ABSTRACT
In the book, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism, Robin Morgan relates an incident that occurred during a civil rights movement meeting in the early 1960s. Twenty years later, in the spring of 1984, Christopher Wilder raped and murdered a still unknown number of women. About to be apprehended by the police, he shot himself. From a feminist perspective, there is no mystery behind Wilder's actions. His were sexually political murders, a form of murder rooted in a system of male supremacy in the same way that lynching is based in white supremacy. Such murder is, in short, a form of patriarchal terrorism. The murders of women and children—including torture and murder by husbands, lovers, and fathers, as well as that committed by strangers—are not some inexplicable evil or the domain of "monsters" only. On the contrary, sexual murder is the ultimate expression of sexuality as a form of power.
