Dworkin Andrea

Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

PLUME

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Copyright © 1974 by Andrea Dworkin

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For Grace Paley

and in Memory o f Emma Goldman

. . . Shakespeare had a sister; but do not

look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the

poet. She died young —alas, she never

wrote a word.. . . Now my belief is that

this poet who never wrote a word and was

buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives

in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are

washing up the dishes and putting the

children to bed. But she lives; for great

poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to

walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within

your power to give her. For my belief is

that if we live another century or so—I

am talking of the common life which is the

real life and not of the little separate lives

which we live as individuals —and have

five hundred a year each of us and rooms

of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what

we think; if we escape a little from the

common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each

other but in relation to reality. . . if we

face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is

no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and

that our relation is to the world of reality

. . . then the opportunity will come and the

dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister

will put on the body which she has so often

laid down. Drawing her life from the lives

of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she

will be born. As for her coming without

that preparation, without that effort on

our part, without that determination that

when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we

cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come

if we worked for her, and that so to work,

even in poverty and obscurity, is worthwhile.

Virginia Woolf,

A Room of One's Own (1929)

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T

Ricki Abrams and I began writing this book together in

Amsterdam, Holland, in December 1971. We worked

long and hard and through a lot o f living and then, for

many reasons, our paths separated. Ricki went to Australia, then to India. I returned to Amerika. So the book, in its early pieces and fragments, became mine as

the responsibility for finishing it became mine. I thank

Ricki here for the work we did together, and the time

we had together, and this book which came from that

time and grew beyond it.

Andrea Dworkin

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

17

Part One: THE FAIRY TALES

29

Chapter 1 Onceuponatime: The Roles

34

Chapter 2 Onceuponatime: The Moral of the

Story

47

Part Two: THE PORNOGRAPHY

5 1

Chapter 3 Woman as Victim: Story of O

55

Chapter 4 Woman as Victim: The Image

64

Chapter 5 Woman as Victim: Suck

75

Part Three: THE HERSTORY

91

Chapter 6 Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

95

Chapter 7 Gynocide: The Witches

118

Part Four: ANDROGYNY

151

Chapter 8 Androgyny: The Mythological Model

155

Chapter 9 Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and

Community

174

Afterword

197

Notes

205

Bibliography

211

There is a misery of the body and a misery

of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

looked at them, poured nectar into our

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

The Revolution is not an event that takes

two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it

becomes a non-alienated human society,

free from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke

March 7, 1968

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation, June 1973

I N T R O D U C T I O N

This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal. It has no other purpose. It is not cerebral wisdom, or academic horseshit, or ideas carved

in granite or destined for immortality. It is part o f a

process and its context is change. It is part o f a planetary movement to restructure community forms and human consciousness so that people have power over

their own lives, participate fully in community, live in

dignity and freedom.

T h e commitment to ending male dominance as the

fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality o f earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation o f

the self and transformation o f the social reality on every

level. T h e core o f this book is an analysis o f sexism (that

system o f male dominance), what it is, how it operates

on us and in us. However, I do want to discuss briefly

two problems, tangential to that analysis, but still crucial

to the development o f revolutionary program and consciousness. T h e first is the nature o f the women’s movement as such, and the second has to do with the work o f the writer.

17

10

Woman Hating

Until the appearance of the brilliant anthology

Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett’s extraordinary

book Sexual Politics, women did not think o f themselves

as oppressed people. Most women, it must be admitted,

still do not. But the women’s movement as a radical

liberation movement in Amerika can be dated from the

appearance of those two books. We learn as we reclaim

our herstory that there was a feminist movement which

organized around the attainment of the vote for

women. We learn that those feminists were also ardent

abolitionists. Women “came out” as abolitionists —out

of the closets, kitchens, and bedrooms; into public

meetings, newspapers, and the streets. Two activist

heroes o f the abolitionist movement were Black women,

Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, and they stand

as prototypal revolutionary models.

Those early Amerikan feminists thought that suffrage was the key to participation in Amerikan democracy and that, free and enfranchised, the former slaves would in fact be free and enfranchised. Those women

did not imagine that the vote would be effectively denied Blacks through literacy tests, property qualifications, and vigilante police action by white racists. Nor did they imagine the “separate but equal” doctrine and

the uses to which it would be put.

Feminism and the struggle for Black liberation were

parts of a compelling whole. That whole was called,

ingenuously perhaps, the struggle for human rights.

The fact is that consciousness, once experienced, cannot

be denied. Once women experienced themselves as activists and began to understand the reality and meaning of oppression, they began to articulate a politically

Introduction

19

conscious feminism. T h eir focus, their concrete objective, was to attain suffrage for women.

T h e women’s movement formalized itself in 1848 at

Seneca Falls when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia

Mott, both activist abolitionists, called a convention.

T hat convention drafted The Seneca Falls Declaration of

Rights and Sentiments which is to this day an outstanding

feminist declaration.

In struggling for the vote, women developed many

o f the tactics which were used, almost a century later,

in the Civil Rights Movement. In order to change laws,

women had to violate them. In order to change convention, women had to violate it. T h e feminists (suffragettes) were militant political activists who used the tactics o f civil disobedience to achieve their goals.

T h e struggle for the vote began officially with the

Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It was not until

August 26, 1920, that women were given the vote by the

kindly male electorate. Women did not imagine that the

vote would scarcely touch on, let alone transform, their

own oppressive situations. Nor did they imagine that

the “separate but equal” doctrine would develop as

a tool o f male dominance. Nor did they imagine the

uses to which it would be put.

T here have also been, always, individual feminists —

women who violated the strictures o f the female role,

who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the

right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the

bondage o f the marriage contract. Those individuals

were often eloquent when they spoke o f the oppression

they suffered as women in their own lives, but other

women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen.

20

Woman Haling

Feminists, most often as individuals but sometimes in

small militant groups, fought the system which oppressed them, analyzed it, were jailed, were ostracized, but there was no general recognition among women

that they were oppressed.

In the last 5 or 6 years, that recognition has become

more widespread among women. We have begun to understand the extraordinary violence that has been done to us, that is being done to us: how our minds are

aborted in their development by sexist education; how

our bodies are violated by oppressive grooming imperatives; how the police function against us in cases of rape and assault; how the media, schools, and

churches conspire to deny us dignity and freedom; how

the nuclear family and ritualized sexual behavior imprison us in roles and forms which are degrading to us.

We developed consciousness-raising sessions to try to

fathom the extraordinary extent of our despair, to try

to search out the depth and boundaries of our internalized anger, to try to find strategies for freeing ourselves from oppressive relationships, from masochism and passivity, from our own lack of self-respect. There

was both pain and ecstasy in this process. Women

discovered each other, for truly no oppressed group

had ever been so divided and conquered. Women began to deal with concrete oppressions: to become part of the economic process, to erase discriminatory laws,

to gain control over our own lives and over our own

bodies, to develop the concrete ability to survive on our

own terms. Women also began to articulate structural

analyses o f sexist society — Millett did that with Sexual

Politics; in Vaginal Politics Ellen Frankfort demonstrated

Introduction

21

the complex and deadly antiwoman biases o f the medical establishment; in Women and Madness Dr. Phyllis Chesler showed that mental institutions are prisons for

women who rebel against society’s well-defined female

role.

We began to see ourselves clearly, and what we saw

was dreadful. We saw that we were, as Yoko O no wrote,

the niggers o f the world, slaves to the slave. We saw

that we were the ultimate house niggers, ass-licking,

bowing, scraping, shuffling fools. We recognized all o f

our social behavior as learned behavior that functioned

for survival in a sexist world: we painted ourselves,

smiled, exposed legs and ass, had children, kept

house, as our accommodations to the reality o f power

politics.

Most o f the women involved in articulating the oppression o f women were white and middle class. We spent, even if we did not earn or control, enormous

sums o f money. Because o f our participation in the mid-

dle-class lifestyle we were the oppressors o f other

people, our poor white sisters, our Black sisters, our

Chicana sisters —and the men who in turn oppressed

them. This closely interwoven fabric o f oppression,

which is the racist class structure o f Amerika today,

assured that wherever one stood, it was with at least one

foot heavy on the belly o f another human being.

As white, middle-class women, we lived in the house

o f the oppressor-of-us-all who supported us as he

abused us, dressed us as he exploited us, “treasured”

us in payment for the many functions we performed.

We were the best-fed, best-kept, best-dressed, most

willing concubines the world has ever known. We had

22

Woman Hating

no dignity and no real freedom, but we did have good

health and long lives.

The women’s movement has not dealt with this

bread-and-butter issue, and that is its most awful

failure. There has been little recognition that the destruction of the middle-class lifestyle is crucial to the development of decent community forms in which all

people can be free and have dignity. T here is certainly

no program to deal with the realities of the class system

in Amerika. On the contrary, most of the women’s

movement has, with appalling blindness, refused to take

that kind o f responsibility. Only the day-care movement

has in any way reflected, or acted pragmatically on, the

concrete needs of all classes of women. The anger at

the Nixon administration for cutting day-care funds is

naive at best. Given the structure o f power politics and

capital in Amerika, it is ridiculous to expect the federal

government to act in the interests o f the people. The

money available to middle-class women who identify

as feminists must be channeled into the programs we

want to develop, and we must develop them. In general,

middle-class women have absolutely refused to take any

action, make any commitment which would interfere

with, threaten, or significantly alter a lifestyle, a living

standard, which is moneyed and privileged.

The analysis of sexism in this book articulates

clearly what the oppression o f women is, how it functions, how it is rooted in psyche and culture. But that analysis is useless unless it is tied to a political consciousness and commitment which will totally redefine community. One cannot be free, never, not ever, in an

unfree world, and in the course o f redefining family,

Introduction

23

church, power relations, all the institutions which inhabit and order our lives, there is no way to hold onto privilege and comfort. T o attempt to do so is destructive, criminal, and intolerable.

T h e nature o f women’s oppression is unique: women

are oppressed as women, regardless o f class or race;

some women have access to significant wealth, but that

wealth does not signify power; women are to be found

everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut o f the machinery and way o f life which is ruinous to us. And perhaps most importantly, most women have little sense o f dignity or self-

respect or strength, since those qualities are directly

related to a sense o f manhood. In Revolutionary Suicide,

Huey P. Newton tells us that the Black Panthers did not

use guns because they were symbols o f manhood, but

found the courage to act as they did because they were

men. When we women find the courage to defend ourselves, to take a stand against brutality and abuse, we are violating every notion o f womanhood we have ever

been taught. T h e way to freedom for women is bound

to be torturous for that reason alone.

T h e analysis in this book applies to the life situations o f all women, but all women are not necessarily in a state o f primary emergency as women. What I mean

by this is simple. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, I would be

oppressed as a woman, but hunted, slaughtered, as a

Jew. As a Native American, I would be oppressed as

a squaw, but hunted, slaughtered, as a Native Am erican. That first identity, the one which brings with it as

24

Woman Hating

part of its definition death, is the identity of primary

emergency. This is an important recognition because it

relieves us of a serious confusion. The fact, for instance,

that many Black women (by no means all) experience

primary emergency as Blacks in no way lessens the responsibility of the Black community to assimilate this and other analyses of sexism and to apply it in their own

revolutionary work.

As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am

particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are

writing, and the reasons why. I want writers to write

books because they are committed to the content of

those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I

want writers to write books that can make a difference

in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to

write books that are worth being jailed for, worth

fighting for, and should it come to that in this country,

worth dying for.

Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial

ventures. People write them to make money, to become

famous, to build or augment other careers. Most Amerikans do not read books—they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art,

then somewhere else, unrelated, life. The notion is that

to have a decent or moral idea is to be a decent or moral

person. Because o f this strange schizophrenia, books

and the writing o f them have become embroidery on a

dying way o f life. Because there is contempt for the

process o f writing, for writing as a way o f discovering

meaning and truth, and for reading as a piece of that

same process, we destroy with regularity the few serious

Introduction

25

writers we have. We turn them into comic-book figures,

bleed them o f all privacy and courage and common

sense, exorcise their vision from them as sport, demand

that they entertain or be ignored into oblivion. And it

is a great tragedy, for the work o f the writer has never

been more important than it is now in Amerika.

Many see that in this nightmared land, language has

no meaning and the work o f the writer is ruined. Many

see that the triumph o f authoritarian consciousness is

its ability to render the spoken and written word meaningless—so that we cannot talk or hear each other speak.

It is the work o f the writer to reclaim the language from

those who use it to justify murder, plunder, violation.

T h e writer can and must do the revolutionary work o f

using words to communicate, as community.

Those o f us who love reading and writing believe

that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the

truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being

afraid, and never lying. Those o f us who love reading

and writing feel great pain because so many people

who write books have become cowards, clowns, and

liars. Those o f us who love reading and writing begin

to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see

writers being bought and sold in the market place — we

see them vending their tarnished wares on every street

corner. T oo many writers, in keeping with the Am erikan way o f life, would sell their mothers for a dime.

T o keep the sacred trust o f the writer is simply to

respect the people and to love the community. T o violate that trust is to abuse oneself and do damage to others. I believe that the writer has a vital function in

the community, and an absolute responsibility to the

26

Woman Hating

people. I ask that this book be judged in that context.

Specifically Woman Hating is about women and

men, the roles they play, the violence between them.

We begin with fairy tales, the first scenarios of women

and men which mold our psyches, taught to us before we can know differently. We go on to pornography, where we find the same scenarios, explicitly sexual and now more recognizable, ourselves, carnal

women and heroic men. We go on to herstory —the

binding of feet in China, the burning o f witches in

Europe and Amerika. There we see the fairy-tale and

pornographic definitions of women functioning in

reality, the real annihilation of real women —the crushing into nothingness o f their freedom, their will, their lives —how they were forced to live, and how they were

forced to die. We see the dimensions of the crime, the

dimensions of the oppression, the anguish and misery

that are a direct consequence of polar role definition,

of women defined as carnal, evil, and Other. We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it,

rebuilding it as we can imagine it.

I write however with a broken tool, a language which

is sexist and discriminatory to its core. I try to make the

distinctions, not “history” as the whole human story, not

“man” as the generic term for the species, not “manhood” as the synonym for courage, dignity, and strength. But I have not been successful in reinventing

the language.

This work was not done in isolation. It owes much to

others. I thank my sisters who everywhere are standing

Introduction

27

up, for themselves, against oppression. I thank my sisters, the women who are searching into our common past, writing it so that we can know it and be proud. I

thank my sisters, these particular women whose work

has contributed so much to my own consciousness and

resolve — Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Shulamith Firestone, Judith Malina, and Jill Johnston.

I also thank those others who have, through their

books and lives, taught me so much —in particular,

Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Daniel Berrigan, Jean

Genet, Huey P. Newton, Julian Beck, and Tim othy

Leary.

I thank my friends in Amsterdam who were family

for the writing o f much o f this book and who helped

me in very hard times.

I thank Mel Clay who believed in this book from its

most obscure beginnings, the editors o f Suck and in

particular Susan Janssen, Deborah Rogers, Martin

Duberman, and Elaine Markson who has been wonderful to me. I thank Marian Skedgell for her help and kindness. I thank Brian Murphy who tried to tell me a

long time ago that O was an oppressed person. Chapter

3 is dedicated to Brian.

I thank Karen Malpede and Garland Harris for their

support and help. I thank Joan Schenkar for pushing

me a little further than I was willing, or able, to go.

I thank Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, Kathleen

Norris, and Muriel Rukeyser. Without their love and

friendship this work would never have been done.

Without their examples o f strength and commitment,

I do not know who I would be, or how.

I thank my brother Mark and my sister-in-law Carol

28

Woman Hating

for their friendship, warmth, and trust. And I thank

my parents, Sylvia and Harry Dworkin, for their devotion and support through all these years, which must have seemed to them interminable, when their daughter was learning her craft. I thank them for raising me with real caring and tenderness, for believing in me so

that I could learn to believe in myself.

Andrea Dworkin

New York City, July 1973

Part One

THE FAIRY TALES

You cannot be free if you are contained

within a fiction.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her

name was

Lilith

Eve

Hagar

Jezebel

Delilah

Pandora

Jahi

Tam ar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

goddess and her name was

Kali

Fatima

Artemis

Hera

Isis

Mary

Ishtar

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

queen and her name was

Bathsheba

31

32

Woman Hating

Vashti

Cleopatra

Helen

Salome

Elizabeth

Clytemnestra

Medea

and there was a wicked witch and she was also called

witch and her name was

Joan

Circe

Morgan le Fay

Tiamat

Maria Leonza

Medusa

and they had this in common: that they were feared,

hated, desired, and worshiped.

When one enters the world of fairy tale one seeks

with difficulty for the actual place where legend and

history part. One wants to locate the precise moment

when fiction penetrates into the psyche as reality, and

history begins to mirror it. Or vice versa. Women

live in fairy tale as magical figures, as beauty, danger,

innocence, malice, and gr eed. In the personae of the

fairy tale —the wicked witch, the beautiful princess,

the heroic prince —we find what the culture would have

us know about who we are.

The point is that we have not formed that ancient

world —it has formed us. We ingested it as children

whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on

our minds as cultural absolutes long before we were in

fact men and women. We have taken the fairy tales of

Woman Hating

33

childhood with us into maturity, chewed but still lying

in the stomach, as real identity. Between Snow-white

and her heroic prince, our two great fictions, we never

did have much o f a chance. A t some point, the Great

Divide took place: they (the boys) dreamed o f mounting

the Great Steed and buying Snow-white from the

dwarfs; we (the girls) aspired to become that object o f

every necrophiliac’s lust —the innocent, victimized Sleeping Beauty, beauteous lump o f ultimate, sleeping good.

Despite ourselves, sometimes unknowing, sometimes

knowing, unwilling, unable to do otherwise, we act out

the roles we were taught.

Here is the beginning, where we learn who we must

be, as well as the moral o f the story.

C H A P T E R 1

Onceuponatime: The Roles

Death is that remedy all singers dream of

Allen Ginsberg

The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,

what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.

We are bom into a sex role which is determined by

visible sex, or gender.

We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth

into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.

In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct

consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.

Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.

There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex

there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.

We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that

death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,

the body. We recognize the body as the source of our

suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,

bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role

which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any

real self-becoming or self-realization.

Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood

34

Onceuponatime: The Roles

35

models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes

us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil

will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,

then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we

forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince

searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic

prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as

the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror

remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to

be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the

wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively

evil.

Terror, then, is our real theme.

The Mother as a Figure of Terror

Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the

woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on

which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good

queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.

She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in

her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the

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Woman Hating

snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white

as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the

embroidery frame.” 1 Soon after, she had a daughter

with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and

hair as black as ebony. ” 2 Then, she died.

A year later, the king married again. His new wife

was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact,

ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the

male realm, that beauty translated directly into power

because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male

devotion.

The new queen had a magic mirror and she would

ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest

of us all? ” 3 And inevitably, the queen was the fairest

(had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the

king would have married her).

One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest

was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full

fair, *tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ” 4

Snow-white was 7 years old.

The queen became “yellow and green with envy,

and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-

white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill

weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had

no peace.. . . ” 5

Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve

peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would

have made an excellent head o f state). She ordered a

huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and

bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired

good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he

turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its

Onceuponatime: The Roles

37

heart back to the queen. T h e heart was “salted and

cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that

there was an end o f Snow-white. ” 6

Snow-white found her way to the home o f the 7

dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if

you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and

make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything

tidy and clean. ” 7 T hey simply adored her.

T h e queen, who can now be called with conviction

the wicked queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-

white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several

times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep

sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen

made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant

Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.

T h e dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear

to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a

glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. T h e

heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately

fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought

her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants

carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the

piece o f poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed

“flew out o f her throat. ” 8 She soon revived fully, that

is to say, not much. T he prince placed her squarely in

the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective

too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“ I would rather

have you than anything in the world. ” 9 T he wicked

queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended

because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer

Woman Haling

than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron

shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down

dead. ” 10

Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her

biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon

dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced

to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was

done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes

of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils

from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on

the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s

stepmother knew how the social structure operated,

and she was determined to succeed on its terms.

Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated

by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of

human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real

basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:

[When the prince began to search for the woman whose

foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were

very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest

went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother

stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it,

Onceuponatime: The Roles

39

for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed

her a knife, and said,

“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,

and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the

pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her

with him on his horse as his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the

blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and

took the false bride home again, saying that she was

not the right one, and that the other sister must try

on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and

got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.

Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut

a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ”

So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her

foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down

to the prince, who took his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how

the blood was flowing. . . . 11

Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her

only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.

Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was

consonant with the values o f the market place.* She

loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f

the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love

in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-

dored thing.

Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.

*

This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and

mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter

6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

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Woman Hating

She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long

wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her

wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal

rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she

craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she

made this offer:

. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on

one condition — the child that will come into the world

must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and

I will care for it like a mother. 13

Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a

vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did

not do much better by her:

When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up

in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither

steps nor door, only a small window above. When the

witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!” 14

The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white

and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When

the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel,

cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and

desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ” 15

The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the

tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered

when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily

ever after. )

Onceuponatime: The Roles

41

Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply

abandoned them:

I will tell you what, husband.. . . We will take the

children early in the morning into the forest, where

it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give

each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our

work and leave them alone; they will never find the

way home again, and we shall be quit of them. 16

Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy

house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them,

feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.

These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female

figures. T hey define for us the female character and

delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good,

she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more o f the same.

Here we discover the cardinal principle o f sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She

has one real function, motherhood. In that function,

because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice.

She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children

and other living things. W hether called mother, queen,

stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch,

the content o f nightmare, the source o f terror.

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Woman Haling

The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good

What can it do? It grows,

It bleeds. It sleeps.

It walks. It talks,

Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”

Kathleen Norris

For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as

close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s

most winning quality.

Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking

her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince

woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep,

or was it because she was asleep?

Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince

fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with

the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without

looking upon Snow-white. ” 17 It awake was not readily

distinguishable from it asleep.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel

—all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence,

and victimization. They are archetypal good women —

victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate,

confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.

They have one scenario of passage. They are moved,

as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house

o f the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they

are objects o f romantic adoration. They do nothing to

warrant either.

That one other figure of female good, the good

fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes

Onceuponatime: The Roles

43

or virtue. H er power cannot match, only occasionally

moderate, the power o f the wicked witch. She does have

one physical activity at which she excels — she waves her

wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly,

she disappears.

These figures o f female good are the heroic models

available to women. And the end o f the story is, it would

seem, the goal o f any female life. T o sleep, perchance

to dream?

The Prince, the Real Brother

The man of flesh and bone; the man who

is bom, suffers, and dies—above all, who

dies; the man who eats and drinks and

plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the

man who is seen and heard; the brother,

the real brother.

Miguel de Unamuno,

Tragic Sense of Life

He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is,

he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He

travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person o f worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.

O f course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to

become him. T hey suffer, and murder, and rape, and

plunder. T hey use airplanes now.

What matters is that he is both powerful and good,

that his power is by definition good. What matters is

that he matters, acts, succeeds.

One can point out that in fact he is not very bright.

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Woman Haling

For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her

two sisters though he danced with her and presumably

conversed with her. His recurring love o f corpses does

not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from

the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even

physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern

counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates

the wrong village.

The truth o f it is that he is powerful and good when

contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is.

The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of

the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the

shabby reality of the man as hero.

The Husband, the Real Father

The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.

George Gilder, Sexual Suicide

Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are,

again by definition, powerful and good. They are never

responsible or held accountable for the evil done by

their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice

it.

There is, of course, no rational basis for considering

them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved

progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale

Onceuponatime: The Roles

45

fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.

Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her

picking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.

T he father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a good

heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon

the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ” 18 When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found

their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell

on their father’s neck. T h e man had not had a quiet

hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,

after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do not

misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was

nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the

woman. He was a good man.

Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman

in the first place, has no emotional connection with his

child, does not interact in any meaningful way with

her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she

is dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is the

patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.

T he roles available to women and men are clearly

articulated in fairy tales. T h e characters o f each are

vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship

possible between them. We see that powerful women

are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that

men are always good, no matter what they do, or do

not do.

We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear

Woman Hating

family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,

murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,

female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystaliza-

tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that

culture.

C H A P T E R 2

Onceuponatime: The Moral

of the Story

Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,

Honor the sisters of your friends.

Pieces of ass, a piece of action,

Pieces.

The loneliest of mornings

Something moves about in the mirror.

A slave’s trick, survival.

I remember thinking, our last time:

If you killed me, I would die.

Kathleen Norris

I cannot live without my life.

Emily Bronte

T h e lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

T h e heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

T he good father can never be confused with the bad

mother. T h eir qualities are different, polar.

W here he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake,

she is asleep. W here he is active, she is passive. Where

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Woman Hating

she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be

destroyed.

It is, structurally at least, that simple.

She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.

Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in

her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed.

She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of

power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male

power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is

evil. She is evil because she acts.

She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is

repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured.

There are two definitions of woman. There is the

good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.

She must be destroyed. The good woman must be

possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished.

Both must be nullified.

The bad woman must be punished, and if she is

punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to

be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces

women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished,

destroyed, so that they can become good.

Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity

Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story

49

convinces her that she is bad. T h e bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.

T h e moral o f the story should, one would think,

preclude a happy ending. It does not. T h e moral o f the

story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for

a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or

asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who

is good —inert, passive, victim ized—and that a good

woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Part Two

THE PORNOGRAPHY

Among my brethren are many who dream

with wet pleasure of the eight hundred

pains and humiliations, but I am the other

kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape

after escape, I dream only of escaping,

ascent, of a thousand possible ways to

make a hole in the wall, of melting the

bars, escape escape, of burning the whole

prison down if necessary.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a

staple o f the market place, and where it is illegal it

flourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellants of New York to Twelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,

whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f their

manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point o f inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses

o f men and women?

Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f

male/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/

slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown

now out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o f

erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,

her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult

and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her

end annihilation —death or complete submission.

Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It

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Woman Hating

is the structure of male and female mind, the content

o f our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and

mile o f our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the

real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and

how can we bear it?

C H A P T E R 3

Woman as Victim:

Story of O

T h e Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along

with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion o f children’s fairy tales. T h e female as a figure o f innocence and evil enters the adult w orld—the brutal world o f genitalia.

T h e female manifests in her adult fo rm —cunt. She

emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition, Story o f O is more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is,

what she needs, her processes o f thinking and feeling,

her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic

dance o f some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion o f O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmic principle which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.

Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I

once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the

mystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacral

destiny o f women. T h e book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the Newsweek reviewer who

wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere

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Woman Haling

perversity is its movement toward the transcendence

o f the self through a gift of the self. . . to give the body,

to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love. ” 1 Any clear-headed appraisal

of O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.

This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover

Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,

sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a

regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to

be an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after being

properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her

lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she is

fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for

Roissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to be

branded with Sir Stephen’s mark and to have rings with

his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic

model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is

infatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked as

an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,

despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is

nothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her,

fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permis-

Woman as Victim: Story of O

57

sion to kill herself and receives it. Q . E. D., pornography

is never big on plot.

O f course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities o f cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains,

or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by

minor characters in the book, or the varieties o f whips

used, or described her clothing or the different kinds o f

nipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained,

or the shapes and colors o f the welts on her body.

From the course o f O ’s story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one o f complete

passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that

she transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only

the hole between her legs is left to define her, and the

symbol o f that hole must surely be O. Much, however,

even in the rarefied environs o f pornography, necessarily interferes with the attainment o f utter passivity.

Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makes

demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal

history which is a sequence o f likes, dislikes, skills,

opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the very

least as positive space. And since in addition as a woman

one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins o f

Eve and Pandora, the wickedness o f Jezebel and Lucre-

tia Borgia, O ’s transcendence o f the species is truly

phenomenal.

T h e thesis o f O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful,

wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. She

gives the gift o f herself, her body, her well-being,

her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural

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Woman Hating

and good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which

is also natural and good, as well as beautiful, because

she fulfills her destiny:

As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I

am naught but the thought of you, the desire of you,

the obsession of you. That, I believe, is what you

wanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2

Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated

herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen

for the self-control he was displaying. She wanted him

to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him

to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and

penetrate her body, to devastate her if need be. . . . 3

. . . Yet he was certain that she was guilty and, without

really wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sin

he knew nothing about (since it remained completely

internal), although Sir Stephen had immediately detected it: her wantonness. 4

. . . no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination

could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the

way he used her with such utter freedom, at the notion

that he could do anything with her, that there was no

limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her

body, he might search for pleasure. 5

O is totally possessed. That means that she is an

object, with no control over her own mobility, capable

of no assertion of personality. Her body is a body, in

the same way that a pencil is a pencil, a bucket is a

bucket, or, as Gertrude Stein pointedly said, a rose is

a rose. It also means that O ’s energy, or power, as a

woman, as Woman, is absorbed. Possession here denotes a biological transference o f power which brings

Woman as Victim: Story of O

59

with it a commensurate spiritual strength to the possessor. O does more than offer herself; she is herself the offering. T o offer herself would be prosaic Christian

self-sacrifice, but as the offering she is the vehicle o f

the miraculous— she incorporates the divine.

Here sacrifice has its ancient, primal meaning:

that which was given at the beginning becomes the gift.

T h e first fruits o f the harvest were dedicated to and

consumed by the vegetation spirit which provided them.

T h e destruction o f the victim in human or animal

sacrifice or the consumption o f the offering was the

very definition o f the sacrifice—death was necessary

because the victim was or represented the life-giving

substance, the vital energy source, which had to be

liberated, which only death could liberate. A n actual

death, the sacrifice per se, not only liberated benevolent

energy but also ensured a propagation and increase o f

life energy (concretely expressed as fertility) by a sort

o f magical ecology, a recycling o f basic energy, or raw

power. O ’s victimization is the confirmation o f her

power, a power which is transcendental and which has

as its essence the sacred processes o f life, death, and

regeneration.

But the full significance o f possession, both mystically and mythologically, is not yet clear. In mystic experience communion (wrongly called possession

sometimes) has meant the dissolution o f the ego, the

entry into ecstasy, union with and illumination o f the

godhead. T h e experience o f communion has been the

province o f the mystic, prophet, or visionary, those who

were able to alchemize their energy into pure spirit

and this spirit into a state o f grace. Possession, rightly

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defined, is the perversion of the mystic experience; it is

by its very nature demonic because its goal is power,

its means are violence and oppression. It spills the blood

of its victim and in doing so estranges itself from life-

giving union. O’s lover thinks that she gives herself

freely but if she did not, he would take her anyway.

Their relationship is the incarnation of demonic possession:

Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his

creatures, whom he lays hold of in the guise of a monster or bird, of an invisible spirit or a state of ecstasy.

He did not wish to leave her. The more he surrendered

her, the more he would hold her dear. The fact that

he gave her was to him a proof, and ought to be for

her as well, that she belonged to him: one can only

give what belongs to you. He gave her only to reclaim

her immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes,

like some common object which had been used for some

divine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For a

long time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he was

delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving

was even greater than he had hoped, and that it bound

him to her all the more so because, through it, she

would be more humiliated and ravished. Since she

loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived

from him. 6

A precise corollary of possession is prostitution. The

prostitute, the woman as object, is defined by the usage

to which the possessor puts her. Her subjugation is the

signet o f his power. Prostitution means for the woman

the carnal annihilation o f will and choice, but for the

man it once again signifies an increase in power, pure

and simple. To call the power o f the possessor, which he

Woman as Victim: Story of O

61

demonstrates by playing superpimp, divine, or to confuse it with ecstasy or communion, is to grossly misunderstand. “All the mouths that had probed her mouth, all the hands that had seized her breasts and

belly, all the members that had been thrust into her had

so perfectly provided the living proof that she was

worthy o f being prostituted and had, so to speak, sanctified her. ” 7 O f course, it is not O who is sanctified, but Rene, or Sir Stephen, or the others, through her.

O ’s prostitution is a vicious caricature o f old-world

religious prostitution. T h e ancient sacral prostitution

o f the Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, et al., was the ritual

expression o f respect and veneration for the powers o f

fertility and generation. T h e priestesses/prostitutes o f

the temple were literal personifications o f the life energy

o f the earth goddess, and transferred that energy to

those who participated in her rites. T h e cosmic principles, articulated as divine male and divine female, were ritually united in the temple because clearly only through

their continuing and repeated union could the fertility

o f the earth and the well-being o f a people be ensured.

Sacred prostitution was “nothing less than an act o f

communion with god (or godhead) and was as remote

from sensuality as the Christian act o f communion is

remote from gluttony. ” 8 O and all o f the women at

Roissy are distinguished by their sterility and bear no

resemblance whatsoever to any known goddess. No

mention is ever made o f conception or menstruation,

and procreation is never a consequence o f fucking. O ’s

fertility has been rendered O. T here is nothing sacred

about O ’s prostitution.

O ’s degradation is occasioned by the male need for

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Woman Hating

and fear of initiation into manhood. Initiation rites

generally include a period of absolute solitude, isolation, followed by tests of physical courage, mental endurance, often through torture and physical mutilation, resulting in a permanent scar or tattoo which marks the

successful initiate. The process of initiation is designed

to reveal the values, rites, and rules of manhood and

confers on the initiate the responsibilities and privileges

of manhood. What occurs at Roissy is a clear perversion of real initiation. Rene and the others mutilate O’s body, but they are themselves untouched. Her body

substitutes for their bodies. O is marked with the scars

which they should bear. She undergoes their ordeal

for them, endures the solitude and isolation, the torture, the mutilation. In trying to become gods, they have bypassed the necessary rigors of becoming men.

The fact that the tortures must be repeated endlessly,

not only on O but on large numbers of women who are

forced as well as persuaded, demonstrates that the men

o f Roissy never in fact become men, are never initiates,

never achieve the security of realized manhood.

What would be the sign of the initiate, the final mark

or scar, manifests in the case of O as an ultimate expression of sadism. The rings through O ’s cunt with Sir Stephen’s name and heraldry, and the brand on her ass,

are permanent wedding rings rightly placed. They

mark her as an owned object and in no way symbolize

the passage into maturity and freedom. The same might

be said o f the conventional wedding ring.

O,

in her never-ending role as surrogate everything,

also is the direct sexual link between Sir Stephen and

Rene. That the two men love each other and fuck each

Woman as Victim: Story of O

63

other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir

Stephen uses O anally most o f the time. T h e consequences o f misdirecting sexual energy are awesome indeed.

But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is

the mind-boggling literary style o f Pauline Reage, its

author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yet

kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white.

Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite. That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for the compelling irrationality

o f Story of O. For those women who are convinced yet

doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for

self-protection: the double-double think that the author

engages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that we

only have to double-double unthink it.

T o sum up, Story of O is a story o f psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles o f the universe — the

survival o f one dependent on the absolute destruction

o f the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most

powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s

dead bodies.

C H A P T E R 4

Woman as Victim:

The Image

The Image, by Jean de Berg, is a love story, a Christian

love story and also a story of Christian love. No book

makes more clear the Christian experience of woman

after the fall, as we know her, Eve’s unfortunate descendant. The Image, like the catechism, is a handbook of Christianity in action. In addition, The Image is an

almost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sex-

relatedness, of duality as the structural basis of male-

female violence.

It would be an exaggeration of some substance to

call the following a summary of plot, but what happens

in The Image is this: Jean de Berg, the auteur of The

Image, meets Claire, whom he has known casually for

many years, at a party; he has always been interested in

her, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beauty

made her lack the necessary vulnerability which would

have made her, in the veni, vidi, vici tradition, a desirable

conquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, Innocent

Young Girl Dressed In White, who, it turns out, is

Claire’s slave; they go to a bar where Anne is offered to

Jean de Berg; they go to a rose garden where Anne

sticks a rose by its thorns into the flesh of her cunt;

64

Woman as Victim: The Image

65

they go to a restaurant where Claire shames Anne, an

event often repeated (Claire shames Anne by ordering

her to raise her skirt, or lower her blouse, or by sticking her finger up A nne’s cunt); Claire shows Jean de Berg photographs in the artsy-craftsy sadomasochistic

tradition for which Anne modeled, except for the last

photograph, which is clearly a photo o f Claire herself;

Claire whips Anne; Anne sucks Jean de B erg’s cock;

Jean de Berg takes Anne to buy lingerie and humiliates

Anne and embarrasses the salesgirl by exhibiting A nne’s

whip scars which are fresh; Anne is given a bath by

Claire in Jean de Berg’s presence in which Anne is

almost drowned (erotically); it occurs to Jean de Berg

that he would like to fuck Claire —which causes Claire

to increase the viciousness o f her assaults on Anne;

Anne is tortured in the Gothic chamber and then ravaged anally by Jean de Berg; Jean de Berg goes home, has a dream about Claire, is awakened by a knock on

the door, and lo and behold! Claire has recognized her

true role in life (“ ‘I have come, ’ she said quietly”) 1 —

that o f Jean de B erg’s slave. He hits her, and she lives

happily ever after.

O f course, the above is again somewhat sketchy. I

did not mention that Anne was forced to piss in public

in the rose garden, or how she was nasty to Jean de Berg

in a bookstore (a crucial point —since she then had to

be punished), or how she fetched the whips herself, or

how she was made to serve Claire and Jean de Berg

orangeade before they stuck burning needles in her

breasts.

T h e characterizations have even less depth and complexity, not to mention subtlety and sensitivity, than the

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Woman Hating

plot. Claire is cold and aloof. Jean de Berg describes

her:

Claire was very beautiful, as I said, probably even

more beautiful than her friend in the white dress. But

unlike the latter, she had never aroused any real emotion in me. This astonished me at first, but then I told myself that it was her impeccable beauty, precisely,

her very perfection that made it impossible to think of

her as a potential “conquest. ” I probably needed to

feel that some little thing about her, at least, was vulnerable, in order to arouse any desire in me to win her. 2

He later writes: “Her classic features, her cold beauty,

her remoteness made me think of some goddess in

exile." 3 Here the female characterization is explicit:

vulnerability as the main quality of the human; coldness

as the main quality of the goddess. As in most fiction,

the female characterization is synonymous with an appraisal of the figure’s beauty, its type, and most importantly, its effect on the male figures in the book.

Anne, who is, according to Pauline Reage, the other

half o f Claire, is sweet, modest, vulnerable, young,

demure (“Anne, for her part, had resumed the modest

demeanor of an object of lust” 4), and wanton. Claire

says that Anne creams at each new humiliation, at even

the thought o f being whipped. Anne appears to be Beth

from Little Women but is, in fact, a bitch in heat, her cunt

always wet—just like the rest of us, we are meant to

conclude. (Beth, remember, died young of goodness. )

Jean de Berg, representing the male sex, is—wouldn’t

you know it—intelligent, self-assured, quietly master-

Woman at Victim: The Image

67

ful and self-contained when not actually in the act o f

ravaging, powerful and overwhelmingly virile when in

the act o f ravaging. One has no idea o f his physicality,

except to imagine that he is graying at the temples.

T h e relationships between the three characters are

structured simply and a bit repetitively: Claire, master —

Anne, slave; Jean de Berg, master —Anne, slave; which

resolves into the happy ending—Jean de Berg, master —

Claire, slave. T h e master-slave motif is content, structure, and moral o f the story. T he master role is always a male role, the slave role is always a female role. T h e

moral o f the story is that Claire, by virtue o f her gender,

can only find happiness in the female/slave role.

Here we are told what society would have us know

about lesbian relationships: a man is required for completion, consummation. Claire is miscast as master because o f her literal sex, her genitalia. Jean de Berg is her surrogate cock which she later forges into the instrument o f her own degradation. The Image paints women as real female eunuchs, mutilated in the first

instance, much as Freud suggested, by their lack o f

cock, incapable o f achieving whole, organic, satisfying

sexual union without the intrusion and participation

o f a male figure. That figure cannot only act out the

male role — that figure must possess biological cock and

balls. Claire and Anne as biological females enact a

comedy, grotesque in its slapstick caricature: Claire

as master, a freak by virtue o f the role she wills to play,

a role designed to suit the needs and capacities o f a

man; Claire as master, as comic as Chaplin doing the

king o f France, or Laurel and Hardy falling over each

other’s feet in another vain attempt to secure wealth

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Woman Hating

and success. After all, The Image forces us to conclude,

what can Claire stick up Anne’s cunt but her fingers —

hardly instruments of ravishment and ecstasy. Biology,

we are told, is role. Biology, we are told, is fate. The

message is strangely familiar.

