of college campuses, lecturing about date rape: what it is, and how to avoid it. Her lectures are a confused but deliberate attempt to separate rape from sex. MIM believes that no meaningful distinction between the two is possible under patriarchy; women never consented to being born into a system in which men have more power than they do, so how can women ever give coercion-free consent to individual sex acts?

While MIM acknowledges that under patriarchy, all sex is rape, we know that First World women do not need sexual relationships for survival. MIM upholds asexuality as the most advanced sexual practice if done correctly. [!] We also do have policies regarding divorce for spousal abuse. As the next best thing to asexuality, we require forever monogamy of our members and advocate it for the masses, because a commitment to working through problems in a relationship is a closest thing to a guarantee of increasing equality in a relationship. We work to abolish patriarchy which is the only way to end rape. Feminists need to focus on building independent institutions of the oppressed to overthrow patriarchy, not on how to distinguish between good sex and bad sex within the confines of patriarchy....

Koestner is pro-pig, encouraging women to file rape charges in criminal courts, and to pressure college judicial systems to give stronger punishments....

On a related note, the following are highlights from 'Prison Awareness Week, 1995':

Dr. Allyn Rickett spoke about his experience in a Chinese prison undergoing a process of thought reform through criticism and self-criticism. Dr. Rickett and his wife were American students in revolutionary China. He was justly arrested as an Amerikan spy. Many members of the audience remarked on the differences between Dr. Rickett's treatment—as a serious objective enemy of the people—and the treatment of Amerika's prisoners.

RAIL and MIM held a panel discussion of why all prisoners are political prisoners. One anarchist thought calling all prisoners political prisoners was detracting from the importance of those incarcerated for their openly political acts. While MIM agreed with the importance of defending revolutionary leaders, we do not think recognizing the political nature of all incarceration takes away from the sacrifices made by individuals in the revolutionary struggle. While many in attendance thought MIM was right about the political nature of incarceration, others were outright reactionary and thought the solution to "racial" disparities in arrest and conviction was incarcerating more white people—and they weren't talking about Bill Clinton.

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