Pauline Reage, the major promoter of The Image as

a piece of metaphysical veracity, sees the function,

or very existence, of the man-master, as the glorification of the woman-slave. Her thesis is that to be a slave is to have power:

. . . the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the

ground at her master’s heels, is now really the god.

The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling

of her displeasure. His sole function is to perform the

various ceremonies that center around the sacred object. 5

With the logic indigenous to our dual-role culture, the

slave is here transmuted into the source of power. What

price power, one asks in despair. This is truly the source

of the male notion of female power—since she is at the center

of his obsession, she is powerful; no matter that the form

her power takes is that she “drag herself along the

ground at her master’s heels. ”

The man, Reage instructs us, has the illusion of

power because he wields the whip. That illusion marks

for Reage the distance between carnal knowledge and

what is, more profoundly, true:

Yes, men are foolish to expect us to revere them when,

in the end, they amount to almost nothing. Woman,

like man himself, can only worship at the shrine o f

Woman as Victim: The Image

69

that abused body, now loved and now reviled, subjected to every humiliation, but which is, after all, her own. The man, in this particular affair, stays in one

piece: he is the true worshiper, aspiring in vain to

become one with his god.

The woman, on the contrary, although just as much

of a true worshiper and possessed of that same anxious

regard (for herself) is also the divine object, violated,

endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy,

achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in

contemplation of herself. 6

Having noted in the last chapter Reage’s extraordinary

facility with the double-double think, which she uses

here with her usual skill, I must take exception to her

conclusions. It is surprising that the worship o f the

divine object, the woman as victim and executioner,

should involve any external mediation, especially that

o f a male priest. Surely if woman is so willing to be the

giver and the offering, if as “the divine object, violated,

endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn” her “only joy. . .

lies in contemplation o f herself, ” a man is extraneous.

Surely, with such divine endowments and attendant

satisfactions, she need not be coaxed or seduced into

whipping or mutilating herself (“And yet it is usually the

men who introduce their mistresses to the joys o f being

chained and whipped, tortured and humiliated. . . ” 7),

or initiating other women, who serve as a substitute or

mirror image or other half. Men often insist that women

are self-serving, and indeed, Claire is Anne’s priestess.

Both execute their roles effectively. No male figure is

required mythologically unless Jean de Berg would play

the eunuch-priest, that traditional helpmate o f the

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Woman Hating

priestess, an honor no doubt not intended for him here.

Conversely, only men have been permitted to serve

male gods; eunuchs and women, synonymous here,

have been strictly excluded from those holy rites. The

proper conclusion therefore is that man, not woman, is

the divine object of The Image: he is the priest; he serves

a male god in whose image he was created; he serves

himself. Were that not the case, woman, as the worshiped, would serve herself, instead of serving herself up like turkey or duck, garnished, stuffed, sharpened

knife ready for the ritual carving. That a man becomes

the master of the master means, despite Reage’s assertions to the contrary, that women should serve men, that women are properly slaves and men properly masters, that men have the only meaningful power (in our culture —that power allied to and defined by force and

violence), that men created in the image of the Almighty

are all mighty. Single-single think brings us closer to

the truth in this instance than double-double think.

The Image is rife with Christian symbolism. One of

the more memorable sequences in the book takes place

in a rose garden chosen by Claire as the proper proscenium for Anne’s humiliation. In the rose garden, Claire directs Jean de Berg’s attention to a specific

type of rose, special in its perfect beauty. Claire orders

Anne to step into the flowerbed and to fondle the rose,

which Anne handles as though it were a moist, ready

cunt. Claire orders Anne to pick the rose and to bring

it to her, which Anne does, though not before she feebly

protests that there is a prohibition against picking the

flowers and that she is afraid of the thorns. Anne’s

hesitation necessitates punishment. She is ordered to

Woman at Victim: The Image

71

lift her dress while Claire first strokes Anne’s cunt with

the rose, then jabs the thorn into her thigh and tears

the flesh very deliberately. Claire kisses Anne’s hands as

a poetic drop o f blood flows. Claire then pushes the

stem o f the rose into A nne’s garter belt. T h e thorn is

caught in the lace, and the flower is fastened, an adornment fraught with symbolic meaning. Even Jean de Berg finds the performance a bit overdone:

I answered that it was indeed a great success, although perhaps rather overburdened with symbols, in the romantic and surrealist traditions. 8

T h e rose as a symbol has powerful occult origins.

Eliphas Levi says o f it:

It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression

o f spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace,

she was a daughter o f God; it was love refusing to be

stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against

sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural

religion, full o f reason and love, founded on the

revelations o f the harmony o f being, o f which the rose,

for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9

T h e rose became for Christian mystics “a rose o f light

in the center o f which a human figure is extending its

arms in the form o f a cross. ” 10 However, the official

Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and

nature, posited the rose as a symbol o f both in opposition to the lily, which represented purity o f mind and body. The Image takes a stand on the side o f official

Christianity by using the rose as an instrument o f pain

and blood-letting.

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The photographs which Claire shows to Jean

de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.

The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochistic poses. They chart the torture and mutilation o f a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in what is apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, of

the victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupation with her own body, a narcissism which is concretized in the last photograph, which is of Claire herself, faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is a

flaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a woman

must, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to and

participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario

which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems

her o f the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her own

self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more

than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new

road to the cross. ” 11 The road, however, is an old one,

well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach via

this particular road, it is only because the bodies of

martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.

It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated

woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more

impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally

in a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced by

many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious

areas” 12 is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’s

fallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlike

Jesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whose

punishment scarcely equals the horror o f her crime.

That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesus

died for us once, the crucifixion he suffered sufficed, we

Woman at Victim: The Image

73

are told, for all time. Anne, Claire, O, all will be forced

spread-eagle on the cross until death releases them, and

then again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonement

for their crime, and thus set the rest o f us free.

Christianity has one other image o f woman, Mary,

the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreams

o f Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats and

fucks her. Surely that demonstrates the psychic significance, in a sexist culture, o f the Madonna figure.

Just as Anne on the cross was a profanation o f the

sacred nature o f women, so is the concept, the Lie,

o f a virgin mother, separate from her cunt, separate

from nature, innocent by virtue o f the abandonment

o f her real, and most honorable, sexuality.

T he worship o f virginity must be posited as a real

sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than

those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse.

T h e Christian institutionalization o f that worship,

its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in

the development and expression o f natural sexuality by

giving credence to that other: woman as whore. T h e

dualism o f good and evil, virgin and whore, lily and

rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and

finds its logical expression in the rituals o f sadomasochism. The Christian emphasis on pain and suffering as the path to transcendence and salvation is the very

meat o f most sadomasochistic pornography, just as the

Christian definition o f woman is its justification. Lenny

Bruce expressed it very simply when he said this:

I understand that intellectually — that a woman

who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better

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Woman Haling

Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity

to kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that's what that

act is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyone

you’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them,

you can’t make it.

So that chick who's got that much love for all her

fellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year—

that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want to

be the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early,

man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virgin

is Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird. 13

As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he

should know.

C H A P T E R 5

Woman as Victim:

Suck

We move from the straight literary pornography o f our

forebears, represented by Story of O and The Image, into

another realm, that o f the sex newspaper, born o f the

hip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture),

post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,

Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pill:

post Them and into the world o f Us. We move into the

realm o f here and now, our own turned-on, liberated

time and space, into the social world for which we are

responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as

women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a

concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, and

Screw are important. Playboy is Them —no doubt Kissinger and Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow.

But the counter-culture sex papers are created by

people who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals, longhairs, whatever the appropriate term might be), people who share our values, our concerns — people

who talk o f liberation. The counter-culture sex papers

would be a part o f our community and so we are

obliged, if we are a community, to approach them critically and seriously, to ask what they bring to us and what they take from us.

75

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Woman Hating

“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are the

Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the

Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,

BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and

genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the

streets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika,

BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuse

to do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult,

with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock

Nation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. We

are the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are not

yet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our past

is only prologue.

Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have

used acid, mescaline, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency; use grass and hashish often with no mystification; have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, or barbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations, many of which are absolutely casual; reject the nuclear family and seek forms of community antagonistic to it. We are the people who listened to Leary, Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some of

us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live

good, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitly political actions —opposing illegitimate wars, resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonder

how to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersed in the process of revolution, we learn the skills of revolution, we resist all forms of current authority

and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to

those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace

freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-

Woman as Victim: Suck

77

lution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, at

least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children

o f privilege, children o f liberals and reformists. We

were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots o f

privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.

We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine

suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced

physical and intellectual regimentation which we found

unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private) where we studied anthropology, Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too,

with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chicken

shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in

the classroom or outside o f it. T h e universities where

we studied all o f these disembodied ideas continued

doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We

have had our share o f disaster and despair: the acid

tragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies. Many o f us have known jail, and we have all seen friends die. We are older than we ever thought we

would be.

What it comes down to is this: through the use o f

drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism o f our parents. O ur goals are simple enough to understand: we want to

humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color;

to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create

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Woman Hating

communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people. So when we look at a sex newspaper, made by people like us, we demand that

it take some positive step in the direction we want to

go: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes,

the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestyle

have given us. And, most importantly, we refuse to

permit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns and

consciousness of this culture, the very patterns and consciousness which oppress us as women, which enslave us as human beings.

Suck is a typical counter-culture sex paper. Any

analysis of it reveals that the sexism is all-pervasive,

expressed primarily as sadomasochism, absolutely the

same as, and not counter to, the parent cultural values.

Suck claims to be an ally. It is crucial to demonstrate that

it is not.

The first issue of Suck appeared in Amsterdam,

Holland, in 1969. It continues to be printed in Amsterdam because Dutch police do not confiscate pornography or imprison pornographers. It was started by two Amerikan expatriates. Suck is entirely about sex,

that is, its pages contain pornographic fiction, technical

sexual advice (how to suck cock or cunt, for instance),

letters from readers which reveal personal sexual histories (mostly celebrational), and photographs o f cunt, cock, fucking, sucking, and group orgying. The newspaper appears irregularly —when there is enough

Woman as Victim: Suck

79

money and material for publication. Suck is confiscated

in England and France with some vigor.

Suck has made positive contributions. Sucking is

approached in a new way. Sucking cock, sucking cunt,

how to, how good. Sperm tastes good, so does cunt. In

particular, the emphasis on sucking cunt serves to

demystify cunt in a spectacular way —cunt is not dirty,

not terrifying, not smelly and foul; it is a source o f

pleasure, a beautiful part o f female physiology, to be

seen, touched, tasted.

T he taboo against sucking goes very deep. Most of

the actual laws against cocksucking and cuntsucking

relate to prohibitions against any sexual activity that

does not lead to, or is not performed for the purpose

o f effecting, impregnation. Sucking as an act leading

to orgasm places the nature o f sexual contact clearly —

sex is the coming together o f people for pleasure. T he

value is in the coming together. Marriage does not

sanctify that coming together, procreation is not its

goal. Suck treats sucking as an act o f the same magnitude as fucking. That attitude, pictures o f women sucking cock, men sucking cunt, and all the vice versas,

discussions o f the techniques o f sucking, all break down

barriers to the realization o f a full sexuality.

Cunnilingus and fellatio (sucking by any other name

. . . ) are still crimes. The antifellatio laws, in conjunction with sodomy laws, are sometimes used against male homosexuals (lesbians are not taken seriously enough

to be prosecuted). Given the selective enforcement o f

the laws, the shame that attaches to the forbidden acts,

and the fact that acts o f oral lovemaking represented

Woman Hating

in words or in pictures are generally deemed obscene,

sucking must be seen in and of itself as an act of political

significance (which is certainly wonderful news for depressed revolutionaries). In this instance Suck takes a relevant, respectable stand.

(Important digression. As late as October 1961,

Lenny Bruce was arrested because in one o f his routines

he used the verb “to come" and talked about cock-

sucking. He was arrested for the crime of obscenity.

Bruce described the bust:

I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for using

a ten letter word which is sort of chic. I’m not going to

repeat the word tonite. It starts with a “c. ” They said

it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice —

which is weird, cause I don't relate that word to homosexuals. It relates to any contemporary woman I know or would know or would love or would marry. 1

Bruce was busted in San Francisco (obscenity), Philadelphia (possession), Los Angeles (possession), Hollywood (obscenity), Chicago (obscenity), and not permitted to enter England or Australia. As late as 1964

Bruce was busted for obscenity in New York City, in

1965 he was declared a legally bankrupt pauper, and

on August 3, 1966, he died in Los Angeles. )

Suck also makes a contribution in printing pictures

of cunt, though here the praise must be severely qualified. Photos o f cunt are rare. All the rest we have seen —

siliconed tits, leering smiles, Playboy's version of pubic

hair. But having seen a remarkable movie by Anne

Severson and Shelby Kennedy2 in which a fixed camera

catalogues the cunts of many different women, all ages,

Woman as Victim: Suck

81

races, with all sorts o f sexual experience, one gets a

comprehension o f the superficiality o f the Suck cunt

photos. Imagine a catalogue o f still photos o f people’s

faces —the colors, textures, indentations, the unique

character o f each. It is the same with cunts, and it would

be fine if Suck would show us that. It does not.

Germaine Greer once wrote for Suck — she was an

editor—and her articles, the token women’s articles,

were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic.

Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch with

unaltered female sexuality and place that sexuality

clearly, unapologetically, within the realm o f humanity:

women, not as objects, but as human beings, truly a

revolutionary concept.

But Greer has another side which allies itself with

the worst o f male chauvinism and it is that side which, I

believe, made her articles acceptable to Suck's editors

and Suck acceptable to her. In an interview in the Am erikan Screw, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine:

‘I am a W hore, ’ ” she stated:

Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could

ball everyone —the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent, the dishonest.

We have to rescue people who are already dead.

We have to make love to people who are dead, and

that’s not easy. 3

Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world. T he notion is based on a false premise. Just as

the pill was supposed to liberate women by liberating

us sexually, i. e., we could fuck as freely as men, fucking

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Woman Hating

is supposed to liberate women and men too. But the pill

served to reinforce our essential bondage —it made us

more accessible, more open to exploitation. It did not

change our basic condition because it did nothing to

challenge the sexist structure of society, not to mention

conventional sexual relationships and couplings. Neither

does promiscuity per se. Greer’s alliance with the sexual

revolution is, sadly but implicitly, an alliance with male

chauvinism because it does not speak to the basic condition of women which remains the same if we fuck one man a week, or twenty.

There is similar misunderstanding in this statement:

Well, listen, this is one o f the things a woman has

to understand, and I get a bit impatient sometimes with

women who can’t see it. A woman, after all, in this

country is a commodity. She’s a status symbol, and the

prettier she is the more expensive, the more difficult

to attain. Anyone can have a fat old lady. But young

girls with clear eyes are not for the 40-year-old man

who’s been working as a packer or a storeman all his

life. So that when he sees her he snarls, mostly I think,

because she’s not available to him. She’s another taunt,

and yet another index o f how the American dream is

not his to have. He never had a girl like that and he

never will.

Now, I think that the most sensible way for us to

see the crime of rape is an act o f aggression against

this property symbol. . . (but I’m not sure about

this at all —I mean, I think it’s also aggression against

the mother who fucks up so many people’s lives). And

I must think that as a woman, who has not done a

revolution, have not put myself on the barricade on

this question, I owe it to my poor brothers not to get

uptight. Because I am that, I am a woman they could

Woman as Victim: Suck

83

never hope to ball, and in the back o f my mind I reject

them too. 4

Here again, the alliance is with male chauvinism, and it

is incomprehensible. Mothers fuck up people’s lives in

direct proportion to how fucked up their own lives are

— that fuck up is the role they must play, the creative

possibilities they must abort. Greer surely knows that

and must speak to it. Women who walk, as opposed to

those who take taxis or drive (another relevant class

distinction), are constantly harassed, often threatened

with violence, often violated. That is the situation which

is the daily life o f women.

It is true, and very much to the point, that women

are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive

than others —but it is only by asserting one’s humanness

every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone

as opposed to something. That, after all, is the core o f

our struggle.

Rape, o f course, does have its apologists. Norman

Mailer posits it, along with murder, as the content o f

heroism. It is, he tells us in The Presidential Papers,

morally superior to masturbation. Eldridge Cleaver

tells us that it is an act o f political rebellion — he “practiced” on Black women so that he could rape white women better. Greer joins the mystifying chorus when

she posits rape as an act o f aggression against property

(a political anticapitalist action no less) and suggests

that it might also be an act o f psychological rebellion

against the ominous, and omnipresent, mother. * Rape

*

G reer changed her ideas on rape. Cf. Germ aine G reer, “Seduction Is a

Four-Letter W ord, ” Playboy, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1973).

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Woman Hating

is, in fact, simple straightforward heterosexual behavior

in a male-dominated society. It offends us when it does,

which is rarely, only because it is male-female relation

without sham —without the mystifying romance of the

couple, without the civility of a money exchange. It

happens in the home as well as on the streets. It is not

a function of capitalism — it is a function of sexism.

What Greer contributes to Suck, and to its women

readers who might look to her for cogent analysis and

deep imagination, is mostly confusion. That confusion

stems from an identification with men which too often

blunts her perception of the real, empirical problems

women face in a sexist society. That confusion manifests

itself most destructively in the patently untrue notion

that a woman who fucks freely is free.

The main body of Suck is pornographic fiction. It is

in the fiction that we find a repetition of events, situations, images, and attitudes which most effectively reinforce conventional sexist values. “Congo Crystal Hotel, ” a story by Mel Clay, is typical of Suck fiction.

Two men watch a pornographic movie. They have a

sadistic sexual encounter. One of the men, Beno, goes

off to meet Carol, a woman he has known previously.

He forces her to fuck and suck two Blacks, who violate

her in every way. Carol’s husband intrudes. Beno forces

Carol to suck her husband’s cock and as her husband

comes, Beno shoots him. An example of the purple

prose:

In a sudden spasm the man clutches her head and

arches his back and as the beginning sensations of

orgasm overtake him Beno pulls the trigger, the explosion drowning out the sound of Carol gulping on his come and his brains splashing against the ceiling. 5

Woman as Victim: Suck

85

Carol is announced: “he could smell her even before he

saw her. ” 6 T h e rape which Beno forces on her is, o f

course, the vehicle o f her recognition that she loves

him, because only he could do that to her. T h e story

contains incredible violence. Beno whips his male lover,

Carol is beaten and raped, the husband is killed. T he

cocks o f the Blacks are, o f course, gigantic tools o f pleasure and pain. T here is little to distinguish “Congo Crystal Hotel” from straight pornography, except for

the awful quality o f the writing. T h e vision o f woman is

precisely the same: insatiable cunt, to be violated and

abused; the sadomasochistic content is the same; even

the exaggerated genitalia o f the Blacks participate in

the worst o f the pornographic tradition.

“Sex Angels, ” a story by Ron Reid, chronicles the adventures o f Helen and Tony, that is, a gangbang arranged by Helen with a bunch o f tough bikers. Helen is “high class cunt who was soon to be stuffed with their

working class cocks. ” 7 T he class analysis is central to the

story: “the social gu lf accentuated the mounting thrill

already high with the knowledge that the young husband was to observe his wife’s gangbanging by the pack. ” 8 The culmination o f the event, after Helen has

been thoroughly used, is described like this:

now hot wet fuck tube — hot slit, go on let see you fuck

your wife now. we’ve all been through her. 9

Helen, whose resemblance to that other well-known sex

object, Helen o f Troy, will not be overlooked by the

acute observer, is a “hot wet fuck tube —hot slit. ” Indeed, one must ask, in the world o f Suck fiction, who o f us is not?

Woman Hating

The overwhelming fact which emerges about Suck

fiction is that it contains and expresses the traditional

male fantasies about women. Helen and Carol differ

little from O and Claire. Their needs can be articulated

in precisely the same way: cock, lots of it, all o f the time,

rape, violation, cruelty. If only our needs were so simple. If only our needs had anything to do with it at all.

Men have always known, in that existential-accord-

ing-to-Mailer way, that women not only need IT but

want IT, rape-brand-whip orchestrated. It was always

obvious to them —a woman's “virtue” is merely facade,

her reluctance is merely tactic. What matters is that she

wants to be fucked —she is defined by her need to be

fucked. We find in Suck these sacrosanct male fantasies

applied with true counter-culture egalitarianism: to

all beings “feminine, ” whether women or gay men.

Projection has come home to roost and cock is crowing

like never before —but, like the cult of cunt before it,

the cult of cock is colored with the washes o f unresolved

guilt and pure sadism. The onus and hatred of male

homosexuality is heavy in Suck — ugly, heavy, and ever

present.

Suck has in some ways aligned itself with the cause

of gay liberation. Suck 4 printed the “Gay Guide to

Europe, ” a list of gay clubs, bars, pissoirs, etc., to alleviate the chronic need for information felt by the traveling gay man. Suck 6 has a story entitled “A Week

in the Fondle Park, ” in which a man extols the quantity

of cock sucked in one idyllic week in Amsterdam’s

central park, which had been turned over to longhaired dopers and freaks in the summer of 1971. But in Suck, as in the parent culture which maligns any

Woman as Victim: Suck

87

deviation from the ole hetero norm, the hatred attached

to the queer is very apparent.

“T h e Suction Game” is the story o f two men, one

dark-skinned, one light-skinned, one overt, one latent —

a typical colonial situation, ripe for exploitation. T h e

acknowledged (overt) queer has the typical misogynist

point o f view:

Carlos explained that the male body was nature’s

perfection and how clean men were compared to

women. 10

T o the n orm ally) self-enhancing John Wayne male, the

above is self-evident and always has been. In the context o f the homosexual encounter it has added significance. It reinforces the maleness o f both partners. It makes the homosexual act an affirmation o f manhood.

The insecurities which a homosexual identity conjures

up in our culture, however, are hardly resolved through

the putting down o f women. “Cocksucker” is a term o f

insult and abuse —it means queer. Yet it is obviously

absurd for a man to believe that what is pleasurable to

him when done by a woman is disgusting when done by

a man. T h e distinction here is not so very subtle: the

political meaning o f the two acts, heterosexual fellatio

and homosexual fellatio, is different. T he form er makes

the man clearly the master —the woman kneels at the

foot o f the sheikh. T he latter makes the man queer—

ours is not to reason why, or is it?

Carlos (overt, dark-skinned), having unzipped the

hero’s pants, has started kissing his glorious equipment:

Woman Hating

Here I was standing in this tiny YM CA room, naked as

the day I was born, with a pretty boy queer, kneeling

in front o f me playing with my cock. The whole thing

was sickening, but the worst part was that I was enjoying it.. . . Suddenly I didn’t give a fuck if he was queer. I just relaxed and surrendered to his sucking

mouth. 11

The resultant orgasm is fantastic, mind-blowing, as

aren’t they all in Suck. Yet the imminent slander is too

much to bear. Being sucked by a queer is one thing.

Reciprocity is something else. Could it be reciprocity

that makes one queer?

He was a fucking queer but I wasn’t. If he had hot

rock that was his problem not mine. He’ll just have to

find some other queer to suck his cock. 12

Hot Rock Carlos is undaunted. After much patient

persistance, our supermale hero succumbs, with reservations: “The idea was repulsive to me, but I wanted to make him happy. ” 13 The moral of the tale is simple.

Says our hero:

Funny I do not consider myself queer, just damn lucky

to be able to attract so many good looking young boys

so they could have their rock inside me. 14

Only now does the definitive definition of queer seem

to emerge. Cocksucking isn’t the definitive experience

after all. One must conclude that anal intercourse,

the closest corollary to female penetration, really defines the queer. One must conclude that being fucked in the ass separates the queers from the men and places

Woman as Victim: Suck

89

them squarely among the women. O ne must conclude

that being penetrated is queer, not to mention debasing,

disgusting, and humiliating, which one had already

guessed.

Homosexual men are not only penetrated like

women —they also lust after pain and degradation. T h e

author o f “T h e Suction Game” has given us another

example o f homosexual pornography, this one engagingly entided “T ough Young Dicks for Hot Kicks. ”

Five young toughs are cruising; they pick up a longhaired boy, shove him in the back seat o f the car and order him to blow them all; the boy considers refusing, since he’d love to be beaten then and there, but instead submits since greater abuse can always be had through submission than through resistance; the young

toughs brutally rape the long-haired boy, then piss and

shit all over him. He is, o f course, ecstatic:

Gee did I smell o f come and teenage sweat and urine

and I had two more toss-offs myself thinking about

their tough young faces and dicks enjoying me for

hot kicks. 15

T h e stereotype o f the homosexual which emerges

from the general run o f Suck fiction is not very different

from the stereotype o f woman. T h e homosexual is

queer, asshole, cocksucker, faggot; the woman is hole,

hot wet fuck tube, hot slit, or just plain ass. He thrives

on pain and so does she. Gangbanging is their mutual

joy. Huge, throbbing, monster, atom-smashing cock is

god and master to them both. T h e parts they play in the

sadomasochistic script are the same: so are costumes,

attitudes, and other conventional cultural baggage. It

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Woman Haling

is not hard to see that the struggle for gay male liberation and women’s liberation is a common struggle: both mean freedom from the stigma of being female.

The fantasies (indicative of structural mental sets) which

oppress male homosexuals and women are very much

alike. Women and male homosexuals are united in

their queerness, a union which is real and verifiable —

affirmed by Suck, which contributes to the cultural

oppression of both.

The pages of Suck have, sadly, nothing to do with

sexual liberation — there is no “counter” to the culture to be found anywhere in them. They are, instead, a catalogue of exactly those sexist fantasies which

express our most morbid psychic sets. They chart the

landscape of repression, a landscape that is surprisingly

familiar. As women, we find that we are where we have

always been: the necessary victim, there we are, the

victim again; the eternal object, there we are, the object again. Through the projection of archetypal sadomasochistic images, which are the staple of the sexist mentality, we become more a prisoner, robbed and

cheated of any real experience or authentic communication, thrown back into the intricate confusion of being women in search of a usable identity.

Part Three

THE HERSTORY

We are a feelingless people. If we could

really feel, the pain would be so great that

we would stop all the suffering. If we could

feel that one person every six seconds dies

of starvation (and as this is happening, this

writing, this reading, someone is dying of

starvation) we would stop it. If we could

really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in

the throat, in the breast, we would go into

the streets and stop the war, stop slavery,

stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop

destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we

will act: when we act, we will change the

world.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

T he rapes, tortures, and violations o f O, Claire, Anne,

Suck's Helen, et al., are fiction, documenting the twisted

landscape o f male wish-fulfillment. Here we have her-

story, the underbelly o f history, two acts o f gynocide

committed against women by men, their scope and substance largely ignored. One is not surprised to find that they document that same twisted landscape.

I isolate in particular Chinese footbinding and the

persecution o f the witches because they are crimes

which equal in sheer horror and sadism the extermination o f Native Americans and Hitler’s massacre o f the Jews. Those two horrendous slaughters have found a

place, however tenuous, in the “conscience” o f “man. ”

Acts o f genocide against women have barely been noticed, and they have never evoked rage, or horror, or sorrow. That sexist hatred equals racist hatred in its

intensity, irrationality, and contempt for the sanctity

o f human life these two examples clearly demonstrate.

That women have not been exterminated, and will not

be (at least until the technology o f creating life in the

laboratory is perfected) can be attributed to our presumed ability to bear children and, more importantly 93

9

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Woman Hating

no doubt, to the relative truth that men prefer to fuck

cunts who are nominally alive. I except here necrophili-

acs, those pure and unsullied princes, whose story begins where ours ends.

In addition, in any war, in any violence between

tribes or nations, a specific war crime is perpetrated

against women —that of rape. Every woman raped

during a political nation-state war is the victim of a

much larger war, planetary in its dimensions —the war,

more declared than we can bear to know, that men wage

against women. That war had its most gruesome, grotesque expression when Chinese men bound the feet of Chinese women and when British, Welsh, Irish,

Scottish, German, Dutch, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish,

and Amerikan men had women burned at the stake in

the name of God the Father and His only Son.

F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

Instructions Before Reading Chapter

1. Find a piece o f cloth 10 feet long and 2 inches wide

2. Find a pair o f children’s shoes

3. Bend all toes except the big one under and into the

sole o f the foot. W rap the cloth around these toes

and then around the heel. Bring the heel and toes as

close together as possible. W rap the full length o f

the cloth as tightly as possible

4. Squeeze foot into children’s shoes

5. Walk

6. Imagine that you are 5 years old

7. Imagine being like this for the rest o f your life

C H A P T E R 6

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

T he origins o f Chinese footbinding, as o f Chinese

thought in general, belong to that amorphous entity

called antiquity. The 10th century marks the beginning o f the physical, intellectual, and spiritual dehumanization o f women in China through the institution o f footbinding. That institution itself, the implicit belief

in its necessity and beauty, and the rigor with which it

was practiced lasted another 10 centuries. T here were

sporadic attempts at emancipating the foot —some

artists, intellectuals, and women in positions o f power

were the proverbial drop in the bucket. Those attempts,

modest though they were, were doomed to failure:

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Woman Hating

footbinding was a political institution which reflected

and perpetuated the sociological and psychological inferiority of women; footbinding cemented women to a certain sphere, with a certain function —women were

sexual objects and breeders. Footbinding was mass

attitude, mass culture —it was the key reality in a way

of life lived by real women— 10 centuries times that

many millions o f them.

It is generally thought that footbinding originated as

an innovation among the dancers of the Imperial

harem. Sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries,

Emperor Li Yu ordered a favorite ballerina to achieve

the “pointed look. ” The fairy tale reads like this:

Li Yu had a favored palace concubine named

Lovely Maiden who was a slender-waisted beauty and

a gifted dancer. He had a six-foot high lotus constructed for her out o f gold; it was decorated lavishly with pearls and had a carmine lotus carpet in the

center. Lovely Maiden was ordered to bind her feet

with white silk cloth to make the tips look like the

points o f a moon sickle. She then danced in the center

of the lotus, whirling about like a rising cloud. 1

From this original event, the bound foot received the

euphemism “Golden Lotus, ” though it is clear that

Lovely Maiden’s feet were bound loosely— she could still

dance.

A later essayist, a true foot gourmand, described 58

varieties of the human lotus, each one graded on a 9-

point scale. For example:

T ype: Lotus petal, New moon, Harmonious bow,

Bamboo shoot, Water chestnut

Specifications: plumpness, softness, fineness

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

97

Rank:

Divine Quality (A-1), perfectly plump, soft and fine

Wondrous Quality (A-2), weak and slender

Immortal Quality (A-3), straight-boned, independent

Precious Article (B-1), peacocklike, too wide, dis-

proportioned

Pure Article (B-2), gooselike, too long and thin

Seductive Article (B-3), fleshy, short, wide, round

(the disadvantage of this foot was that its owner

could withstand a blowing wind)

Excessive Article (C-1), narrow but insufficiently

pointed

Ordinary Article (C-2), plump and common

False Article (C-3), monkeylike large heel (could

climb)

T he distinctions only emphasize that footbinding

was a rather hazardous operation. T o break the bones

involved or to modify the pressure o f the bindings irregularly had embarrassing consequences — no girl could bear the ridicule involved in being called a “largefooted Demon” and the shame o f being unable to marry.

Even the possessor o f an A - 1 Golden Lotus could

not rest on her laurels —she had to observe scrupulously

the taboo-ridden etiquette o f bound femininity: (1) do

not walk with toes pointed upwards; (2) do not stand

with heels seemingly suspended in midair; (3) do not

move skirt when sitting; (4) do not move feet when

lying down. T h e same essayist concludes his treatise

with this most sensible advice (directed to the gentlemen o f course):

Do not remove the bindings to look at her bare feet,

but be satisfied with its external appearance. Enjoy the

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Woman Hating

outward impression, for if you remove the shoes and

bindings the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever. 2

Indeed. The real feet looked like this:

(feet: 3 to 4 inches in length)

The physical process which created this foot is

described by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footbinding:

The History of a Curious Erotic Custom:

The success or failure of footbinding depended on

skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The

bandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

99

wrapped in the following way. One end was placed on

the inside of the instep, and from there it was carried

over the small toes so as to force the toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully that heel and toes were drawn closer together.

The process was then repeated from the beginning

until the entire bandage had been applied. The foot of

the young child was subjected to a coercive and unremitting pressure, for the object was not merely to confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and

into the sole and bring the heel and sole as close together as physically possible. 3

A C h ris tia n m is s io n a ry o b s e rve d :

The flesh often became putrescent during the binding

and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes

one or more toes dropped off. 4

A n e ld e rly C h in e s e w o m a n , as late as 1934, re m e m b e re d v iv id ly h e r c h ild h o o d e x p e rie n c e : Born into an old-fashioned family at P’ing-hsi, I was

inflicted with the pain of footbinding when I was seven

years old. I was an active child who liked to jump about,

but from then on my free and optimistic nature vanished. Elder Sister endured the process from six to eight years of age [this means that it took Elder Sister two years to attain the 3-inch foot]. It was in the first lunar month of my seventh year that my ears were

pierced and fitted with gold earrings. I was told that a

girl had to suffer twice, through ear piercing and footbinding. Binding started in the second lunar month; mother consulted references in order to select an

auspicious day for it. I wept and hid in a neighbor’s

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Woman Hating

home, but Mother found me, scolded me, and dragged

me home. She shut the bedroom door, boiled water,

and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife, needle,

and thread. I begged for a one-day postponement, but

Mother refused: “Today is a lucky day, ” she said. “ If

bound today, your feet will never hurt; if bound tomorrow they will. ” She washed and placed alum on my feet and cut the toenails. She then bent my toes toward

the plantar with a binding cloth ten feet long and two

inches wide, doing the right foot first and then the

left. She finished binding and ordered me to walk,

but when I did the pain proved unbearable.

That night, Mother wouldn’t let me remove the

shoes. My feet felt on fire and I couldn’t sleep; Mother

struck me for crying. On the following days, I tried

to hide but was forced to walk on my feet. Mother hit

me on my hands and feet for resisting. Beatings and

curses were my lot for covertly loosening the wrappings. The feet were washed and rebound after three or four days, with alum added. After several months,

all toes but the big one were pressed against the inner

surface. Whenever I ate f ish or freshly killed meat,

my feet would swell, and the pus would drip. Mother

criticized me for placing pressure on the heel in walking, saying that my feet would never assume a pretty shape. Mother would remove the bindings and wipe

the blood and pus which dripped from my feet. She

told me that only with the removal o f the flesh could

my feet become slender. If I mistakenly punctured a

sore, the blood gushed like a stream. My somewhat

fleshy big toes were bound with small pieces o f cloth and

forced upwards, to assume a new moon shape.

Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each

new pair was one- to two-tenths o f an inch smaller than

the previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and it

took pressure to get into them. Though I wanted to

sit passively by the K’ang, Mother forced me to move

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

1

0

1

around. After changing more than ten pairs of shoes,

my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I

had been in binding for a month when my younger

sister started; when no one was around, we would

weep together. In summer, my feet smelled offensively because of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation and hurt if

they got too near the K'ang and were struck by warm

air currents. Four of the toes were curled in like so

many dead caterpillars; no outsider would ever have

believed that they belonged to a human being. It took

two years to achieve the three-inch model. My toenails pressed against the flesh like thin paper. The heavily-creased plantar couldn't be scratched when it

itched or soothed when it ached. My shanks were thin,

my feet became humped, ugly, and odiferous; how I

envied the natural-footed! 5

Bound feet were crippled and excruciatingly painful. T h e woman was actually “walking” on the outside o f toes which had been bent under into the sole o f the

foot. T he heel and instep o f the foot resembled the sole

and heel o f a high-heeled boot. Hard callouses formed;

toenails grew into the skin; the feet were pus-filled and

bloody; circulation was virtually stopped. T h e foot-

bound woman hobbled along, leaning on a cane, against

a wall, against a servant. T o keep her balance she took

very short steps. She was actually falling with every

step and catching herself with the next. Walking required tremendous exertion.

Footbinding also distorted the natural lines o f the

female body. It caused the thighs and buttocks, which

were always in a state o f tension, to become somewhat swollen (which men called “voluptuous”). A cu

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rious belief developed among Chinese men that footbinding produced a most useful alteration of the vagina. A Chinese diplomat explained:

The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrous

become the folds o f the vagina. (There was the saying: the smaller the feet, the more intense the sex urge. ) Therefore marriages in Ta-t’ung (where binding

is most effective) often take place earlier than elsewhere. Women in other districts can produce these folds artificially, but the only way is by footbinding,

which concentrates development in this one place.

There consequendy develop layer after layer (of folds

within the vagina); those who have personally experienced this (in sexual intercourse) feel a supernatural exaltation. So the system o f footbinding was not really oppressive. 6

Medical authorities confirm that physiologically footbinding had no effect whatsoever on the vagina, although it did distort the direction of the pelvis. The belief in the wondrous folds of the vagina of footbound

woman was pure mass delusion, a projection of lust

onto the feet, buttocks, and vagina of the crippled

female. Needless to say, the diplomat’s rationale for

finding footbinding “not really oppressive” confused

his “supernatural exaltation” with her misery and

mutilation.

Bound feet, the same myth continues, “made the

buttocks more sensual, [and] concentrated life-giving

vapors on the upper part of the body, making the face

more attractive. ” 7 If, due to a breakdown in the flow

o f these “life-giving vapors, ” an ugly woman was foot-

bound and still ugly, she need not despair, for an A -1

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

103

Golden Lotus could compensate for a C-3 face and

figure.

But to return to herstory, how did our Chinese

ballerina become the millions o f women stretched over

10 centuries? T h e transition from palace dancer to population at large can be seen as part o f a class dynamic.

T h e emperor sets the style, the nobility copies it, and

the lower classes climbing ever upward do their best

to emulate it. T he upper class bound the feet o f their

ladies with the utmost severity. T h e Lady, unable to

walk, remained properly invisible in her boudoir, an

ornament, weak and small, a testimony to the wealth

and privilege o f the man who could afford to keep h e r—

to keep her idle. Doing no manual labor, she did not need

her feet either. Only on the rarest o f occasions was she

allowed outside o f the incarcerating walls o f her home,

and then only in a sedan chair behind heavy curtains.

T he lower a woman’s class, the less could such idleness

be supported: the larger the feet. T h e women who had

to work for the economic survival o f the family still

had bound feet, but the bindings were looser, the feet

bigger—after all, she had to be able to walk, even if

slowly and with little balance.

Footbinding was a visible brand. Footbinding did

not emphasize the differences between men and women —it

created them, and they were then perpetuated in the

name o f morality. Footbinding functioned as the C erberus o f morality and ensured female chastity in a nation o f women who literally could not “run around. ”

Fidelity, and the legitimacy o f children, could be reckoned on.

T he minds o f footbound women were as contracted

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as their feet. Daughters were taught to cook, supervise

the household, and embroider shoes for the Golden

Lotus. Intellectual and physical restriction had the usual

male justification. Women were perverse and sinful,

lewd and lascivious, if left to develop naturally. The

Chinese believed that being bom a woman was payment

for evils committed in a previous life. Footbinding was

designed to spare a woman the disaster of another such

incarnation.

Marriage and the family are the twin pillars of all

patriarchal cultures. Bound feet, in China, were the

twin pillars o f these twin pillars. Here we have the joining together of politics and morality, coupled to produce their inevitable offspring—the oppression of women based on totalitarian standards of beauty and a

rampant sexual fascism. In arranging a marriage, a

male's parents inquired first about the prospective

bride’s feet, then about her face. Those were her human, recognizable qualities. During the process of footbinding, mothers consoled their daughters by conjuring up the luscious marriage possibilities dependent on the beauty of the bound foot. Concubines for the Imperial harem were selected at tiny-foot festivals (forerunners of Miss America pageants). Rows upon rows of women sat on benches with their feet outstretched

while audience and judges went along the aisles and

commented on the size, shape, and decoration of foot

and shoes. No one, however, was ever allowed to touch

the merchandise. Women looked forward to these

festivals, since they were allowed out o f the house.

The sexual aesthetics, literally the art o f love, of

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the bound foot was complex. T h e sexual attraction o f

the foot was based on its concealment and the mystery

surrounding its development and care. T h e bindings

were unwrapped and the feet were washed in the

woman’s boudoir, in the strictest privacy. T h e frequency o f bathing varied from once a week to once a year. Perfumes o f various fragrances and alum were

used during and after washing, and various kinds o f

surgery were performed on the callouses and nails.

T h e physical process o f washing helped restore circulation. T he mummy was unwrapped, touched up, and put back to sleep with more preservatives added. T h e rest

o f the body was never washed at the same time as the

feet, for fear that one would become a pig in the next

life. Well-bred women were supposed to die o f shame

if men observed them washing their feet. T h e foot

consisted, after all, o f smelly, rotted flesh. This was

naturally not pleasing to the intruding male, a violation o f his aesthetic sensibility.

T h e art o f the shoes was basic to the sexual aesthetics o f the bound foot. Untold hours, days, months went into the embroidery o f shoes. T here were shoes

for all occasions, shoes o f different colors, shoes to

hobble in, shoes to go to bed in, shoes for special

occasions like birthdays, marriages, funerals, shoes

which denoted age. Red was the favored color for bed

shoes because it accentuated the whiteness o f the skin

o f the calves and thighs. A marriageable daughter made

about 12 pairs o f shoes as a part o f her dowry. She

presented 2 specially made pairs to her mother-in-law

and father-in-law. When she entered her husband’s

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home for the first time, her feet were immediately

examined by the whole family, neither praise nor

sarcasm being withheld.

There was also the art of the gait, the art of sitting,

the art of standing, the art of lying down, the art of adjusting the skirt, the art of every movement which involves feet. Beauty was the way feet looked and how

they moved. Certain feet were better than other feet,

more beautiful. Perfect 3-inch form and utter uselessness were the distinguishing marks of the aristocratic foot. These concepts of beauty and status defined

women: as ornaments, as sexual playthings, as sexual

constructs. The perfect construct, even in China, was

naturally the prostitute.

The natural-footed woman generated horror and

repulsion in China. She was anathema, and all the

forces o f insult and contempt were used to obliterate

her. Men said about bound feet and natural feet:

A tiny foot is proof of feminine goodness.. . .

Women who don’t bind their feet, look like men,

for the tiny foot serves to show the differentiation.. . .

The tiny foot is soft and, when rubbed, leads to

great excitement.. . .

The graceful walk gives the beholder mixed feelings o f compassion and pity.. . .

Natural feet are heavy and ponderous as they get

into bed, but tiny feet lightly steal under the coverlets.. . .

The large-footed woman is careless about adornment, but the tiny-footed frequently wash and apply a variety o f perfumed fragrances, enchanting all who

come into their presence.. . .

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107

T h e natural foot looks much less aesthetic in walk-

ing. . . .

Everyone welcomes the tiny foot, regarding its

smallness as precious.. . .

Men formerly so craved it that its possessor

achieved harmonious matrimony.. . .

Because o f its diminutiveness, it gives rise to a

variety o f sensual pleasures and love feelings.. . . 8

Thin, small, curved, soft, fragrant, weak, easily

inflamed, passive to the point o f being almost inanim ate—this was footbound woman. Her bindings created extraordinary vaginal folds; isolation in the bedroom increased her sexual desire; playing with the shriveled, crippled foot increased everyone’s desire.

Even the imagery o f the names o f various types o f foot

suggest, on the one hand, feminine passivity (lotuses,

lilies, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts) and, on the other

hand, male independence, strength, and mobility (lotus

boats, large-footed crows, monkey foot). It was unacceptable for a woman to have those male qualities denoted by large feet. This fact conjures up an earlier assertion: footbinding did not formalize existing differences between men and women —it created them.

One sex became male by virtue o f having made the

other sex some thing, something other, something

completely polar to itself, something called female.

In 1915, a satirical essay in defense o f footbinding,

written by a Chinese male, emphasized this:

T h e bound foot is the condition o f a life o f dignity

for man, o f contentment for woman. Let me make this

clear. I am a Chinese fairly typical o f my class. I pored

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too much over classic texts in my youth and dimmed

my eyes, narrowed my chest, crooked my back. My

memory is not strong, and in an old civilization there

is a vast deal to learn before you can know anything.

Accordingly among scholars I cut a poor figure. I am

timid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings of

men. But to my footbound wife, confined for life to

her house except when I bear her in my arms to her

palanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that o f a

roaring lion, my wisdom is of the sages. To her I am

the world; I am life itself. 9

Chinese men, it is clear, stood tall and strong on

women’s tiny feet.

The so-called art of footbinding was the process of

taking the human foot, using it as though it were insensible matter, molding it into an inhuman form. Footbinding was the “art” of making living matter insensible, inanimate. We are obviously not dealing here with art at all, but with fetishism, with sexual psychosis. This

fetish became the primary content of sexual experience

for an entire culture for 1,000 years. The manipulation

of the tiny foot was an indispensable prelude to all

sexual experience. Manuals were written elaborating

various techniques for holding and rubbing the Golden

Lotus. Smelling the feet, chewing them, licking them,

sucking them, all were sexually charged experiences.

A woman with tiny feet was supposedly more easily

maneuvered around in bed and this was no small advantage. Theft of shoes was commonplace. Women were forced to sew their shoes directly onto their bindings. Stolen shoes might be returned soaked in semen.

Prostitutes would show their naked feet for a high

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109

price (there weren’t many streetwalkers in China).

Drinking games using cups placed in the shoes o f prostitutes or courtesans were favorite pastimes. Tiny-footed prostitutes took special names like Moon Immortal, Red Treasure, Golden Pearl. No less numerous were the euphemisms for feet, shoes, and bindings.

Some men went to prostitutes to wash the tiny foot and

eat its dirt, or to drink tea made from the washing

water. Others wanted their penises manipulated by the

feet. Superstition also had its place —there was a belief

in the curative powers o f the water in which tiny feet

were washed.

Lastly, footbinding was the soil in which sadism

could grow and go unchecked —in which simple cruelty

could transcend itself, without much effort, into

atrocity. These are some typical horror stories o f those

times:

A stepmother or aunt in binding the child’s foot

was usually much harsher than the natural mother

would have been. An old man was described who delighted in seeing his daughters weep as the binding was tightly applied.. . . In one household, everyone

had to bind. T h e main wife and concubines bound to

the smallest degree, once morning and evening, and

once before retiring. T h e husband and first wife

strictly carried out foot inspections and whipped those

guilty o f having let the binding become loose. T h e

sleeping shoes were so painfully small that the women

had to ask the master to rub them in order to bring

relief. Another rich man would flog his concubines

on their tiny feet, one after another, until the blood

flowed. 10

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. . . about 1 9 3 1 . . . bound-foot women unable to Bee

had been taken captive. The bandits, angered because

o f their captives’ weak way o f walking and inability to

keep in file, forced the women to remove the bindings

and socks and run about barefoot. They cried out in

pain and were unable to move on in spite o f beatings.

Each o f the bandits grabbed a woman and forced her

to dance about on a wide field covered with sharp

rocks. The harshest treatment was meted out to prostitutes. Nails were driven through their hands and feet; they cried aloud for several days before expiring.

One form o f torture was to tie-up a woman so that her

legs dangled in midair and place bricks around each

toe, increasing the weight until the toes straightened

out and eventually dropped off. 11

END OF F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

One asks the same questions again and again, over

a period o f years, in the course of a lifetime. The questions have to do with people and what they do —the how and the why o f it. How could the Germans have murdered 6, 000, 000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades, taken the gold out of their teeth? How could white

people have bought and sold black people, hanged

them and castrated them? How could “Americans”

have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land,

spread famine and disease? How can the Indochina

genocide continue, day after day, year after year?

How is it possible? Why does it happen?

As a woman, one is forced to ask another series of

hard questions: Why everywhere the oppression of

women throughout recorded history? How could the

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111

Inquisitors torture and bum women as witches? How

could men idealize the bound feet o f crippled women?

How and why?

T h e bound foot existed for 1, 000 years. In what

terms, using what measure, could one calculate the

enormity o f the crime, the dimensions o f the transgression, the amount o f cruelty and pain inherent in that 1, 000-year herstory? In what terms, using what

vocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to the

reality, o f that 1, 000-year herstory?

Here one race did not war with another to acquire

food, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fight

with another in the interest o f survival, real or imagined; one group o f people in a fever pitch o f hysteria did not destroy another. None o f the traditional explanations or justifications for brutality between or among peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary, here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in the interest o f the art o f sex, male-female harmony, role-definition, beauty.

Consider the magnitude o f the crime.

Millions o f women, over a period o f 1,000 years,

were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name o f

erotica.

Millions o f human beings, over a period o f 1, 000

years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name

o f beauty.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years,

reveled in love-making devoted to the worship o f the

bound foot.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years, worshiped and adored the bound foot.

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Woman Hating

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for the

sake o f a secure marriage.

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in the

name o f beauty.

But this thousand-year period is only the tip of

an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible

expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and

values organically rooted in all cultures, then and

now. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, his

sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her,

his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation:

physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is

the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based

on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well

as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her

deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her

as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her

feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge

as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos

is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.

Women should be beautiful. All repositories of

cultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefner

agree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverence

for female beauty which informs the romantic ethos,

gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformed into that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous and abstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman is

Beauty.

Notions o f beauty always incorporate the whole of a

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given societal structure, are crystallizations o f its values.

A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocratic standards o f beauty. In Western “democracy”

notions o f beauty are “democratic” : even if a woman is

not born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.

T h e argument is not simply that some women are

not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to ju d ge women on

the basis o f physical beauty; or that men are not judged

on that basis, therefore women also should not be

judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards o f beauty are too parochial in and o f themselves; or even that judgin g

women according to their conformity to a standard o f

beauty serves to make them into products, chattels,

differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms o f

literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial.

Standards o f beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body.

They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture,

gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define

precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, o f

course, the relationship between physical freedom and

psychological development, intellectual possibility, and

creative potential is an umbilical one.

In our culture, not one part o f a woman’s body is

left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is

spared the art, or pain, o f improvement. Hair is dyed,

lacquered, straightened, permanented; eyebrows are

plucked, penciled, dyed; eyes are lined, mascaraed,

shadowed; lashes are curled, or false —from head to

toe, every feature o f a woman's face, every section o f

her body, is subject to modification, alteration. This al

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teration is an ongoing, repetitive process. It is vital to

the economy, the major substance of male-female role

differentiation, the most immediate physical and psychological reality of being a woman. From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part

of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,

painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and

wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of

makeup and costuming caricature the women they

would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic

ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the

core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.

The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her

arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high-

heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly

her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother

teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which

defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in

order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What

we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly

in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th-

century China.

This cultural transfer o f technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic o f that relationship.

What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward

the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do

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painful things to her own body? T h e mother takes on

the role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all

manner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform to

the demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother-daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. T h e daughter

who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother

is forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognition o f the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society

so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.

T h e daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.

Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,

and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,

shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to

walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,

straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.

The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: no

price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation

too painful for the woman who would be beautiful.

The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives o f childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent

experience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts the

feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces

the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases

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itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,

and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the

body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,

creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of

lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as

any backward nation. Indeed, the effects o f that prescribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any

area of human possibility is left untouched by it.

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of

herself. ” The male response to the woman who is made-

up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these

oppressive grooming imperatives.

The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos

surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation

(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The

body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint

and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop

mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a

respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.

BEAUTY HURTS

C H A P T E R 7

Gynocide: The Witches

It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion

of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that

God will never permit such a thing to

happen.

Malleus Maleficarum

It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark

Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the

social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The

learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.

The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the

Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only

democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a

democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even

crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations

of the flesh and the Kingdom o f Heaven, a layer o f dirt,

lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and

to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,

it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those

diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place

— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics o f leprosy, epileptic convulsions, 118

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119

and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly. T he Black Death is thought to have killed 25

percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds

to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some

towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,

crying for help and words were all they got: You have

sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will

suffer so much the less torment in the life to come.

Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers

for the dead. 1

H unger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,

may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and

hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church

had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation

which were vivid in the Christian imagination were

modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.

T he Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devil

underwent as many transformations as the snake has

skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic

theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one

religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,

intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,

Woman Hating

vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the

old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old

practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.

Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent

some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to

hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the

local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed

to continue their traditional vocations of healing the

sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often

transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be

embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became

St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan

gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —

shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross.

But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare

as well. The peoples o f northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal

totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered

to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy o f the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control o f animals. In the later neolithic agricultural

stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply

predominated.

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Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently

dancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Ar-

riege. Early religions actively worshiped animals, and

in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts, sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal) were parts o f the rites. T h e magician-priest-shaman became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and

apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal

(even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached

to his girdle). T here he stood, replete with horns and

hooves—the primitive deity, attributes o f him echoing

in the later deities Osiris, Isis, Hathor, Pan, and Janus.

His worship was assimilated into the phallic worship o f

the northern sky-thunder-warrior gods (the influence

o f which can be seen in Druidic practices). These pagan

rites and deities maintained their divinity in the mass

psyche despite all o f the Church’s attempts to blacklist

them. Some kings o f England were converted by the

missionaries, only to revert to the old faith when the

missionaries left. Others maintained two altars, one

devoted to Christ, one to the horned god. The peasants

never played politics—they clung to the fertility-magic

beliefs. Until the 10th century, the Church protested

this willful “devil worship” but could do nothing but

issue proclamations, impose penances and fasts, and, o f

course, carry on the unending struggle against nature

and the flesh.

This was a serious business, for the end o f the world

was believed to be imminent. For good Christians, prep

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arations to depart this earthly abode included renunciation of all hedonistic activities (eating, dancing, fucking, etc. ). St. Simon Stylites, in his attempt to avoid the crime of being human, fled to the desert where he

erected a pillar on which he mortified his flesh for most

of his 72 years. He was tempted throughout by visions

of lascivious women. Indeed, it required starvation,

incessant prayer, and flagellation to be visited by lascivious women in those days and still lead the perfect Christian life.

The extremeness of the Church's ascetic imperatives

invited a reciprocal debauchery. The nobility, when

not out butchering, enforced that most curious of

customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape

of newly wed peasant women. The Crusaders brought

back spices and syphilis from the East —that summing

up their knowledge of Arab culture. The clergy was

so openly corrupt and sensual that successive popes

were forced to acknowledge it. “By 1102 a church council had to state specifically that priests should be degraded for sodomy and anathematized for 'obstinate sodomy. ' ” 2 Bishops and cardinals were also known to

fuck around: “A typical example is that Bishop o f Toul

. . . whose favorite concubine was his own daughter

by a nun o f Epinal. " 3 The monasteries and cloisters

were rampant with homosexuality, but nuns and monks

did occasionally get together for heterosexual fucking.

Until the 12th century, there were basically three

kinds of relationship to the Church. There were the

ascetics who fled the cities to roam like beasts in the

wilderness and emulated St. Simon, who made a pig-sty

his home when not on the pillar. The ascetics mortified

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123

the flesh while awaiting cataclysmic destruction and

eternal resurrection. There were the nobility, the

clergy, and the soldiers, who delighted in carnal excesses o f every sort, and the serfs who went on breeding because it was their only outlet and because the nobles

encouraged increases in the number o f tenants. T h e

last group, crucial to this period, were the heretics.

In the 12th century various groups, viewing the abominations o f Christianity with increasing horror, began to voice openly and even loudly their skepticism. These

sects played a prominent role in shaping the Church’s

idea o f the Devil.

T h e Waldenses, Manicheans, and Cathari were the

principal heretical sects. It is said that “the Waldenses

were burnt for the practices for which the Franciscans

were later canonized. ” 4 T heir crime was to expose and

to mock the clergy as frauds. For their piety they

suffered the fate o f all heretics, which was burning.

More influential and more dangerous were the Manicheans, who traced their origins to the Persian Mani who had been crucified in a . d. 276. T h e Manicheans

worshiped one God, who incorporated both good and

evil, the ancient Zoroastrian idea. T h e Cathari, who

were equally maligned by the Christians, also worshiped

the dual principle:

. . . the chief outstanding quality of the Cathari was

their piety and charity. They were divided into two

sections: the ordinary lay believers and the Perfecti,

who believed in complete abstinence and even the

logical end of all asceticism — the Endura —a passionate

disavowal of physical humanity which led them to

starvation and even apparently to mass suicide. They

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adopted most of the Christian teaching and dogma of

the New Testament, mixed with Gnostic ritual, using

asceticism as an end to visions and other-consciousness.

They were so loyal to their beliefs that a John of Toulouse was able to plead before his judges in 1230 ...

“Lords: hear me. I am no heretic; for I have a wife and

lie with her, and have children; and I eat flesh and lie

and swear, and am a faithful Christian. ” Many of them

seem, indeed, to have lived with the barren piety of

the saints. They were accordingly accused of sexual

orgies and sacrilege, and burned, and scourged, and

harried. Nevertheless the heresy flourished, and

Cathari were able to hold conferences on equal terms

with orthodox bishops. 5

The Holy Inquisition, in its infancy, exterminated the

Cathari, tried to exterminate the Jews, and then went

on to exterminate the Knights Templars, the Christian

organization of knighthood and conquest which had

become too powerful and wealthy. It had become independent of clergy and kings, and had thereby incurred the wrath of both. With these experiences under its expanding belt, the Inquisition in the 15th century

turned to the persecution o f those most heinous o f all

heretics, the witches, that is, to all of those who still clung

to the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe.

The Manicheans and Cathari had, in order to account for the existence of good and evil (the thorniest of theological problems), worshiped good and evil both.

The Catholics, not able to accept that solution, developed a complex theology concerning the relationship between God and the Devil, now called Satan, which rested on the weird idea that Satan was limited

in some specific ways, but very marvelous, all of his

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machinations, curses, and damnations being “by G od’s

permission” and a testimony to G od’s divine majesty.

Here we have the Catholic version o f double-double

think. Through the processes o f Aristotle’s famous

logic, as adapted by St. Thom as Aquinas, which was

the basis o f Catholic theology, it now became clear

that not to believe in the literal existence o f Satan was

tantamount to atheism. T h e evil principle, articulated

by the Manicheans and Cathari, was absorbed into

Catholicism, along with the horned figure o f the old

pagan cults, to produce the horned, clawed, sulphurous,

black, fire and brimstone Satan o f the medieval Christian iconographers.

Later Calvin and Luther also made their contributions. Luther had more personal contact with Satan than any man before or since. He proclaimed Satan

“Prince” o f this earthly realm and considered all earthly

experiences under his domination. Luther and Calvin

agreed that good works no longer counted —only divine

grace for the elect was sufficient to ensure entrance into

the Kingdom o f God. Thus Reformation Protestantism

obliterated the small measure o f hope that even

Catholicism offered. Calvin himself was a voracious

witch hunter and burner.

Although the Protestants contributed without modesty and with great enthusiasm to the witch terror, we find the origins o f the actual, organized persecutions,

not unexpectedly, in the Bull o f Innocent V III, issued

December 9, 1484. The Pope named Heinrich Kramer

and James Sprenger as Inquisitors and asked them to

define witchcraft, describe the modus operandi o f

witches, and standardize trial procedures and sen

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tencing. The papal Bull reversed the Church’s previous

position, which had been formulated by a synod in

A. D. 785:

. . . if somebody, deceived by the devil, following the

custom of the heathen, believes that some man or

woman, is a striga who eats men, and for that reason

burns her or gives her flesh to eat, or eats it, he is to

be punished by death. 6

The Church had accordingly for 7 centuries considered

the belief in witchcraft a heathen belief and the burning of alleged witches a capital crime. Pope Innocent, however, secure in papal infallibility and demonstrating a true political sensibility (leading to the consolidation of power), described the extent of his concern: It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without

afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of

Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Saltzburg, and Bremen, many

persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi [male] and succubi

[female], and by their incantations, spells, conjurations,

and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and

horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother's

womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the

produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruit

of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen,

herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen,

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herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with

terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence

husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive

their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the

Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls,

whereby they outrage Divine Majesty and are a cause

of scandal and danger to very many. 7

T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft and

in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and

Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. This

document, a monument to Aristode’s logic and academic methodology (quoting and footnoting “authorities”), catalogues the major concerns o f 15th-century Catholic theology:

Question I. Whether the Belief that there are such

Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic

Faith that Obstinancy to maintain the Opposite Opinion

manifestly savours of Heresy (Answer: Yes)

Question III. Whether Children can be Generated by

Incubi and Succubi (Answer: Yes)

Question VIII. Whether Witches can Hebetate the Power

of Generation or Obstruct the Venereal Act (Answer:

Yes)

Question IX. Whether Witches may work some Presti-

digitatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to

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be entirely removed and separate from the Body (Answer: Yes)

Question XL That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, and Procure Abortion; or if they do not do this, Offer

New-born Children to the Devils (Answer: Yes)8

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of

witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. They write “of the several Methods by which Devils through Witches Entice and Allure the

Innocent to the Increase of that Horrid Craft and company” ; “of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made”; “How they are Transported from Place to

Place”; “Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with those Devils known as Incubi, ” 9 etc. They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men,

change themselves into animals, change animals into

people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The

main concern of the Malleus is with natural events,

nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine —the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology,

sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.

Before we approach the place of women in this most

Christian piece of Western history, the importance of

the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark

Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by.

Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was

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found in every courtroom. It had been read by every

judge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.

T h e Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It was

theology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge its

authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f wisdom, ” 10

wrote Montague Summers in 1946, the year I was born)

was to commit heresy, a capital crime.

Although statistical information on the witchcraft

persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:

In almost every province of Germany the persecution

raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said

to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg,

where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine

hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year.

So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was

author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted

of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in

three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at

Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single

execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single

year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the

Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that

of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned

two hundred. 11

It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in

England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even

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fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure

for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,

but the most responsible estimate would seem to be

9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have

been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when

one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at

the end of the 13th century computed the number of

the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,

Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated

the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio o f women to

men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1

and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.

Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from

becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime:

since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” 12 Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the

Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of

Christ, women remained what they had always been in

Judeo-Christian culture:

Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in

Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head

of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of

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a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon

than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among

much which in that place precedes and follows about a

wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but

little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John

Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry

(S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to

friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary

evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!. . . Cicero in his second

book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead

them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads

them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is

avarice.. . . When a woman thinks alone, she thinks

evil. 13

T he word “woman” means “the lust o f the flesh. As it

is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death,

and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ” 14

Other characteristics o f women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan: And the first is, that they are more credulous.. . . The

second reason is, that women are naturally more

impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit.. . .

The third reason is that they have slippery tongues,

and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women

those things which by evil arts they know; and since

they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner

of vindicating themselves by witchcraft.. . .

. . . because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we

may add to what has already been said the following:

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that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it

is not surprising that they should come more under the

spell of witchcraft.

For as regards intellect, or the understanding of

spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature

from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of

the authorities, backed by various examples from the

Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually

like children. 15

Women are by nature instruments of Satan —they are

by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the

original creation:

But the natural reason is that she is more carnal

than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was

formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which

is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And

since through this defect she is an imperfect animal,

she always deceives.. . . And all this is indicated by

the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe

and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve

the Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature.... 16

. . . This is so even among holy women, so what must it

be among others? 17

In addition, “Women also have weak memories, ” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction, ” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women, ” “the world now suffers through

the malice of women, ” “a woman is beautiful to look

upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep, ”

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“she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit

. . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18

Women are most vividly described as being “more

bitter than death” :

And I have found a woman more bitter than death,

who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and

her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the

devil.. . .

More bitter than death, again, because that is

natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which

arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it

of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment

for sin.

More bitter than death, again, because bodily death

is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling

and secret enemy. 19

and also:

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not

speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men

are caught not only through their carnal desires, when

they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their

face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of

serpents.. . . And when it is said that her heart is a

net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns

in their hearts.. . .

To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,

which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there

are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth

thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth

of the womb. 20

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Here the definition of woman, in common with the

pornographic definition, is her carnality; the essence

of her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition, is her malice and avarice. The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing

with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of

the womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about male

potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men

have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed

as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.

The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils

stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men —

seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the

evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:

The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard.

A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being who

first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and

withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point

only to a natural and common process, namely to

nocturnal emissions accompanied by dreams of a more

or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is

commonly an equivalent for semen. 21

To be dreamed of often ended in slow burning on the

stake.

The most blatant proof of the explicitly sexual nature of the persecutions, however, had to do with one of the witches' most frequent crimes: they cast “glamours”

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over the male organ so that it disappeared entirely.

Sprenger and Kramer go to great lengths to prove that

witches do not actually remove the genital, only render

it invisible. If such a glamour lasts for under 3 years,

a marriage cannot be annulled; if it lasts for 3 years or

longer, it is considered a permanent fact and does annul

any marriage. Catholics now seeking grounds for divorce should perhaps consider using that one.

Men lost their genitals quite frequently. Most often,

the woman responsible for the loss was a cast-off mistress, maliciously turned to witchcraft. I f the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he

could demand reinstatement o f his genitals:

A young man who had lost his member and suspected

a certain woman, tied a towel about her neck, choked

her and demanded to be cured. “The witch touched

him with her hand between the thighs, saying, ‘Now

you have your desire. ’ ” His member was immediately

restored. 22

Often the witches, greedy by virtue o f womanhood,

were not content with the theft o f one genital:

And what then is to be thought of those witches who in

this way sometimes collect male organs, as many as

twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a

bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move

themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as

has been seen by many as is a matter of common report? 23

How can we understand that millions o f people for

centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idi

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otic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that

these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of ju risprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the

Malleus Malef icarum, with its frenzied and psychotic

woman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths,

demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil,

reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture,

shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnal

beings, hold for men.

We see in the text of the Malleus not only the fear of

loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. The reason for this fear can perhaps be located in the nature of

the sex act per se: men enter the vagina hard, erect;

men emerge drained of vitality, the cock flaccid. The

loss of semen, and the feeling of weakness which is its

biological conjunct, has extraordinary significance to

men. Hindu tradition, for instance, postulates that men

must either expel the semen and then vacuum it back

up into the cock, or not ejaculate at all. For those Western men for whom orgasm is simultaneous with ejaculation, sex must be a most literal death, with

the mysterious, muscled, pulling vagina the death-

dealer.

To locate the origins of the myth of feminine evil

in male castration and potency fears is not so much to

participate in the Freudian world view as it is to accept

and apply the anthropologist's method and link up

Western Judeo-Christian man with Australian, African,

or Trobriand primitives. To do so is to challenge the

egotism which informs our historical attitude toward

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ourselves and which would separate us from the rest o f

the species. T here is nothing to indicate that “civilization, ” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any way moderated the primal male dread o f castration. Quite

the contrary, history might even be defined as the study

o f the concrete expression o f that dread.

T h e Christians in their manifold variety were continuing the highly developed Jewish tradition o f misogyny, patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternatively

known as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. T h e Adam and

Eve creation myth is the basic myth o f man and woman,

creation, death, and sex. T here is another Jewish legend, namely that o f Adam-Lilith, which never assumed that place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatri-archal values. T h e Genesis account o f Adam and Eve in

Eden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “the

transition from primitive life to civilization, the coming

o f death, and the acquisition o f knowledge. ” 24 As Hays

points out, Adam has been told by God the Father that

if he eats from the T ree o f Knowledge he will die. T h e

serpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. T h e

serpent, it turns out, told the immediate truth: Adam

and Eve do not keel over dead; rather, they know each

other carnally.

Sex is, biblically speaking, the sole source o f civilization, death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. We have

here the beginning o f the human family and the work

ethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtue

o f their origins. One could posit, with all the assurance

o f a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Eve

always were mortal and carnal and that through eating

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the forbidden fruit only became aware of what their

condition had always been. God has never been very

straightforward with people.

Whether the precise moral of the story is that death

is a direct punishment for carnal knowledge (which

might make guilt an epistemological corollary) or that

awareness of sex and death are coterminous, the fact of

man knowing and feeling guilt is rooted in the Oedipal

content of the legend. In a patriarchy, one does not

disobey the father.

Adam’s legacy post-Eden is sexual knowledge, mortality, guilt, toil, and the fear of castration. Adam became a human male, the head of a family. His sin was lesser than Eve’s, seemingly by definition again. Even

in Paradise, wantonness, infidelity, carnality, lust, greed,

intellectual inferiority, and a metaphysical stupidity

earmark her character. Yet her sin was greater than

Adam’s. God had, in his oft-noted wisdom, created her

in a way which left her defenseless against the wiles of

the snake —the snake approached her for that very

reason. Yet she bears responsibility for the fall. Doubledouble think is clearly biblical in its origins.

Eve’s legacy was a twofold curse: “Unto the woman

He said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail;

in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire

shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ’ ” 25

Thus, the menstrual cycle and the traditional agony of

childbirth do not comprise the full punishment —patriarchy is the other half of that ancient curse.

The Christians, of course, like Avis, trying harder,

seeing in woman the root of all evil, limited her to

breeding more sinners for the Church to save. No won

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der then that women remained faithful adherents o f the

older totemic cults o f Western Europe which honored

female sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductive capacity, and recognized woman as embodying the regenerative power o f nature. T h e rituals o f these

cults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth,

and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developed by women. Magic was the substance o f ritual, the content o f belief. T h e magic o f the witches was an

imposing catalogue o f medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge o f telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion,

hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew

the medicinal nature o f herbs and developed formulae

for using them. T he women who were faithful to the

pagan cults developed the science o f organic medicine,

using vegetation, before there was any notion o f the

profession o f medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous

physician o f the Middle Ages, claimed that everything

he knew he had learned from “the good women. ” 26

Experimenting with herbs, women learned that those

which would kill when administered in large doses

had curative powers when administered in smaller

amounts. Unfortunately, it is as poisoners that the

witches are remembered. The witches used drugs like

belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and

hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development

o f analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all

medical help for births, were consulted in cases o f impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners o f euthanasia. Since the

Church enforced the curse o f Eve by refusing to permit

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any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to

the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they

could. It was especially as midwives that these learned

women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and

Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic

Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not

have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus.

It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor

pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her

husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and

intention both.

The origins of the magical content of the pagan cults

can be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithic people, smaller in stature than the natives of northern Europe or England. They were a pastoral

people who had no knowledge of agriculture. They

fled before stronger, technologically more advanced

murderers and missionaries who had contempt for

their culture. They set up communities in the inlands and concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground. The fairies developed those

magical skills for which the witches, centuries later,

were burned.

The socioreligious organization of the fairy culture

was matriarchal and probably polyandrous. The fairy

culture was still extant in England as late as the 17th

century when even the pagan beliefs of the early witches

had degenerated into the Christian parody which we

associate with Satanism. The Christians rightly recognized the fairies as ancient, original sorcerers, but

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wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f the

demonic. T here was communication between the fairies

and the pagan women, and any evidence that a woman

had visited the fairies was considered sure proof that

she was a witch.

T here were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge o f esoteric magic

and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also

practitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,

the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies o f

Christianity. T here is particular confusion when one

tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.

Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition were

true devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.

An understanding o f what the Old Religion really

was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amount and kind o f distortion that the myth o f feminine evil

made possible, who the women were who were being

burned, and what they had really done. T he information available comes primarily from the confessions o f accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work o f anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. T h e scenario o f the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot o f

knowledge disappears with 9 million people.

T h e religion was organized with geographic integ

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rity. Communities had their own organizations, mainly

structured in covens, with local citizens as administrators. There were weekly meetings which took care of business —they were called esbats. Then there were

larger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covens

met together for totemic festivities. There may have

been an actual continental organization with one all-

powerful head, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.

It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers were

approached by local officials and asked to join. Conditions of membership in a coven were the free consent of the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs and

loyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to the

new Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to the

horned god. Membership was contractual, that is, a

member signed an actual contract which limited her

obligations to the cult to a specific number of years,

at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.

Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she

would live gallantly and have the pleasure of the

World. . . ” 28 The neophyte’s debts probably were paid

and she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,

drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would

have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly

existence. It was only according to the Church that she

lost her soul as part o f the bargain. And, needless to

say, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.

Once the neophyte made the decision for the

horned god, she went through a formal initiation, often

conducted at the sabbat. The ceremony was simple.

The initiate declared that she was joining the coven

of her own free will and swore devotion to the master

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o f the coven who represented the horned god. She was

then marked with some kind o f tattoo which was called

the witches’ mark. T h e inflicting o f the tattoo was painful, and the healing process was long. When healed, the scar was red or blue and indelible. One method particularly favored by the witch hunters when hunting was to take a suspected woman, shave her pubic and other

bodily hair (including head hair, eyebrows, etc. ) and,

upon finding any scar, find her guilty o f witchcraft.

Also, the existence o f any supernumerary nipple, common in all mammals, was proof o f guilt.

T he initiate was often given a new name, especially

if she had a Christian name like Mary or Faith. Children, when they reached puberty, were initiated into the coven — parents naturally wanted their children to

share the family religion. T he Inquisition was as ruthless with children as it was with adults. T here are stories o f children being whipped as their mothers

were being burned —prevention, it was called.

T he religious ceremony, which was the main content o f the sabbat, included dancing, eating, and fucking. T he worshipers paid homage to the horned

god by kissing his representative, the master o f the

coven, anywhere he indicated. T he kiss was generally

on the master’s ass —designed, some say, to provoke the

antisodomy Christians. That ritual kiss was possibly

placed on a mask which the costumed figure —masked,

horned, wearing animal skins, and probably an artificial

phallus —wore under his tail. T h e disguise conjures up

the ancient, two-faced Janus.

T he witches danced ring dances in a direction opposite to the path o f the sun, an ancient, symbolic

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rite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing because it evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.

After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they

brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were

cannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of human

flesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how.

Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simple

meal of pedestrian food.

The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice has

been stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood. There is no evidence that any living child was killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed. There is evidence that sometimes dead infants were ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism,

and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, was

a vital part of the ritual of all early religions, including the Jewish one. The witches participated in this tradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed a

goat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed and

extended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalism to almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross to

ensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followers

symbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink of

his blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?

The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy —

heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of the

sabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It was

said that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the

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masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that no

woman ever conceived. It would seem that the horned

figure used an artificial phallus and could service all

the celebrants. T h e Old Religion, as opposed to the

Christian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, nature

and woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logical

and most sacral rite.

T h e worship o f animals is also indigenous to nature-

based religious systems. Early people existed among

animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious

ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals

and gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance.

There was a respect for the natural world — people were

hunter and hunted simultaneously. T heir perspective

was acute. T hey worshiped the spirit and power they

saw manifest in the carnivore world o f which they were

an integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” to

separate himself out o f nature, to place himself over

and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a

strong sense o f people as part o f nature, and animals

maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought

that the witches, through malice and a lust for power

(pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. T h e witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats,

mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from

one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawl

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ing conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy

was organized and controlled by the wicked women.

They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics

of total paranoia —they developed the classic model for

that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically— they had a

great respect for what worked. For instance, when they

suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her

in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any

living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room,

that creature was identified as the woman's familiar,

and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally,

given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly

in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.

Cats were particularly associated with witches. That

association is based on the ancient totemic significance

of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were

sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis

and there was also a cat deity.. . . Through Osiris

(Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the

“solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent

of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce

fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of

fertility.. . . Cats were also associated with Hathor,

a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and

rain.. . .

Still stronger, however, was the association of the

cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess —

a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-

goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing. . . the

circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the

symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation. 29

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T h e Christians not only converted the horned god into

Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. T h e witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an

ancient tradition which had as its substance love and

respect for the natural world.

It was also believed that the witch could transform

herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called

lycanthropy, is twofold:

. . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person

temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or

destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in

which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or

she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind. 30

T h e origins o f the belief in lycanthropy can be traced

to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the

use o f belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that

they did become animals. * The effect o f the belief in

lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a

stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches,

agents o f Satan, bringing with them drought, disease,

death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous,

demonic. The legend o f the werewolf (popularized in

the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout,

*

For a contem porary account o f lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.

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two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There

were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who

were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the

next morning that a respectable town matron had been

wounded in precisely the same way.

Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,

and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they an-

nointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and

aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave

the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost

archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was

of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but

genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the

air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their

assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the

devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for

such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius

Loyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it was

regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.

. . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches

were believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expressly

forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief

that witches flew. 31

With typical consistency then, the Church said that

saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the

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witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,

they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves

with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,

in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it

would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.

We now know most o f what can be known about

the witches: who they were, what they believed, what

they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the

historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which

resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly

all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that

slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed

for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original

Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.

Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,

woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to

include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a

footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance

o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.

Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells

us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely

by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,

here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living

o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned

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alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the

hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not

changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those

premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,

to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

Part Four

ANDROGYNY

When the sexual energy of the people is

liberated they will break the chains.

The struggle to break the form is

paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility

of realizing a form (a technique) to escape

the fire in which we are being consumed.

The journey to love is not romantic.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in

its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to

destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,

its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, and

structural mental sets which define women as hot wet

fuck tubes, hot slits.

Androgynous mythology provides us with a model

which does not use polar role definitions, where the

definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,

female = bad, man = human, woman = other. A ndrogyny myths are multisexual mythological models. T hey go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios

they suggest for building community, for realizing the

fullest expression o f human sexual possibility and

creativity.

Androgyny as a concept has no notion o f sexual

repression built into it. W here woman is carnality, and

carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that

woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;

that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-

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ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and

community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual

freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.

It may be the one road to freedom open to women,

men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.

C H A P T E R 8

Androgyny:

The Mythological Model

It is a question o f finding the right model. We are bo rn

into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;

Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the

substantive message o f this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns o f social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside

the socioreligious scenario o f right and wrong, good

and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated

with shame and guilt. We are programmed by the culture

as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous

way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming

operates on every level o f choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and

how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility

o f women. Take any aspect o f behavior and one can

find the source o f the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable

in this context.

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Depth psychologists consider man the center of his

world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondary universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in

the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,

the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever

planetary power might be relevant and meaningful;

religionists consider God a surrogate man, created

precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father

to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the

natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct

(no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important

(no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and

that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply,

he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:

woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man

from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is

directly responsible for the current ecological situation

which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,

including human life. Man has treated nature much as

he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.

The phenomenological world is characterized by its

diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-

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tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world

consists o f finding the proper relationship to it.

In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem is

similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the

center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think

that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions

of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow o f

sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even

into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to

natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in

interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change

ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally

defined beings. We must find ways o f destroying the

cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must

discover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual being

and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent

natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.

Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world

we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;

prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,

governments contemptuous o f their people, people

filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,

rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition

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gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,

want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those

phenomena mark the distance between civilized man

and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social

patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced

way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how

it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment

when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable

humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence

was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and

social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then

imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had

with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even

know much of what happened before people made

pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps

would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have

(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part

of the natural world, not set over against it; when men

and women, male and female, were whatever they were,

not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into

castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined

whole.

In recent years, depth psychologists in particular

have turned to primitive people and tribal situations

in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of

male and female. The most notable effort was made by

Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable

as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers

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have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as

archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined

as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and

embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is

defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.

Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal

values (particularly the need for complex organization)

inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a

feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or

mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical

thought. O f course, biological women are ruled, it

turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued

over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but

that would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jung

never questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.

In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,

M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and a

Patron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study o f mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint o f women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this

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imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery

connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),

Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church:

But if she will stop long enough to look within, she

also may become aware of impulses and thoughts

which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes

but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed

feminine being within her. For the most part, however,

a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own

nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.

And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros

which is within her, and the world without, and

through her own womanly adaptation to the world

to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of

the nonhuman feminine principle. 1

Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”

Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian

point of view.

It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance

that male and female are pitted against each other and

that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open

to male and female, men and women, when they meet:

These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent

on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and

women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.. . . So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed. 2

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These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,

embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure o f reality. T hey are polar opposites; their mode o f interaction is conflict. T hey cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values”

are other. (Women have never understood that they

are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) T here is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male

and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two

halves o f the same whole. One is not superior, one is not

inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,

ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the

other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is the

so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia

of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,

physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologically women. Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminine

evil.

T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or

erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes

from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f

human sexuality. The essential information which

would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which

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describe the creation of the first human being as male

and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the

wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct

a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories

all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.

With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. * But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture

are gross perversions of original creation myths which

molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-con-

scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths

all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception

uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,

male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The

myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real

cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised

by a culture which posits other values, and though

those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been

ostracized and persecuted.

With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is

myth, and why does it have such importance? The best

definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,

Dreams, and Mysteries:

*

It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when people

began to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percent of the whole o f human history.

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

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What exactly is a myth? In the language current during the nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anything that was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam,

or the invisible man, no less than the history of the

world as described by the Zulus, or the Theogony of

Hesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many another

cliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this,

too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, according to primitive Christianity, everything which could not be justified by reference to one or the other

of the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ”

But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged us

to go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christian polemics against the pagan world. We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the

myth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” and

archaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to

express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred

history; that is, a transhuman revelation which took

place at the dawn of the Great Time.. . . Being real

and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently, repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token, a justification, for all human actions. In

other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass

at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior. 3 [Italics added]

I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect.

It is not only in primitive and archaic societies that

myths provide this model for behavior —it is in every

human society. T he distance between myth and social

organization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, in

advanced technological societies, but myth still operates

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as the substructure of the collective. The story of Adam

and Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moon

and Mars, and the Christian version of the primitive

myth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the most

technologically advanced communications media.

What are the myths of androgyny, and how do we

locate them behind the myths of polarity with which we

are familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yin

and yang.

Yin and yang are commonly associated with female

and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that

it appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free description of phenomena, describes cosmic movement as cyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang

(masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin

(female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identifications reduce the concepts too often to conceptual polarities: they are used to fix the proper natures of

men and women as well as the forces of male and female.

These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based

on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that

(1) all people are composed of both yin and yang,

though in the man yang properly predominates and in

the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male

and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally

vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one

looks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation of

yin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half of

the universe.

The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,

are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an

already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

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165

Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called

The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted

meanings o f yin and yang:

Out of the Tao, and the Tai-chi [“the great ridge

pole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principles of reality, the one pole being the light (yang) and the other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). Among

European scholars, some have turned first to sexual

references for an explanation, but the characters refer

to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the

north side of a mountain and the south side of a river.

. . . Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennants

and, corresponding to the character of yin, is the south

side of a mountain and the north side of a river. Starting only with the meaning of “light” and “dark, ” the principle was then expanded to all polar opposites,

including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang

have their common origin in an undivided One and

are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang

appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin

as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it

is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the

basis for these ideas. 4

Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological

sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night

which then slowly changes into day. When men began

conceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, the

phenomena o f light and dark were an obvious starting

point. My own experience is that night and day are

more alike than different —in which case they couldn't

possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has

reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are

more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.

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Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually

female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and

misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We

know that at one time men were hunters and women

were planters. Both forms o f work were essential and

arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength

and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men

hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that

they could not run, go without food for long periods of

time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It

is probable that very early in human history women

also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival

of the species that they develop into planters — first to

supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant

and woman mortality. We see that the first division of

labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the

man in the process of impregnation, women were invested with a supreme magical power, one which engendered awe and fear in men. As they developed skill in planting, they embodied even more explicitly fertility, generation, and of course death. The overwhelming mana of women, coupled with the high mortality which went along with childbirth, could well have led

to practices of protection, segregation, and slowly

increasing social restriction. With pregnancy as the

one inevitable in a woman’s life, men began to organize

social life in a way which excluded woman, which limited her to the living out of her reproductive function.

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167

As men began to know power, that power directly related to the exclusion o f women from community life, the myth o f feminine evil developed and provided justification for laws, rites, and other practices which relegated women to pieces o f property. As a corollary, men developed the taste for subjugating others and

hoarding power and wealth which characterizes them

to this very day.

Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is the

realization that these concepts did not originally attach

to sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (first

being) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’ai

Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation o f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender o f the noun is feminine) because o f woman’s generative function.

Am ong the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called male-

female polarities are called yabyum; among the Indian

Hindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantric

sects o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cult

attached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to the

union o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. T h e culminating religious rite o f the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union o f man and woman which achieves, even if

only symbolically, the original androgynous energy.

This is the outstanding fact when one looks at yabyum

and Shiva-Shakti:

The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to the

passive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did

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Woman Hating

the opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principle to the passive male pole, and the dynamic principle to the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhist did it the other way around. 5

The explanation for this major difference, this attachment in one case of the feminine to the passive and in the other of the feminine to the active, is that these

attachments were made arbitrarily. 6 Two convictions

vital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywhere the feminine is synonymous with the passive, receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definition of the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comes from the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity, receptivity, etc.

In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology, the phenomenological world is not created by god as something distinct from him. It is the godhead

in manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “. . . the

image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in

terms of an essentially psychological reading of the

problem of creation. ” 7 In a description of that androgynous being, we find: “He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself into

two parts; and with that there was a master and a

mistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage

Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ” 8

In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity was

Isis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous. So is Awonawilona, chief god of the Pueblo Zuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.

Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

169

older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f original human beings: male/male, male/female, female/

female. These original humans were so powerful that

the gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynous ancestry did not stop him from becoming the Macho Kid, halved them.

T h e Aranda o f Australia know a supernatural being

called Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynes

as the first beings, then split them apart, then tied them

back together with hemp to make couples. It is essentially this story that is repeated throughout the primitive world.

Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestral images o f one being with breasts, penis, and beard.

Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participate in the same devotional tradition —we perceive that they are united in sexual intercourse, but it is

also possible that they represent one literal androgynous body.

T here are still devotional religious practices which

harken back to the mythology o f the primal androgyne

— Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indian

manifestations, clearly participates in that tradition.

Possibly the rite o f subincision, practiced in Australia,

is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is the

ritual slitting open o f the underside o f the penis to form

a permanent cleft into the urethra. T h e opening is

called the “ penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “T h e

subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that o f a certain class o f hermaphrodites. ” 9

T he drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, is

sacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to

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speculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulation

o f what the Oedipal complex is and means serves the

imperatives of a patriarchal culture, of Judeo-Chris-

tian morality, and remains largely unchallenged. But

the earliest devotional mother-son configurations are

those of a Mother/Goddess and her Son/Lover. The

son is lover to the mother and is ritually sacrificed at a

predetermined time (mothers don’t have to be possessive). This sacrifice is not related to guilt or punishment—it is holy sacrifice which sanctifies the tribe, does honor to the offering, and is premised on cyclic fertility patterns of life, death, and regeneration. These rites, associated with the worship of the Great Mother

(the first corruption of the Great Original, or primal

androgyne) involved ritual intercourse between mother

and son, with the subsequent sacrifice of the son. At

one time both a son and a daughter were sacrificed, but

as the daughter became a mother-surrogate, the son

was sacrificed alone. This sacralized set, Mother/God-

dess-Son/Lover, and the rituals associated with it, are

postandrogyne developments: that is, men and women

experienced separateness (not duality) and attempted

to recreate symbolically the androgynous state of mind

and body through what we now call incest. If it is true

that the implications of the androgyny myths in terms

of behavior run counter to every Judeo-Christian, or

more generally sexist, notion of morality, it would follow that incest is the primary taboo of this and similar cultures because it has its roots in the sexually dynamic

androgynous mentality. Indeed, it is not surprising

to discover that early versions of the Oedipus story do

not end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

171

leaves Oedipus overcome with fear, guilt, and remorse,

blinded and ruined. In the earlier Homeric version,

Oedipus becomes king and reigns happily ever after.

Freud chose the wrong version o f the right story.

Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne. Here is the substance o f a cultural underground most directly related to us. According to the Zohar,

the first created woman was not Eve but Lilith. She was

created coterminous with Adam, that is, they were

created in one body, androgynous. T hey were o f one

substance, one corporality. God, so the legend goes,

split them apart so that Lilith could be dressed as a bride

and married to Adam properly, but Lilith rebelled at

the whole concept o f marriage,, that is, o f being defined as Adam ’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in fact the first woman and the first feminist both. T h e Jewish

patriarchs, with shrewd vengeance, called her a witch.

They said that the witch Lilith haunted the night (her

name is etymologically associated with the Hebrew

word for night) and killed infants. She became symbolic

o f the dark, evil side o f all women. O f course, Lilith,

we know now, made the correct analysis and went to the

core o f the problem: she rejected the nuclear family.

God, however, saw it differently — he had created Lilith

from dust, just as he had created Adam. He had created her free and equal. Not making the same mistake twice, Eve was created from Adam's rib, clearly giving

her no claim to either freedom or equality. It took the

Christians to assert that since the rib is bent, woman’s

nature is contrary to man’s.

How then can we understand the biblical statement

that God created man in his own image —male and fe

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male created he them? The Midrash gives the definitive answer: When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the first man, he created him androgynous. 10 There is also

a corresponding Jewish androgynous godhead. The

very word for the godhead, Elohim, is composed of a

feminine noun and a masculine plural ending. God

is multiple and androgynous. The tradition of the

androgynous godhead is most clearly articulated in the

Kabbalah, a text which in written form goes back to the

Middle Ages. The oral Kabbalah, which is more extensive than the written Kabbalah, originates in the most obscure reaches of Jewish history, before the

Bible, and has been preserved with, according to occultists, more care than the written Bible —that is, the Bible has been rewritten, edited, modified, translated;

oral Kabbalah has retained its purity.

The Kabbalistic scheme of the godhead is complex.

Suffice it here to say that god is male and female interwoven. Certain parts are associated with the female, other parts with the male. For instance, primal understanding is female; wisdom is male; severity is female; mercy is male. Special prominence is given to the final

emanation of the godhead, Malkuth the Queen, the

physical manifestation of the godhead in the universe.

Malkuth the Queen is roughly equivalent to Shakti. For

the Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacrament is sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny.

Just as the Tantrics are/were ostracized by the rest of

the Hindu and Buddhist communities, so do the main

body of Jews ostracize the Kabbalists. Now they are

considered to be freaks —they have been viewed as

heretics. And heretics they are, for in recognizing the

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173

androgynous nature o f the godhead they undermine

the authority o f God the Father and threaten the power

o f patriarchy.

It remains only to point out that Christ also had

some notion o f androgyny. In Gospel to the Egyptians,

Christ and a disciple named Salome have this conversation:

When Salome asked how long Death should prevail,

the Lord said: So long as ye women bear children; for

I have come to destroy the work o f the Female. And

Salome said to Him: Did I therefore well in having

no children? T h e Lord answered and said: Eat every

Herb, but eat not that which hath bitterness. When

Salome asked when these things about which she questioned would be made known, the Lord said: When ye trample upon the garment o f shame; when the Tw o

become One, and Male with Female neither male nor

fem ale. 11

In the next chapter I am going to pursue the implications o f androgyny myths in the areas o f sexual identity and sexual behavior, and it would be in keeping

with the spirit o f this book to take Christ as my guide

and say with him: “When ye trample upon the garment

o f shame; when the Tw o become One, and Male with

Female neither male nor female. ”

C H A P T E R 9

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking,

and Community

Nothing short o f everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley, Island

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman”

are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models

they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human

becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the

female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture

as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy.

Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are “gender disorders, ” “criminality, ” as well as “sick, ” “disgusting, ” and “immoral. ” Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on

polar role definition, and the social institutions related

to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum)

are “human nature. ” Homosexuality, transsexuality,

incest, and bestiality persist as the “perversions” of this

“human nature” we presume to know so much about.

They persist despite the overwhelming forces marshaled against them —discriminatory laws and social practices, ostracism, active persecution by the state

and other organs of the culture —as inexplicable embarrassments, as odious examples of “filth” and/or

“maladjustment. ” The attempt here, however modest

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175

and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, one

which discards the fiction that there are two polar

distinct sexes.

We have seen that androgyny myths present an

image o f one corporality which is both male and female.

Sometimes the image is literally a man-form and a

woman-form in one body. Sometimes it is a figure

which incorporates both male and female functions.

In every case, that mythological image is a paradigm

for a wholeness, a harmony, and a freedom which is

virtually unimaginable, the antithesis o f every assumption we hold about the nature o f identity in general and sex in particular. T h e first question then is: What

o f biology? There are, after all, men and women. They

are different, demonstrably so. We are each o f one sex

or the other. If there are two discrete biological sexes,

then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete

modes o f human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined.

One might argue for a liberalization o f sex-based roles,

but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.

Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to

develop new means o f human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies o f

formation o f gender identity in children provide basic

information which challenges the notion that there are

two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens

to transform the traditional biology o f sex difference

into the radical biology o f sex similarity. That is not to

say that there is one sex, but that there are many. The

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evidence which is germane here is simple. The words

“male” and “female, ” “man” and “woman, ” are used

only because as yet there are no others.

1. Men and women have the same basic body structure. Both have both male and female genitals —the clitoris is a vestigial penis, the prostate gland is most

probably a vestigial womb. Since, as I pointed out earlier, there is information on only 2 percent of human history, and since religious chronicles, which were for

centuries the only record of human history, consistently

speak of another time in the cycle o f time when humans

were androgynous, and since each sex has the vestigial

organs of the other, there is no reason not to postulate

that humans once were androgynous — hermaphroditic

and androgynous, created precisely in the image of

that constantly recurring androgynous godhead.

2. Until the 7th week of fetal development both

sexes have precisely the same external genitalia. Basically, the development of sex organs and ducts is the same for males and females and the same two sets of

ducts develop in both.

3. The gonads cannot be said to be entirely male or

female. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey writes:

In their somatic organization, the gonads always retain

a greater or lesser amount o f the opposite-sex tissue

which remains functional throughout life. 1

4. Chromosomal sex is not necessarily the visible

sex of the individual. It happens that a person of one

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177

chromosomal sex develops the gonads o f the other sex. *

Gonadal sex and chromosomal sex can be in direct contradiction.

5. Chromosomal sex is not only X X or XY. There

are other chromosomal formations, and not much is

known about them or what they signify.

6. A person can have the gonads o f one sex, and the

secondary sexual characteristics o f the other sex.

7. Men and women both produce male and female

hormones. T h e amounts and proportions vary greatly,

and there is no way to determine biological maleness

or femaleness from hormone count.

8. One hormone can be transformed by the body

into its “opposite, ” male into female, female into

male. In Sex, Gender, and Society, Ann Oakley gives this

example:

. . . the fact that rapidly maturing male adolescents

sometimes acquire small breasts —the substantial increases in testosterone which accompanies puberty

[are] partially metabolised as oestrogen, which in turn

causes breast developm ent. 2

9. It is now thought that the male hormone determines the sex drive in both men and women.

* Question: Can a person with the chromosomal sex o f a male and the

gonadal sex o f a fem ale conceive? I f so, we would have to accept the notion

that men can have children. I would think that such cases do exist in nature,

even though I could find no confirmation that such persons are ferule. Since

anyone who has children is defined as a woman, and chrom osom e tests are

not done routinely, such persons would probably not be discovered except

by accident.

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10. The female hormone (progesterone) can have a

masculinizing effect. Dr. Sherfey writes:

We may have difficulty conceiving it, but natural selection has no difficulty using sexually heterotypic structures for homotypic purposes. For example,

progesterone is the “pregnancy hormone” essential

for menstruation and the prolonged pregnancy. It is as

uniquely a “female” hormone as one can be. Yet progesterone possesses strong androgenic properties. It may be used to masculinize female embryos. In 1 960,

Jones (27, 63) demonstrated that progesterone given

to human mothers early in pregnancy to prevent

threatened miscarriages. . . severely masculinized a

female fetus. 3

11. Visible sex differences are not discrete. There

are men with tiny cocks, women with large clits. There

are men with highly developed breasts, women with

almost no breast development. There are men with

wide hips, women with no noticeable hip development.

There are men with virtually no body hair, women with

much body hair. There are men with high voices,

women with low voices. There are men with no facial

hair, women who have beards and mustaches.

12. Height and weight differences between men and

women are not discrete. Muscle structures are not discrete. We know the despair of the tall, muscular woman who does not fit the female stereotype; we know also

the despair of the small, delicate man who does not

fit the male stereotype.

13. There is compelling cross-cultural evidence that

muscle strength and development are culturally deter-

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179

mined. T here are cultures in which there are no great

differences in somatotype o f men and women:

In one small-scale (“primitive”) society for which there

are good photographic records —the Manus of the

Admiralty Islands — there is apparently no difference at

all in somatotype between males and females as children, and as adults both men and women tend to the same high degree of mesomorphy (broad shoulders

and chest, heavily muscled limbs, little subcutaneous

fat).. . . In Bali, too, males and females lack the sort

of differentiation of the physique that is a visible difference in our culture. Geoffrey Gorer once described them as a “hermaphroditic” people; they have little

sex differential in height and both sexes have broad

shoulders and narrow hips. They do not run to curves

and muscles, to body hair or to breasts of any size.

(Gorer once remarked that you could not tell male and

female apart, even from the front. ) Another source

informs us that babies suck their fathers' breasts as

well as their mothers'. 4

14.

There are hermaphrodites in nature. Robert T.

Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human

Reproduction, admits:

The medical profession and experimental biologists

have always been very skeptical about the existence of

functional hermaphrodites among the higher animals

and man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, and

other lower animals do combine both sexes in the same

individual. 5

We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexual discreteness and polarity goes —that commitment

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makes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptually intolerable. It is interesting here to speculate on the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger ( Men in

Groups) who in effect project human cultural patterns

of dominance and submission on the animal world. For

instance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primate

species, the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites if

they were human” (Italics hers. ) 6 Most probably, we often

simply project our own culturally determined modes of

acting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectively screen information that would challenge the notions of male and female which are holy to us. In

that case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the current bias toward polarity) would give us significantly different scenarios of animal behavior.

Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenital disorder in which both male and female generative organs exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”

hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and the

secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. But

this is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:

The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girl

who was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. As

is the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed is

carefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,

signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in different

regions o f the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situated right next to each other in the same organ, Dr.

Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that they

would combine and make a human being. ”. . . The

unique feature. . . would be that the same person

contributed both germ cells. 8

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181

Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Fran-

coeur refers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettles

who

in examining human eggs just after they were removed

from their ovarian follicles. . . found that three out

of four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavage in vivo within the intact follicle, without any possible contact with spermatozoa. ” 9

On the basis o f Shettles’ work, Francoeur estimates

that virgin births are a rather common occurrence,

in about the same frequency as fraternal twins and

twice as often as identical twins occur among white

Americans. 10

Seemingly a conservative, Dr. Sherwood Taylor, a

British scientist, “has suggested a much lower frequency

for human parthenogenesis, estimating one case in ten

thousand births. ” 11 However much, however little, it

does occur.

We can presume then that there is a great deal about

human sexuality to be discovered, and that our notion

o f two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. We

can presume then that we will discover cross-sexed

phenomena in proportion to our ability to see them. In

addition, we can account for the relative rarity o f hermaphrodites in the general population, for the consistency o f male-female somatotypes that we do find, and for the relative rarity o f cross-sexed characteristics in the general population (though they occur with more frequency than we are now willing to imagine)

by recognizing that there is a process o f cultural selec

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tion which, for people, supersedes natural selection in

importance. Cultural selection, as opposed to natural

selection, does not necessarily serve to improve the

species or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serve

to uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviant

somatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematically bred out of the population.

However we look at it, whatever we choose to make

out of the data of what is frequently called Intersex, it

is clear that sex determination is not always clearcut

and simple. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University has basically isolated these six aspects of sex identity:

1. Genetic or nuclear sexuality as revealed by indicators

like the sex-chromatin or Barr-body, a full chromosomal count and the leucocytic drumstick; *

2. Hormonal sexuality which results from a balance that

is predominantly androgenic or estrogenic;

3. Gonadal sexuality which may be clearly ovarian or

testicular, but occasionally also mixed;

4. Internal sexuality as disclosed in the structure of

the internal reproductive system;

5. External genital sexuality as revealed in the external

anatomy, and finally;

6. Psychosexual development which through the external

forces of rearing and social conditioning along with

the individual's response to these factors directs the

development o f a personality which is by nature

sexual. 12

* An object in the cell itself which would seem to determine gender.

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183

Since there can be total contradiction between/

among any o f the above, since we have discussed some

(by no means all) o f the cross-sexed characteristics o f

human biological functioning, since we recognize hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis as human realities, we are justified in making a radical new formulation o f

the nature o f human sexuality. We are, clearly, a multi-

sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid

continuum where the elements called male and female are

not discrete *

T he concrete implications o f multisexuality as we

find it articulated in both androgynous mythology and

biology necessitate the total redefinition o f scenarios o f

proper human sexual behavior and pragmatic forms

o f human community. I f human beings are multisexed,

then all forms o f sexual interaction which are directly

rooted in the multisexual nature o f people must be part

o f the fabric o f human life, accepted into the lexicon o f

human possibility, integrated into the forms o f human

community. By redefining human sexuality, or by

defining it correctly, we can transform human relationship and the institutions which seek to control that relationship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we

know now. Sex as community between humans, our

shared humanity, is the world we must build. What

*

T h e notion o f bisexuality is organically rooted to structural polarity

and is inappropriate here for these reasons: the word itself has duality built

into it; one can be bisexual and still relate to the fictions “ male” and “ fem ale"

— to both instead o f to one; one can be bisexual and still relate exclusively to

one role, the masculine or the fem inine, w hether found in men or women.

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kind of sexual identity and relation will be the substance of that community?

Heterosexuality and Homosexuality/

There are men I could spend eternity with,

But not this life.

Kathleen Norris

a little zen in our politics a little acid in

our tea, could be all we need, the poof

is in the putting.

Jill Johnston

I have defined heterosexuality as the ritualized

behavior built on polar role definition. Intercourse

with men as we know them is increasingly impossible.

It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a

refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal

death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity

which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional

heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity.

That is not to say that “men” and “women” should

not fuck. Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i. e., the biological

images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous.

Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction

* For bisexuality, cf. p. 183.

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185

of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as the

primary focus and value, of couple formations, and of the

personality structures dominant-active (“ male”) and sub-

missive-passive (“female”).

Homosexuality, because it is by definition antagonistic to two-sex polarity, is closer at its inception to androgynous sexuality. However, since all individual

consciousness and social relationship are polluted by

internalized notions o f polarity, coupling, and role-

playing, the criteria cited above must also be applied to

homosexual relation. T oo often homosexual relation

transgresses gender imperatives without transforming

them.

An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation,

whether homosexual or heterosexual, generally means

an exclusive commitment to one role. An exclusive

commitment to one sexual formation generally involves the denial o f many profound and compelling kinds o f sensuality. An exclusive commitment to one

sexual formation generally means that one is, regardless o f the uniform one wears, a good soldier o f the culture programmed effectively to do its dirty work.

It is by developing one’s pansexuality to its limits

(and no one knows where or what those are) that one

does the work o f destroying culture to build community.

Transsexuality

How can I really care if we win “the Revolution” ? Either way, any way, there will be

no place for me.

A transsexual friend, in a conversation

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Transsexuality is currently considered a gender

disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which

contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a “disease” with

a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’s

visible sex and make it consonant with the person’s felt

identity.

Since we know very little about sex identity, and

since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation

of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature

and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization.

More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female

discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency

(see p. 185) as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial

points here. One, every transsexual has the right to

survival on his/her own terms. That means that every

transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation,

and it should be provided by the community as one of

its functions. This is an emergency measure for an

emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises

about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the

social situation of transsexuals will be transformed,

and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no

longer persecuted and despised. Three, community

built on androgynous identity will mean the end of

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

187

transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will

be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes o f sexual identity and behavior.

Transvestism

T h e first time I put on the black silk

panties I got a hardon right away.

Julian Beck

Transvestism is costuming which violates gender

imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually

charged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role is

erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civil

disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming

is part o f the strategy and process o f role destruction.

We see, for instance, that as women reject the female

role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,

the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.

Bestiality

[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a

Jew was regarded as a form o f bestiality,

and incurred the same penances.

G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and

other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.

Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships

between people and other animals) is found everywhere

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Woman Hating

on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.

Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places

people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals,

when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance

is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism

in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was

sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in

the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between

people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of

violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore

very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like

horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols

of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human

and other-animal relationships would become more

explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always

share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold —later revolted a little, not

much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try

— know the Monster of the Beginning

Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she

care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

189

T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic

because all human relationships are primarily erotic.

T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,

one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest

taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the

parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces

us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,

or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts

o f other humans who are not our parents and never

will be.

T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:

it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we

place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e

destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.

Th e Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at

birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the

total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous

perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;

and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;

then if we did away with the family we

would in effect be doing away with the

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Woman Hating

repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a

sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one

must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate

to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of

destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.

As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they

will also develop the forms of community appropriate

to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will

be.

Children

The special tie women have with children

is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no

more than shared oppression. And that

moreover this oppression is intertwined

and mutually reinforcing in such complex

ways that we will be unable to speak of

the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

191

T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:

women are rejecting the female role, and life is being

created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally

transformed, we can expect that when women no longer

function as biological breeders we will be expendable.

As men learn more and more to control reproduction,

as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f

computers and robots develop, there is every reason

to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history

resorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,

as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. That

is the simple, compelling reality. T here are only two

other options: women must seize power, or we must

accomplish the transformation into androgyny.

T h e freedom o f those who are capable o f biological

reproduction from that work (which is simply a form

o f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world o f polarity must one expect that development to lead to

gynocide. T h e social processes here stand naked: if

women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important,

implication o f androgyny.

As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer

to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic im

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Woman Haling

pulses. In androgynous community, those impulses

would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would

no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-

realization. The distinctions between “children” and

“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those

distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.

Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley, Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is

the development of a new kind of human being and a

new kind of human community. All of us who have ever

tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short

of everything will really do.

The way from here to there will not be easy. We

must make a total commitment —no longer to take

refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which

are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-

female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse

to know who we are and what we desire so that we need

not take responsibility for our own lives. We must

refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to

submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We

must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

193

submission. We must instead build communities where

violence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,

where natural desire is the fundament o f community,

where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe

based on androgyny and the social forms which would

develop from it are the bases o f the collective cultural

structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck

wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have

written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —

nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We

begin here and now, inch by inch.

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation, June 1973

The Revolution is not an event that takes

two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free

from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968

There is a misery of the body and a misery

of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

looked at them, poured nectar into our

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

AFT ERWORD

The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle

this text has been altered in one very serious way. I

wanted it to be printed the way it was written —lower

case letters, no apostrophes, contractions.

I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessary punctuation is necessary, when one knows ones purposes one knows what is necessary.

my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the

pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his

purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes

differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.

my publisher changed my punctuation because book

reviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters,

fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).

W hen I say god and mammon concerning the

writer writing, I mean that any one can use words to

say something. And in using these words to say what

he has to say he may use those words directly or in-

directly. I f he uses these words indirectly he says what

he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear

and in so doing inevitably he has to serve mammon.. . .

Now serving god for a writer who is writing is writing

anything directly, it makes no difference what it is but

197

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Woman Hating

it must be direct, the relation between the thing done

and the doer must be direct. In this way there is completion and the essence o f the completed thing is completion.

Gertrude Stein

in a letter to me, Grace Paley wrote, “once everyone

tells the truth artists will be unnecessary —meanwhile

there’s work for us. ”

telling the truth, we know what it is when we do it

and when we learn not to do it we forget what it is.

form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how the

printed word appears on the page, where to breathe,

where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicating

rhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it

— I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where I

do, instead of letting you discover your own natural

breath.

I begin by presuming that I am free.

I begin with nothing, no form, no content, and I ask:

what do I want to do and how do I want to do it.

I begin by presuming that what I write belongs to

me.

I begin by presuming that I determine the form I

use —in all its particulars. I work at my craft —in all

its particulars.

in fact, everything is already determined,

in fact, all the particulars have been determined and

are enforced.

in fact, where I violate what has already been determined I will be stopped.

in fact, the enforcers will enforce.

Afterword

199

“Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the

Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set

beyond human judgment. In that case one dare not

believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man.

Bound as he is by his service, even at the door of the

Law, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large in

the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubt

the Law itself. ”

“I don't agree with that point of view, ” said K.,

shaking his head, “for if one accepts it, one must accept

as true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that. ”

“No, ” said the priest, “it is not necessary to accept

everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary. ”

“A melancholy conclusion, ” said K. “It turns lying

into a universal principle. ”

Franz Kafka

I presume that I am free. I act. the enforcers enforce. I discover that I am not free, then: either I lie (it is necessary to lie) or I struggle (if I do not lie, I

must struggle), if I struggle, I ask, why am I not free

and what can I do to become free? I wrote this book to

find out why I am not free and what I can do to become

free.

Though the social structure begins by framing the

noblest laws and the loftiest ordinances that “the great

of the earth” have devised, in the end it comes to this:

breach that lofty law and they take you to a prison cell

and shut your human body off from human warmth.

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Woman Hating

Ultimately the law is enforced by the unfeeling guard

punching his fellow man hard in the belly.

Judith Malina

without the presum ption o f freedom , there is no

freedom . I am free, how, then, do I want to live my

life, do my work, use my body? how, then, do I want to

be, in all my particulars?

standard form s are imposed in dress, behavior,

sexual relation, punctuation. standard form s are imposed on consciousness and b eh avior— on know ing and exp ressin g— so that we will not presum e freedom , so

that freedom will appear — in all its particulars — impossible and unworkable, so that we will not know what telling the truth is, so that we will not feel com pelled

to tell it, so that we will spend ou r time and our holy

hum an energy telling the necessary lies.

standard form s are sometimes called conventions,

conventions are m ightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrum ent o f the Law, an u nfeeling guard pun ching his fellow man hard in the belly.

I am an anarchist. I dont sue, I dont get injunctions, I

advocate revolution, and when people ask me what

can we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken the

fabric of the system wherever you can, make possible

the increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write I

try to extend the possibilities of expression.

. . . I had tried to speak to you honestly, in my own

way, undisguised, trying to get rid, it’s part o f my obligation to the muse, of the ancien regime o f grammar.

. . . the revisions in typography and punctuation

have taken from the voice the difference that distin

Afterword

201

guishes passion from affection and me speaking to

you from me writing an essay.

Julian Beck, 1965, in a foreword

to an edition of The Brig

BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION.

Muriel Rukeyser

there is a great deal at stake here, many writers

fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for

the writer? freedom o f invention, freedom to tell the

truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new

structures.

(the burden o f proof is not on those who presume

freedom, the burden o f p roof is on those who would

in any way diminish it. )

what is at stake for the enforcers, the doorkeepers,

the guardians o f the L aw —the publishing corporations,

the book reviewers who do not like lower case letters,

the librarians who will not stack books without standard

punctuation (that was the reason given Muriel Rukeyser

when her work was violated)—what is at stake for them?

why do they continue to enforce?

while this book may meet much resistance— anger,

fear, dislike—law? police? courts? —at this moment I

must write: Ive attacked the fundaments o f culture,

thats ok. Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok. Ive

attacked every heterosexual notion o f relation, thats

ok. Ive in effect advocated the use o f drugs, thats ok.

Ive in effect advocated fucking animals, thats ok. here

and now, New York City, spring 1974, among a handful

o f people, publisher and editor included, thats ok. lower

case letters are not. it does make one wonder.

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Woman Hating

so Ive wondered and this is what I think right now.

there are well-developed, effective mechanisms for

dealing with ideas, no matter how powerful the ideas

are. very few ideas are more powerful than the mechanisms for defusing them, standard form —punctuation, typography, then on to academic organization, the

rigid ritualistic formulation of ideas, etc. —is the actual

distance between the individual (certainly the intellectual individual) and the ideas in a book.

standard form is the distance.

one can be excited about ideas without changing at

all. one can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without

changing at all. people are willing to think about many

things, what people refuse to do, or are not permitted to

do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.

reading a text which violates standard form forces

one to change mental sets in order to read. there is no

distance. the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar, forces one to read differendy—not to read about different things, but to read in different ways.

to permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think

about different things, but to think in different ways.

that work is not permitted.

If it had been possible to build the Tower o f Babel

without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.

Franz Kafka

The Immovable Structure is the villain. Whether

that structure calls itself a prison or a school or a fac

Afterword

203

tory or a family or a government or The World As It

Is. That structure asks each man what he can do for it,

not what it can do for him, and for those who do not do

for it, there is the pain of death or imprisonment, or

social degradation, or the loss of animal rights.

Judith Malina

this book is about the Immovable Sexual Structure,

in the process o f having it published, Ive encountered

the Immovable Punctuation Typography Structure,

and I now testify, as so many have before me, that the

Immovable Structure aborts freedom, prohibits invention, and does us verifiable harm: it uses our holy human energy to sustain itself; it turns us into enforcers, or outlaws; to survive, we must learn to lie.

T h e Revolution, as we live it and as we imagine it,

means destroying the Immovable Structure to create

a world in which we can use our holy human energy to

sustain our holy human lives;

to create a world without enforcers, doorkeepers,

guards, and arbitrary Law;

to create a world —a community on this planet—

where instead o f lying to survive, we can tell the truth

and flourish.

N O T E S

Chapter 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles

1 The Brothers G rim m , Household Stories (New York: Dover

Publications, 1963), p. 213.

2 Ibid., p. 213.

3 Ibid., p. 214.

4 Ibid.

5Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7Ibid., p. 216.

8 Ibid., p. 221.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

II Ibid., p. 124.

12 Ibid., p. 72.

13 Ibid., p. 73.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 74.

16 Ibid., p. 85

17 Ibid., p. 220.

18 Ibid., p. 85.

19 Ibid., p. 92.

Chapter 3. Woman as Victim: Story of O

1 Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 108, unsigned.

- Pauline Reage, Story o f O (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. xxi.

3 Ibid., p. 80.

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Woman Haling

4 Ibid., p. 93.

5 Ibid., p. 187.

6Ibid., p. 32.

7 Ibid., p. 106.

8 R obert S. d e R opp, Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in M an and

Animals (New York: Dell Publishing C om pany, 1969), p. 134.

Chapter 4. Woman at Victim: The Image

‘J e a n d e B erg, The Image (New York: G rove Press, 1966), p.

137-

2 Ibid., p. 19.

3 Ibid., p. 47.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 10.

6 Ibid., p. 11.

7 Ibid., p. 9.

8 Ibid., p. 42.

9Eliphas Levi, The History o f Magic (London: R ider a n d C om pany, 1969), p. 263.

10 Ibid., p. 265.

" J e a n d e B erg, op. cit., p. 11.

11 Ibid., p. 135.

13

The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. J o h n C ohen (New York: Ballan-

tine Books, 1967), pp. 296-97.

Chapter 5. Woman at Victim: Suck

1 The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen (New York: Ballan-

tine Books, 1967), p. 245.

2 Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy, I Change I Am the Same

(n. d. ).

3 Suck 6.

4 Ibid.

5 Suck 4.

6

Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

" 7 Ibid.

19 Suck 2 .

11 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Suck 3.

Chapter 6. Gynoclde: Chinese Footbinding

I Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History o f a Curious

Erotic Custom (New York: W. Rawls, 1966), p. 39. Mr. Levy’s book is

the primary source for all the factual, historical information in this

chapter.

2Ibid., p. 112.

3 Ibid., pp. 25-26.

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Ibid., pp. 26-28.

6 Ibid., p. 141.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 182.

" 9

Ibid., p. 89.

10 Ibid., p. 144.

II Ibid., pp. 144- 4 5 -

Chapter 7. Gynoclde: The Witches

1 Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft (London: Tandem,

1969 ). P- 66.

2 H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth o f Feminine E vil (London: Methuen and Co., 1966), p. 111.

3Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1971), p. 63.

4 Ibid., p. 65.

5 Ibid., pp. 66-67.

6 Hays, op. cit., p. 147.

7 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum,

trans. by M. Summers (London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 29-30.

8 Ibid., Table of Contents.

9

Ibid.

10 Ibid., Preface.

11 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 183-84.

208

Woman Hating

12 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 123.

13 Ibid., pp. 114-15.

14 Ibid., pp. 115-16.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 117.

17 Ibid., p. 118.

18 Ibid., pp. 119-21.

19 Ibid., p. 112.

20 Ibid., pp. 122-23.

21 Hays, op. cit., p. 151.

22 Ibid., p. 153.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 89.

25 T h e Holy Bible (Philadelphia: N ational Bible Press, 1954), p. 8.

26 M ichelet, op. cit., p. 68.

27 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 161.

28 H ughes, op. cit., pp. 9 7 -9 8 .

29 Gillian T indall, A Handbook on Witches (New York: A theneum ,

1966), p. 99.

30 H ughes, op. cit., p. 156.

31 Ibid., p. 130.

Chapter 8. Androgyny: The Mythological Model

1 M. E sther H ard in g , Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem

(L ondon: R ider an d C om pany, 1971), pp. 35-36.

2 Ibid., p. 36.

3 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: H a rp e r Sc Row, i960), p. 23.

4 The Secret o f the Golden Flower, in tro d u ctio n by R ichard W ilhelm

(L ondon: R outledge, 1962), p. 12.

5A g eh an an d a B harati, The Tantric Tradition (G arden City:

D oubleday an d C om pany, 1970), pp. 18-19.

6 Ibid., p. 200.

7Jo se p h C am pbell, The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology (New

York: Viking, 1969), p. 109.

8 Ibid., p. 105.

9Jo sep h C am pbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton:

Princeton U niversity Press, 1968), p. 154.

Notes

209

10 Midrash, Rabbah, 8: 1.

11 Harding, op. cit., pp. 282-83.

Chapter 9. Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

1 Mary Jane Sherfey, M. D., The N ature and Evolution o f Female

Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 43.

2 Ann Oakley, Sexf Gender and Society (New York: Harper Sc Row,

1972), p. 24.

3 Sherfey, op. cit., pp. 50-51.

4 Oakley, op. cit., p. 30.

5 Robert T . Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in H um an

Reproduction (Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973), p. 139.

6 Sherfey, op. cit., p. 50.

7 Ibid., p. 173.

8 Francoeur, op. cit., p. 139.

9 Ibid., p. 140.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p. 197.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Adams, Elsie, and Mary Louise Briscoe, eds. Up Against the Wall,

M other. Glencoe Press, 1971.

Andersen, Hans Christian. The Snow Queen and Other Tales. New

York: New American Library, 1966.

Aries, Philippe. Centuries o f Childhood: A Social History o f Family Life.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Barber, Benjamin R. Superman and Common M en: Freedom, Anarchy,

and the Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1971.

Baring-Gould, William S. and Ceil, eds. The Annotated Mother Goose.

New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962.

Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan. New York: Scribners, 1950.

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: John Calder, 1962.

Bebel, August. Woman under Socialism. New York: Schocken Books,

1971-

Beck, Julian. The Life o f the Theatre: The Relation o f the Artist to the

Struggle o f the People. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972.

Bharati, Agehananda. The Tantric Tradition. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1970.

Black, Jonathan, ed. Radical Lawyers: Their Role in the Movement and

in the Courts. New York: Avon Books, 1971.

Blofeld, John. The Tantric Mysticism o f Tibet. New York: E. P. Dutton,

1970-

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Our Selves: A

Book by and fo r Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

-----. The Masks o f God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Viking,

1962.

211

212

Woman Hating

------ . The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking,

1969.

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Grateful acknowledgment is due for permission to quote from the following

copyright material:

From Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre. Copyright G 1972 by Julian Beck.

Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

From Jean de Berg, The Image. Copyright © 1966 by Grove Press. Reprinted by

permission of Grove Press, Inc.

From Robert T. Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood. Copyright © 1970 by Robert

T. Francoeur. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

From Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Malefic arum, translated by

Montague Summers. Reprinted by permission of the Translator’s Literary

Estate and The Hogarth Press.

From Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic

Custom. Reprinted by permission of its publisher Walton H. Rawls, New

York, 1966. (Distributed by Twayne Publishers. )

From Pauline Reage, Story of O. Copyright © 1965 by Grove Press. Reprinted by

permission of Grove Press, Inc.

From Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. Copyright, 1929, by Virginia

Woolf; renewed, 1957, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by

permission of the publisher.

Content

Dworkin Andrea Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality