Dworkin Andrea

Right-wing Women

Also by Andrea Dworkin

Woman H ating

Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

The New Womans Broken Heart

Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Right-wing Women

ANDREA DWORKIN

A Perigee Book

Perigee Books

are published by

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

200 Madison Avenue

New York, New York 10016

Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 by Andrea Dworkin

Copyright © 1983 by Andrea Dworkin

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in

any form without permission in writing from the publisher. Published on

the same day in Canada by General Publishing Co. Limited, Toronto.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources

to reprint material in this book:

The University of California Press for the excerpt from “The Coming

Gynocide, ” in Sappho: A New Translation, Mary Barnard, translator (1973),

© copyright 1957 by The Regents of the University of California.

New' Directions Publishing Corporation for six lines from “Canto 9 1 ”

from The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound. Copyright © 1956 by Ezra

Pound.

Portions of this book have been published in slightly different form in Ms.

and Maenad.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dworkin, Andrea.

Right-wing women.

Includes index.

1. Women’s rights— United States.

2. Conservatism— United States.

3. Right and left

(Political science).

I. Title.

[H Q 1426. D898

1982b]

305. 4'2'0973

82-9784

ISBN 0-399-50671-3

AACR2

First Perigee printing, 1983

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

M any people went out of their w ay to help me in different w ays in

the course of m y w riting this book. I owe sincere thanks to Geri

Thoma, Anne Simon, Robin Morgan, Catharine A. MacKinnon,

Karen Hom ick, Emily Jane Goodman, Rachel Gold, Sandra Elkin,

Laura Cottingham, Gena Corea, and Raymond Bongiovanni.

I am very grateful to Sam Mitnick for supporting this project

and to all the people at Perigee involved in publishing it.

This book owes its existence to Gloria Steinem, whose idea it

was that I expand an earlier essay, “Safety, Shelter, Rules, Form,

Love: The Promise of the U ltra-Right” (Ms. y June 1979), into a

book. I thank Gloria not only for the idea but also for her insistence on its importance.

And I thank, once again, both John Stoltenberg and Elaine

Markson, who sustain me.

Andrea Dworkin

New York C ity

March 1982

For Gloria Steinem

In Memory of M uriel Rukeyser

Contents

1. The Promise of the Ultra-Right

13

2. The Politics of Intelligence

37

3. Abortion

71

4. Jew s and Homosexuals

107

5. The Coming Gynocide

147

6. Antifeminism

195

Notes

239

Index

245

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens

the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place,

everywhere conceded— a place earned by personal

merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance,

wealth, family and position. Conceding, then, that

the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and

woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the

same preparation for time and eternity. The talk o f

sheltering woman from the fierce storms o f life is the

sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every

point of the compass, just as they do on man, and

with more fatal results, for he has been trained to

protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are

the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of

individual sovereignty.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1892

1

The Promise of the Ultra-Right

There is a rumor, circulated for centuries by scientists, artists, and

philosophers both secular and religious, a piece of gossip as it were,

to the effect that women are “biologically conservative. ” W hile gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or

idea, or fact. T his particular rumor became dignified as high

thought because it was Whispered-Down-The-Lane in formidable

academies, libraries, and meeting halls from which women, until

very recently, have been formally and forcibly excluded.

The whispers, however m ultisyllabic and footnoted they sometimes are, reduced to a simple enough set of assertions. Women have children because women by definition have children. This

“fact of life, ” which is not subject to qualification, carries with it

the instinctual obligation to nurture and protect those children.

Therefore, women can be expected to be socially, politically, economically, and sexually conservative because the status quo, whatever it is, is safer than change, whatever the change. Noxious male philosophers from all disciplines have, for centuries, maintained

that women follow a biological imperative derived directly from

their reproductive capacities that translates necessarily into narrow

lives, small minds, and a rather meanspirited puritanism.

This theory, or slander, is both specious and cruel in that, in

fact, women are forced to bear children and have been throughout

history in all economic systems, with but teeny-weeny time-outs

while the men were momentarily disoriented, as, for instance, in

the immediate postcoital aftermath of certain revolutions. It is entirely irrational in that, in fact, women of all ideological persuasions, with the single exception of absolute pacifists, of whom there have not been very many, have throughout history supported wars

in which the very children they are biologically ordained to protect

are maimed, raped, tortured, and killed. Clearly, the biological explanation of the so-called conservative nature of women obscures the realities of women’s lives, buries them in dark shadows of distortion and dismissal.

The disinterested or hostile male observer can categorize women

as “conservative” in some metaphysical sense because it is true that

women as a class adhere rather strictly to the traditions and values

of their social context, whatever the character of that context. In

societies of whatever description, however narrowly or broadly defined, women as a class are the dulled conformists, the orthodox believers, the obedient followers, the disciples of unwavering faith.

To waver, whatever the creed of the men around them, is tantamount to rebellion; it is dangerous. Most women, holding on for dear life, do not dare abandon blind faith. From father’s house to

husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a

woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be. Sometimes it is a lethargic conformity, in which case male

demands slowly close in on her, as if she were a character buried

alive in an Edgar Allan Poe story. Sometimes it is a militant conformity. She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her.

She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary

Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par

excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person.

But the militant conformist has given so much of herself—her la

bor, heart, soul, often her body, often children— that this betrayal

is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.

Women know, but must not acknowledge, that resisting male

control or confronting male betrayal w ill lead to rape, battery, destitution, ostracization or exile, confinement in a mental institution or jail, or death. As Phyllis Chesler and Emily Jane Goodman

make clear in W omen, M oney, and P ow er, women struggle, in the

manner of Sisyphus, to avoid the “something worse” that can and

w ill alw ays happen to them if they transgress the rigid boundaries

of appropriate female behavior. Most women cannot afford, either

m aterially or psychologically, to recognize that whatever burnt offerings of obedience they bring to beg protection w ill not appease the angry little gods around them.

It is not surprising, then, that most girls do not want to become

like their mothers, those tired, preoccupied domestic sergeants beset by incomprehensible troubles. Mothers raise daughters to conform to the strictures of the conventional female life as defined by men, whatever the ideological values of the men. Mothers are the

immediate enforcers of male w ill, the guards at the cell door, the

flunkies who administer the electric shocks to punish rebellion.

Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become

very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion

therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts

directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any

number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her

mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl m ay, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different

pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept

abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with

rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.

It is the fashion among men to despise the smallness of women’s

lives. The so-called bourgeois woman with her shallow vanity, for

instance, is a joke to the brave intellectuals, truck drivers, and revolutionaries who have wider horizons on which to project and indulge deeper vanities that women dare not mock and to which women dare not aspire. The fishwife is a vicious caricature of the

small-mindedness and material greed of the working-class wife who

harasses her humble, hardworking, ever patient husband with

petty tirades of insult that no gentle rebuke can mellow. The Lady,

the Aristocrat, is a polished, empty shell, good only for spitting at,

because spit shows up on her clean exterior, which gives immediate

gratification to the spitter, whatever his technique. The Jewish

mother is a monster who wants to cut the phallus of her precious

son into a million pieces and put it in the chicken soup. The black

woman, also a castrator, is a grotesque matriarch whose sheer endurance desolates men. The lesbian is half monster, half moron: having no man to nag, she imagines herself Napoleon.

And the derision of female lives does not stop with these toxic,

ugly, insidious slanders because there is always, in every circumstance, the derision in its skeletal form, all bone, the meat stripped clean: she is pussy, cunt. Every other part of the body is cut away,

severed, and there is left a thing, not human, an it, which is the

funniest joke of all, an unending source of raucous humor to those

who have done the cutting. The very butchers who cut up the

meat and throw away the useless parts are the comedians. The

paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a

dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.

Every woman, no matter what her social, economic, or sexual

situation, fights this paring down with every resource at her command. Because her resources are so astonishingly meager and because she has been deprived of the means to organize and expand them, these attempts are simultaneously heroic and pathetic. The

whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light

reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur

dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men

who rise by clim bing over her prone body in m ilitary formation,

w ill not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken

from her: she w ill not scream out as their heels dig into her

flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all

the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly

stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as

her own.

So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine,

but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons,

institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her

powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most

honest expressions of her w ill and being. She becomes a lackey,

serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and

her kind. This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to

her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of

all ideological persuasions define it.

*

M arilyn Monroe, shortly before she died, wrote in her notebook on

the set of Let's Make Love: “What am I afraid of? W hy am I so

afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I

am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. ” 1

The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.

When she acts w ell, that is, when she convinces the male controllers of images and wealth that she is reducible to current sexual fashion, available to the male on his own terms, she is paid and

honored. Her acting must be imitative, not creative; rigidly conforming, not self-generated and self-renewing. The actress is the puppet of flesh, blood, and paint who acts as if she is the female

acting. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act

but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however

inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is

not a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.

Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol

cannot touch.

Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the

men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who

had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along— It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions

of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? If

so, how endangered they had been to be deceived, so fragile and

exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could leap out from

those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they

knew she deserved. There arose the male imperative that Monroe

must not be a suicide. Norman Mailer, savior of masculine privilege and pride on many fronts, took up the challenge by theorizing that Monroe may have been killed by the FBI, or CIA, or whoever

killed the Kennedys, because she had been mistress to one or both.

Conspiracy was a cheerful and comforting thought to those who

had wanted to slam into her until she expired, female death and

female ecstasy being synonymous in the world of male metaphor.

But they did not want her dead yet, not really dead, not while the

illusion of her open invitation was so absolutely compelling. In

fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death,

and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer:

no, M arilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.

People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—

have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the

lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt

ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by

men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished

to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately

ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing

that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or

whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it

so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused

and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own

lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as

men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-

defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,

by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any

individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the

male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for

male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.

Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly.

Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on

your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will

focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In

effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she

has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to

the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual

adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is

the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-

supremacist rule.

*

. . . I gradually came to see that I would have to

stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will

perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of

personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends

relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an

event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same

way by dozens of other survivors, men and women

in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of such reports and even to question rare departures from

the general view . 2

Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor:

An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical

butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical

mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the

mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No

matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or

eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been

whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they

were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,

threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of

female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given

them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by

women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is

negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is

negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those

who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the exis-

tence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her

suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of

women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real

the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim

to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some

thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual

woman m ultiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete

existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own

suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life,

whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing w ill ever make up for it.

No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for

meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves

to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves

to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male

meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male

w ill, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a

female life. In this w ay, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without

which no life can have meaning.

*

The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the

perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and

unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are

always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus sim plifying survival for women— to make the world slightly more habitable, in other

words— by offering the following:

Form. Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant

of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to

function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual

demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded

from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public

self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life. Sounds, signs, promises, threats, w ildly crisscross, but what do they mean? The Right offers women

a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order.

Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing.

Shelter. Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home

and to believe that women without men are homeless. Women

have a deep fear of being homeless—at the mercy of the elements

and of strange men. The Right claims to protect the home and the

woman’s place in it.

Safety. For women, the world is a very dangerous place. One

wrong move, even an unintentional smile, can bring disaster—assault, shame, disgrace. The Right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The Right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.

Rules. Living in a world she has not made and docs not understand, a woman needs rules to know what to do next. If she knows what she is supposed to do, she can find a way to do it. If

she learns the rules by rote, she can perform with apparent effortlessness, which will considerably enhance her chances for survival. The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend. The Right also promises that,

despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified

rules.

Love. Love is always crucial in effecting the allegiance of women.

The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression

of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return,

the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love

of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely— be Woman as it were— without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.

It is important and fascinating, of course, to note that women

never, no matter how deluded or needy or desperate, worship

Jesus as the perfect son. No faith is that blind. There is no religious or cultural palliative to deaden the raw pain of the son’s betrayal of the mother: only her own obedience to the same father,

the sacrifice of her own life on the same cross, her own body nailed

and bleeding, can enable her to accept that her son, like Jesus, has

come to do his Father’s work. Feminist Leah Fritz, in Thinking Like

a W oman, described the excruciating predicament of women who

try to find worth in Christian submission: “Unloved, unrespected,

unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son,

and fucked by the Holy Ghost, western woman spends her entire

life trying to please. ” 3

But no matter how hard she tries to please, it is harder still for

her to be pleased. In Bless This House, Anita Bryant describes how

each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and

children. ”4 In The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan explains that it is

only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others,

including our husbands. ” 5 In The Gift o f In ner H ealing, Ruth Carter

Stapleton counsels a young woman who is in a desperately unhappy marriage: “T ry to spend a little time each day visualizing Jesus coming in the door from work. Then see yourself walking up

to him, embracing him. Say to Jesus, i t ’s good to have you home

N ick. ’” 6

Ruth Carter Stapleton married at nineteen. Describing the early

years of her marriage, she wrote:

After moving four hundred fifty miles from my first family

in order to save my marriage, I found myself in a cold, threatening, unprotected world, or so it seemed to my confused heart. In an effort to avoid total destruction, I indulged in escapes of every kind. . .

A major crisis arose when I discovered I was pregnant with

my first child. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the

crowning moments of womanhood, but not for me.. . . When

my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt

even more trapped.. . . Then three more babies were born in

rapid succession, and each one, so beautiful, terrified me. I did

love them, but by the fourth child I was at the point of total

desperation. 7

Apparently the birth of her fourth child occasioned her surrender

to Jesus. For a time, life seemed worthwhile. Then, a rupture in a

cherished friendship plummeted her into an intolerable depression.

During this period, she jumped out of a moving car in what she

regards as a suicide attempt.

A male religious mentor picked up the pieces. Stapleton took her

own experience of breakdown and recovery and from it shaped a

kind of faith psychotherapy. Nick’s transformation into Jesus has

already been mentioned. A male homosexual, traumatized by an

absent father who never played with him as a child, played baseball with Jesus under Stapleton’s tutelage—a whole nine innings.

In finding Jesus as father and chum, he was healed of the hurt of

an absent father and “cured” of his homosexuality. A woman who

was forcibly raped by her father as a child was encouraged to remember the event, only this time Jesus had his hand on the father’s shoulder and was forgiving him. This enabled the woman to forgive her father too and to be reconciled with men. A woman who as a child was rejected by her father on the occasion of her first

date—the father did not notice her pretty dress—was encouraged

to imagine the presence of Jesus on that fateful night. Jesus loved

her dress and found her very desirable. Stapleton claims that this

devotional therapy, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables

Jesus to erase damaging memories.

A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being

seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable w ay to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain— the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and

credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical m inistry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.

Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in

the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized

in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy. ” 8 She describes

years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate

into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do

men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a

woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships

him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful

to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her

man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10

Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,

Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and

his feelings. ” 11

Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the

basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission

and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches

women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a

Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source

book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed

undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship

only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and

pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on

how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves

Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman

to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for

which religious women pray.

No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine

Eyes Have Seen the G lory, an autobiography first published in 1970,

Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered

child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through

singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was

very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she

was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and

herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her

father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my

memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive

to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed

herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.

She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to

marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every

“No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several

occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he

simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip

to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her

fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He

hounded her.

Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on

her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by

definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated

Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.

From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a

woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who

manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every

level is virtually absolute. Bryant described the degree of Green’s

control in M ine Eyes: “T hat’s how good a manager m y husband is.

He w illingly handles all the business in m y life— even to including

the Lord’s business. Despite our sometimes violent scraps, I love

him for it. ” 14 Bryant never specifies how violent the violent scraps

were, though Green insists they were not violent. Green himself,

in Bless This House, is very proud of spanking the children, especially the oldest son, who is adopted: “I’m a father to my children, not a pal. I assert m y authority. I spank them at times, and they respect me for it. Sometimes I take Bobby into the music

room, and it’s not so I can play him a piece on the piano. We play

a piece on the seat of his pants! ” 15 Some degree of physical violence, then, was adm ittedly an accepted part of domestic life.

Bryant’s unselfconscious narrative makes clear that over a period of

years, long before her antihomosexual crusade was a glint in Bob

Green’s eye, she was badgered into giving public religious testimonies that deeply distressed her: Bob has a w ay of getting my dander up and backing me up

against a wall. He gets me so terrifically mad at him that I hate

him for pushing me into a corner. He did that now.

“You’re a hypocrite, ” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ

in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which

Christ tells you to do. ”

Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel

so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to d o . 16

Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult

struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant re

bellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as

religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:

Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as

the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband.

Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord. 17

In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this

time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant

spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as

she told Newsweek, “I was scared and I didn’t want to do it. ” 18

Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the

interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of

Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before,

also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to

be a public leader of significance— in her terminology, a “star”—

and at the same time an obedient wife acting to protect her children. A singing career, especially a secular one, could never resolve this raging conflict.

Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a “good” woman.

Bryant, like all the rest of us, is desperate and dangerous, to herself

and to others, because “good” women live and die in silent selfless

ness and real women cannot. Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time. *

Phyllis Schlafly, the Right’s not-born-again philosopher of the

absurd, is apparently not having a hard time. She seems possessed

by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The

Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological

persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as

she claims to be one of the girls. Unlike most other right-wing

women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is

best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal

Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and

*This analysis of Bryant’s situation was written in 1978 and published in

Ms. in June 1979. In May 1980, Bryant filed for divorce. In a statement

issued separately from the divorce petition, she contended that Green had

“violated my most precious asset—my conscience” (The New York Times,

May 24, 1980). Within three weeks after the divorce decree (August 1980),

the state citrus agency of Florida, which Bryant had represented for eleven

years, decided she was no longer a suitable representative because of her

divorce: “The contract had to expire, because of the divorce and so forth, ”

one agency executive said (The New York Times, September 2, 1980). Feminist lawyer and former National Organization for Women president Karen DeCrow urged Bryant to bring suit under the 1977 Florida Human Rights

Act, which prohibits job discrimination on the basis of marital status.

Even before DeCrow’s sisterly act, however, Bryant had reevaluated her

position on the women’s movement, to which, under Green’s tutelage, she

had been bitterly opposed. “What has happened to me, ” Bryant told the

National Enquirer in June 1980, “makes me understand why there are angry

women who want to pass ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. That still is

not the answer. But the church doesn’t deal with the problems of women

as it should. There’s been some really bad teachings, and I think that’s

why I’m really concerned for my own children—particularly the girls.

You have to recognize that there has been discrimination against women,

that women have not had the teaching of the fullness and uniqueness of

their abilities. ” Pace, sister.

the Panama Canal Treaty. Her roots, and perhaps her heart such

as it is, are in the Old Right, but she remained unknown to any

significant public until she mounted her crusade against the Equal

Rights Amendment. It is likely that her ambition is to use women

as a constituency to effect entry into the upper echelon of right-

wing male leadership. She may yet discover that she is a woman

(as feminists understand the meaning of the word) as her male colleagues refuse to let her escape the ghetto of female issues and enter the big tim e. * At any rate, she seems to be able to manipulate the

fears of women without experiencing them. If this is indeed the

case, this talent would give her an invaluable, cold-blooded detachment as a strategist determined to convert women into antifeminist activists. It is precisely because women have been trained to respect and follow those who use them that Schlafly inspires awe and

* According to many newspaper reports, Phyllis Schlafly wanted Reagan

to appoint her to a position in the Pentagon. This he did not do. In a

debate with Schlafly (Stanford University, January 26, 1982) lawyer

Catharine A. MacKinnon tried to make Schlafly understand that she had

been discriminated against as a woman: “Mrs. Schlafly tells us that being a

woman has not gotten in her way. I propose that any man who had a law

degree and graduate work in political science; had given testimony on a

wide range of important subjects for decades; had done effective and brilliant political, policy and organizational work within the party [the Republican Party]; had published widely, including nine books; and stopped a major social initiative to amend the constitution just short of victory dead

in its tracks [the Equal Rights Amendment]; and had a beautiful accomplished family— any man like that would have a place in the current administration.. . . I would accept correction if this is wrong; and she may yet be appointed. She was widely reported to have wanted such a post,

but I don’t believe everything I read, especially about women. I do think

she should have wanted one and they should have found her a place she

wanted. She certainly deserved a place in the Defense Department. Phyllis

Schlafly is a qualified woman. ” Answered Schlafly: “This has been an

interesting debate. More interesting than I thought it was going to be.. . .

I think my opponent did have one good point— [audience laughter] Well,

she had a couple of good points.. . . She did have a good point about the

Reagan administration, but it is the Reagan administration’s loss that they

didn’t ask me to [drowned out by audience applause] but it isn’t my loss. ”

devotion in women who are afraid that they w ill be deprived of the

form, shelter, safety, rules, and love that the Right promises and

on which they believe survival depends.

*

At the National Women’s Conference (Houston, Texas, November

1977), I spoke with many women on the Right. The conversations

were ludicrous, terrifying, bizarre, instructive, and, as other feminists have reported, sometimes strangely moving.

Right-wing women fear lesbians. A liberal black delegate from

Texas told me that local white women had tried to convince her

that lesbians at the conference would assault her, call her dirty

names, and were personally filthy. She told me that she would vote

against the sexual-preference resolution* because otherwise she

would not be able to return home. But she also said that she would

tell the white women that the lesbians had been polite and clean.

She said that she knew it was wrong to deprive anyone of a job and

had had no idea before coming to Houston that lesbian mothers

lost their children. T his, she felt, was genuinely terrible. I asked

her if she thought a time would come when she would have to

stand up for lesbian rights in her hometown. She nodded yes

gravely, then explained with careful, evocative emphasis that the

next-closest town to where she lived was 160 miles away. The history of blacks in the South was palpable.

* “Congress, State, and local legislatures should enact legislation to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sexual and affectional preference in areas including, but not limited to, employment, housing, public accommodations, credit, public facilities, government funding, and the military.

“State legislatures should reform their penal codes or repeal State laws

that restrict private sexual behavior between consenting adults.

“State legislatures should enact legislation that would prohibit consideration o f sexual or affectional orientation as a factor in any judicial determination of child custody or visitation rights. Rather, child custody cases should be evaluated solely on the merits of which party is the better parent, without regard to that person’s sexual and affectional orientation. ”

Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if

lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against

women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted

that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something

comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the

lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.

Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its

existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their

contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that

thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to

them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless

whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.

Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights

Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how

often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply

could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the

Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since

toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss

them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking

the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new m ystery. I resigned m yself to hopeless confusion. H appily, after the conference, I read The P ow er o f the P ositive W oman, in which

Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality,

abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of

being forced to bear an unwanted b ab y. ” 19 Forcing women to bear

unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who

have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the

grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights

Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.

Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from

the South, white and black, also do not like Jew s. T hey live in a

Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white

and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian

fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The

stubborn refusal of Jew s to embrace Christ and the barely masked

fundamentalist perception of Jew s as Christ killers, communists

and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals,

mark Jew s as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many

satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.

The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was

conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful

words “Ah just love tha Jew ish people. ” The slime variety of anti-

Semite, very much in evidence, was typified by a Right to Life

leader who called doctors who perform abortions “Jew ish baby killers. ” I was asked a hundred times: “Am Ah speakin with a Jewish g irl? ” Despite m y clear presence as a lesbian-feminist with press

credentials plastered all over me from the notorious Ms. magazine,

it was as a Jew that I was consistently challenged and, on several

occasions, im plicitly threatened. Conversation after conversation

stopped abruptly when I answered that yes, I was a Jew .

*

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt

they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to

them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites,

or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no

matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to

ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other

than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder

their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom

they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief.

Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify

the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at

least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they

are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason

to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of

danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols

of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as

sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can

change over time to meet changing social circumstances—for ex

ample, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can

be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or

kept under the surface— but the existence of the dangerous outsider alw ays functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, pain-killer, and threat.

The tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognize that they are committing suicide. The danger is that self-sacrificing women are perfect foot soldiers who obey orders, no

matter how criminal those orders are. The hope is that these

women, upset by internal conflicts that cannot be stilled by manipulation, challenged by the clarifying drama of public confrontation and dialogue, w ill be forced to articulate the realities of their own

experiences as women subject to the w ill of men. In doing so, the

anger that necessarily arises from a true perception of how t hey

have been debased may move them beyond the fear that transfixes

them to a meaningful rebellion against the men who in fact dim inish, despise, and terrorize them. This is the common struggle of all women, whatever their male-defined ideological origins; and this

struggle alone has the power to transform women who are enemies

against one another into allies fighting for individual and collective

survival that is not based on self-loathing, fear, and humiliation,

but instead on self-determination, dignity, and authentic integrity.

2

The Politics of Intelligence

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.. . . It’s a

feeling of impotence: of cutting no ice.

Virginia Woolf, her diary,

October 25, 1920

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it

cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in

adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would

tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it

cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

“Indeed, ” wrote Norman M ailer, “I doubt if there w ill be a really

exciting woman w riter until the first whore becomes a call girl and

tells her tale. ” 1 And M ailer was being generous, because he endowed the whore with a capacity to know, if not to tell: she knows something firsthand, something worth knowing. “G enius, ” wrote

Edith Wharton more realistically, “is of small use to a woman who

does not know how to do her hair. ” 2

Intelligence is a form of energy, a force that pushes out into the

world. It makes its mark, not once but continuously. It is curious,

penetrating. Without the light of public life, discourse, and action,

it dies. It must have a field of action beyond embroidery or scrubbing toilets or wearing fine clothes. It needs response, challenge, consequences that matter. Intelligence cannot be passive and private through a lifetime. Kept secret, kept inside, it withers and dies. The outside can be brought to it; it can live on bread and

water locked up in a cell—but barely. Florence Nightingale, in her

feminist tract Cassandra, said that intellect died last in women; desire, dreams, activity, and love all died before it. Intelligence does hang on, because it can live on almost nothing: fragments of the

world brought to it by husbands or sons or strangers or, in our

time, television or the occasional film. Imprisoned, intelligence

turns into self-haunting and dread. Isolated, intelligence becomes a

burden and a curse. Undernourished, intelligence becomes like the

bloated belly of a starving child: swollen, filled with nothing the

body can use. It swells, like the starved stomach, as the skeleton

shrivels and the bones collapse; it will pick up anything to fill the

hunger, stick anything in, chew anything, swallow anything. “Jose

Carlos came home with a bag of crackers he found in the garbage, ”

wrote Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman of the Brazilian underclass, in her diary. “When I saw him eating things out of the trash I thought: and if it’s been poisoned? Children can’t stand hunger.

The crackers were delicious. I ate them thinking of that proverb:

He who enters the dance must dance. And as I also was hungry, I

ate. ” 3 The intelligence of women is traditionally starved, isolated,

imprisoned.

Traditionally and practically, the world is brought to women by

men; they are the outside on which female intelligence must feed.

The food is poor, orphan’s gruel. This is because men bring home

half-truths, ego-laden lies, and use them to demand solace or sex or

housekeeping. The intelligence of women is not out in the world,

acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on

behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women’s work, and

her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of

her ass.

Men are the world and women use intelligence to survive men:

their tricks, desires, demands, moods, hatreds, disappointments,

rages, greed, lust, authority, power, weaknesses. The ideas that

come to women come through men, in a field of cultural values

controlled by men, in a political and social system controlled by

men, in a sexual system in which women are used as things. (As

Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in the one sentence that every

woman should risk her life to understand: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object. ”4) Men are the field of action in which female intelligence moves. But the world, the real world, is more than

men, certainly more than what men show of themselves and the

world to women; and women are deprived of that real world. The

male always intervenes between her and it.

Some w ill grant that women might have a particular kind of intelligence—essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas. Some w ill grant— in fact, insist— that women know more of

“the Good, ” that women are more cognizant of decency or kindness: this keeps intelligence small and tamed. Some will grant that there have been women of genius: after the woman of genius is

dead. The greatest writers in the English language have been

women: George Eliot, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. T hey were

sublime; and they were, all of them, shadows of what they might

have been. But the fact that they existed does not change the categorical perception that women are basically stupid: not capable of intelligence without the exercise of which the world as a whole is

impoverished. Women are stupid and men are smart; men have a

right to the world and women do not. A lost man is a lost intelligence; a lost woman is a lost (name the function) mother, housekeeper, sexual thing. Classes of men have been lost, have been thrown aw ay; there have always been mourners and fighters who

refused to accept the loss. There is no mourning for the lost intel

ligence of women because there is no conviction that such intelligence was real and was destroyed. Intelligence is, in fact, seen as a function of masculinity, and women are despised when they refuse

to be lost.

Women have stupid ideas that do not deserve to be called ideas.

Marabel Morgan writes an awful, silly, terrible book in which she

claims that women must exist for their husbands, do sex and be sex

for their husbands. * D. H. Lawrence writes vile and stupid essays

in which he says the same thing basically with many references to

the divine phallus; t but D. H. Lawrence is smart. Anita Bryant

* See The Total Woman or the quotations from it in chapter 1 of this book.

Or: “In the beginning, sex started in the garden. The first man was all

alone. The days were long, the nights were longer. He had no cook, no

nurse, no lover. God saw that man was lonely and in need of a partner, so

He gave him a woman, the best present any man could receive” (The Total

Woman, [New York: Pocket Books, 1975], p. 129). “Spiritually, for sexual

intercourse to be the ultimate satisfaction, both partners need a personal

relationship with their God. When this is so their union is sacred and

beautiful, and mysteriously the two blend perfectly into one” (Total

Woman, p. 128).

t For instance: “Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as

we know it.. . . Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man,

woman, and children” (Sex, Literature, and Censorship [New York: The Viking Press, 1959], p. 98). “It is the tragedy of modern woman.. . . She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time. Frightened of her own henny self,

she rushes to mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business:

she is marvellous, out-manning the man.. . . Suddenly it all falls out of

relation to her basic henny self, and she realises she has lost her life. The

lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every

female, has been denied her: she never had it.. . . Nothingness! ” (Sex,

Literature, and Censorship, pp. 4 9 - 5 0 ) . . . marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the

sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in the

rhythm of days, in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of quarters, of

years, of decades, of centuries. Marriage is no marriage that is not a correspondence of blood.. . . The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman” (Sex, Literature, and Censorship, p. 101). “Into

says that cocksucking is a form of human cannibalism; she decries

the loss of the child who is the sperm . * Norman M ailer believes

that lost ejaculations are lost sons and on that basis disparages male

homosexuality, masturbation, and contraception. t But Anita B ryant is stupid and Norman M ailer is smart. Is the difference in the style with which these same ideas are delivered or in the penis?

M ailer says that a great w riter writes with his balls; novelist

Cynthia Ozick asks M ailer in which color ink he dips his balls.

Who is smart and who is stupid?

the womb of the primary darkness enters the ray o f ultimate light, and

time is begotten, conceived, there is the beginning o f the end. We are the

beginning of the end. And there, within the womb, we ripen upon the

beginning, till we become aware of the end” (Reflections on the Death of a

Porcupine [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963], p. 7).

*For instance: “W hy do you think the homosexuals are called fruits? It’s

because they eat the forbidden fruit of life.. . . That’s why homosexuality

is an abomination o f God, because life is so precious to God and it is such

a sacred thing when man and woman come together in one flesh and the

seed is fertilized— that’s the sealing of life, that’s the beginning o f life. To

interfere with that in any w ay— especially the eating o f the forbidden

fruit, the eating o f the sperm— that’s why it’s such an abomination.. . . it

makes the sin o f homosexuality all the more hideous because it’s antilife,

degenerative” (Playboy, May 1978).

* For instance: “. . . but if you’re not ready to make a baby with that

marvelous sex, then you may also be putting something down the drain

forever, which is the ability that you had to make a baby; the most marvelous thing that was in you may have been shot into a diaphragm or wasted on a pill. One might be losing one’s future” (The Presidential Papers

[New York: Bantam Books, 1964], p. 142). “O f the million spermatozoa,

there may be only two or three with any real chance o f reaching the ovum

. . . [The others] go out with no sense at all of being real spermatozoa.

They may appear to be real spermatozoa under the microscope, but after

all, a man from Mars who’s looking at us through a telescope might think

that Communist bureaucrats and FBI men look exactly the same.. . .

Even the electron microscope can’t measure the striation o f passion in a

spermatozoon. O r the force o f its w ill” (The Presidential Papers, p. 143). “I

hate contraception.. . . There’s nothing I abhor more than planned parenthood. Planned parenthood is an abomination. I’d rather have those fucking Communists over here” (The Presidential Papers, p. 131). “I think

(Footnote continues overleaf)

If an idea is stupid, presumably it is stupid whether the one who

articulates it is male or female. But that is not the case. Women,

undereducated as a class, do not have to read Aeschylus to know

that a man plants the sperm, the child, the son; women are the soil;

she brings forth the human he created; he is the originator, the

father of life. Women can have their own provincial, moralistic

sources for this knowledge: clergy, movies, gym teachers. The

knowledge is common knowledge: respected in the male writers

because the male writers are respected; stupid in women because

women are stupid as a condition of birth. Women articulate received knowledge and are laughed at for doing so. But male writers with the same received ideas are acclaimed as new, brilliant, interesting, even rebellious, brave, facing the world of sin and sex forthrightly. Women have ignorant, moralistic prejudices; men have ideas. To call this a double standard is to indulge in cruel euphemism. This gender system of evaluating ideas is a sledgehammer that bangs female intelligence to a pulp, annihilating it. Mailer and

Lawrence have taken on the world always; they knew they had a

right to it; their prose takes that right for granted; it is the gravitational field in which they move. Marabel Morgan and Anita Bryant come to the world as middle-aged women and try to act in it; of

course they are juvenile and imprecise in style, ridiculous even.

Both Mailer and Lawrence have written volumes that are as ridiculous, juvenile, despite what they can take for granted as men, despite their sometimes mastery of the language, despite their

(Footnote continued from previous page)

one of the reasons that homosexuals go through such agony when they’re

around 40 or 50 is that their lives have nothing to do with procreation.

They realize with great horror that all that wonderful sex they had in the

past is gone— where is it now? They’ve used up their being” (The Presidential Papers, p. 144). “It’s better to commit rape than masturbate” (The Presidential Papers, p. 140). “what if the seed be already a being? So desperate that it / claws, bites, cuts and lies, / burns, and betrays / desperate to capture the oven. .

(“I Got Two Kids and Another in the O ven, ” Advertisements fo r Myself [Ne

w York: Perigee, 1981], p. 397).

genuine accomplishments, despite the beauty of a story or novel.

But they are not called stupid even when they are ridiculous.

When the ideas of Lawrence cannot be distinguished from the

ideas of Morgan, either both are smart or both are stupid; and

sim ilarly with M ailer and Bryant. Only the women, however, deserve and get our contempt. Are Anita Bryant’s ideas pernicious?

Then so are Norman M ailer’s. Are Marabel Morgan’s ideas side-

slappingly funny? Then so are D. H. Lawrence’s.

A woman must keep her intelligence small and timid to survive.

Or she must hide it altogether or hide it through style. Or she

must go mad like clockwork to pay for it. She w ill try to find the

nice w ay to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike.

Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligence abhors sentim entality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the

cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and

women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman

could not bribe her w ay with smiles through a day. W ild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be

Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lo-

botomized. A ny vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers: but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis and Clark of the female mind. Even restrained intelligence is

restrained not because it is timid, as women must be, but because

it is cautiously weighing impressions and facts that come to it from

an outside that the timid dare not face. A woman must please, and

restrained intelligence does not seek to please; it seeks to know

through discernment. Intelligence is also ambitious: it always

wants more: not more being fucked, not more pregnancy; but more

of a bigger world. A woman cannot be ambitious in her own right

without also being damned.

We take girls and send them to schools. It is good of us, because

girls are not supposed to know anything much, and in many other

societies girls are not sent to school or taught to read and write. In

our society, such a generous one to women, girls are taught some

facts, but not inquiry or the passion of knowing. Girls are taught

in order to make them compliant: intellectual adventurousness is

drained, punished, ridiculed out of girls. We use schools first to

narrow the girl’s scope, her curiosity, then to teach her certain

skills, necessary to the abstract husband. Girls are taught to be

passive in relation to facts. Girls are not seen as the potential originators of ideas or the potential searchers into the human condition.

Good behavior is the intellectual goal of a girl. A girl with intellectual drive is a girl who has to be cut down to size. An intelligent girl is supposed to use that intelligence to find a smarter husband.

Simone de Beauvoir settled on Sartre when she determined that he

was smarter than she was. In a film made when both were old,

toward the end of his life, Sartre asks de Beauvoir, the woman

with whom he has shared an astonishing life of intellectual action

and accomplishment: how does it feel, to have been a literary lady?

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: “Everyone has an

ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read. ” 5 She is ambitious, but it is

a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants

the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she

suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing.

They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the

focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a

larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her

poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the fa vela . Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the

street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get

her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for

literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know.

Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have

dreams of being in the world, not m erely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. "Women dream , ” Florence N ightingale wrote in Cassandra, “till they have no longer the

strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so

honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet

which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those

dreams go at last.. . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream,

neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. ”6

V irginia Woolf, the most splendid modern writer, told us over

and over how awful it was to be a woman of creative intelligence.

She told us when she loaded a large stone into her pocket and

walked into the river; and she told us each time a book was published and she went mad—don’t hurt me for what I have done, I will hurt m yself first, I w ill be incapacitated and I w ill suffer and I

will be punished and then perhaps you need not destroy me, perhaps you w ill pity me, there is such contempt in pity and I am so proud, won’t that be enough? She told us over and over in her

prose too: in her fiction she showed us, ever so delicately so that

we would not take offense; and in her essays she piled on the

charm, being polite to keep us polite. But she did write it straight

out too, though it was not published in her lifetime, and she

was right:

A certain attitude is required—what I call the pouring-out-

tea attitude— the clubwoman, Sunday afternoon attitude. I

don’t know. I think that the angle is almost as important as the

thing. W hat I value is the naked contact of a mind. Often one

cannot say anything valuable about a w riter—except what one

thinks. Now I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine

angle. M y article, written from that oblique point of view, alw ays went dow n. 7

To value “the naked contact of a mind” is to have a virile intelligence, one not shrouded in dresses and pretty gestures. Her work did always go down, with the weight of what being female demanded. She became a master of exquisite indirection. She hid her meanings and her messages in a feminine style. She labored under

that style and hid behind that mask: and she was less than she

could have been. She died not only from what she did dare, but

also from what she did not dare.

These three things are indissolubly linked: literacy, intellect, and

creative intelligence. They distinguish, as the cliche goes, man from

the animals. He who is denied these three is denied a fully human

life and has been robbed of a right to human dignity. Now change

the gender. Literacy, intellect, and creative intelligence distinguish

woman from the animals: no. Woman is not distinguishable from the

animals because she has been condemned by virtue of her sex class to

a life of animal functions: being fucked, reproducing. For her, the

animal functions are her meaning, her so-called humanity, as human

as she gets, the highest human capacities in her because she is

female. To the orthodox of male culture, she is animal, the antithesis

of soul; to the liberals of male culture, she is nature. In discussing

the so-called biological origins of male dominance, the boys can

afford to compare themselves to baboons and insects: they are writing books or teaching in universities when they do it. A Harvard professor does not refuse tenure because a baboon has never been

granted it. The biology of power is a game boys play. It is the male

way of saying: she is more like the female baboon than she is like me;

she cannot be an eminence grise at Harvard because she bleeds, we

fuck her, she bears our young, we beat her up, we rape her; she is an

animal, her function is to breed. I want to see the baboon, the ant,

the wasp, the goose, the cichlid, that has written War and Peace.

Even more I want to see the animal or insect or fish or fowl that has

written Middlemarch.

Literacy is a tool, like fire. It is a more advanced tool than fire,

and it has done as much or more to change the complexion of the

natural and social worlds. Literacy, like fire, is a tool that must be

used by intelligence. Literacy is also a capacity: the capacity to be

literate is a human capacity; the capacity exists and it can be used

or it can be denied, refuted, made to atrophy. In persons socially

despised, it is denied. But denial is not enough, because people

insist on meaning. Humankind finds meaning in experiences,

events, objects, communications, relationships, feelings. Literacy

functions as part of the search for meaning; it helps to make that

search possible. Men can deny that women have the capacity to

learn ancient Greek, but some women w ill learn it nevertheless.

Men can deny that poor women or working-class women or prostituted women have the capacity to read or write their own language, but some of those women will read or write their own language anyw ay; they will risk everything to learn it. In the

slaveholding South in the United States, it was forbidden by law

to teach slaves to read or write; but some slaveowners taught, some

slaves learned, some slaves taught themselves, and some slaves

taught other slaves. In Jew ish law, it is forbidden to teach women

Talm ud, but some women learned Talmud anyw ay. People know

that literacy brings dignity and a wider world. People are strongly

motivated to experience the world they live in through language:

spoken, sung, chanted, and written. One must punish people terribly to stop them from wanting to know what reading and writing bring, because people are curious and driven toward both experience and the conceptualization of it. The denial of literacy to any class or category of people is a denial of fundamental humanity.

Humans viewed as animal, not human, are classically denied literacy: slaves in slave-owning societies; women in woman-owning societies; racially degraded groups in racist societies. The male slave is treated as a beast of burden; he cannot be allowed to read or

write. The woman is treated as a beast of breeding; she must not

read or write. When women as a class are denied the right to read

and write, those who learn are shamed by their knowledge: they

are masculine, deviant; they have denied their wombs, their cunts;

in their literacy they repudiate the definition of their kind.

Certain classes of women have been granted some privileges of

literacy—not rights, privileges. The courtesans of ancient Greece

were educated when other women were kept ignorant, but they

were not philosophers, they were whores. Only by accepting their

function as whores could they exercise the privilege of literacy.

Upper-class women are traditionally taught some skills of literacy

(distinctly more circumscribed than the skills taught the males of

their mating class): they can exercise the privilege of literacy if they

accept their decorative function. After all, the man does not want

the breeding, bleeding bitch at the dinner table or the open cunt in

the parlor while he reads his newspaper or smokes his cigar. Language is refinement: proof that he is human, not she.

The increase in illiteracy among the urban poor in the United

States is consonant with a new rise in overt racism and contempt

for the poor. The illiteracy is programmed into the system: an intelligent child can go to school and not be taught how to read or write. When the educational system abandons reading and writing

for particular subgroups, it abandons human dignity for those

groups: it becomes strictly custodial, keeping the animals penned

in; it does not bring human life to human beings.

Cross-culturally, girls and women are the illiterates, with two

thirds of the world’s illiterates women and the rate rising steadily.

Girls need husbands, not books. Girls need houses or shacks to

keep clean, or street corners to stand on, not the wide world in

which to roam. Refusal to give the tool of literacy is refusal to give

access to the world. If she can make her own fire, read a book

herself, write a letter or a record of her thoughts or an essay or a

story, it will be harder to get her to tolerate the unwanted fuck, to

bear the unwanted children, to see him as life and life through

him. She might get ideas. But even worse, she might know the

value of the ideas she gets. She must not know that ideas have

value, only that being fucked and reproducing are her value.

It has been hard, in the United States, to get women educated:

there are still many kinds of education off limits to women. In

England, it was hard for Virginia Woolf to use a university library.

Simple literacy is the first step, and, as Abby Kelley told a

women’s rights convention in 1850, “Sisters, bloody feet have

worn smooth the path by which you came here. ” 8 Access to the

whole language has been denied women; we are only supposed to

use the ladylike parts of it. Alice James noted in her diary that “[i]t

is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined aw ay from one! ”9

But it is in the actual exercise of literacy as a tool and as a capacity that women face punishment, ostracization, exile, recrimination, the most virulent contempt. To read and be feminine simultaneously she reads Gothic romances, not medical textbooks;

cookbooks, not case law; m ystery stories, not molecular biology.

The language of mathematics is not a feminine language. She may

learn astrology, not astronomy. She may teach grammar, not invent style or originate ideas. She is permitted to write a little book about neurotic women, fiction or nonfiction, if the little book is

trite and sentimental enough; she had better keep clear of philosophy altogether. In fiction, she had better be careful not to overstep the severe limits imposed by femininity. “This then, ” wrote V irginia Woolf, “is another incident, and quite a common incident in the career of a woman novelist. She has to say I w ill wait. I will

wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked

when a woman speaks the truth about her body. The future of

fiction depends very much upon what extent men can be educated

to stand free speech in women. ” 10 The constraint is annihilation:

language that must avoid one’s own body is language that has no

place in the world. But speaking the truth about a woman’s body is

not the simple explication of body parts— it is instead the place of

that particular body in this particular world, its value, its use, its

place in power, its political and economic life, its capacities both

potentially realized and habitually abused.

In a sense intellect is the combination of literacy and intelligence:

literacy disciplines intelligence and intelligence expands the uses of

literacy; there is a body of knowledge that changes and increases

and also a skill in acquiring knowledge; there is a memory filled

with ideas, a storehouse of what has gone before in the world.

Intellect is mastery of ideas, of culture, of the products and processes of other intellects. Intellect is the capacity to learn language disciplined into learning. Intellect must be cultivated: even in men,

even in the smartest. Left alone in a private world of isolation,

intellect does not develop unless it has a private cultivator: a

teacher, a father of intellect, for instance. But the intellect in the

female must not exceed that of the teacher—or the female will be

rebuked and denied. Walt Whitman wrote that a student necessarily disowns and overthrows a teacher; but the female student must always stay smaller than the teacher, always meeker; her intelligence is never supposed to become mastery. Intellect in a woman is always a sign of privilege: she has been raised up above

her kind, usually because of the beneficence of a man who has seen

fit to educate her. The insults to females of intellect are legion: so-

called bluestockings are a laughingstock; women of intellect are

ugly or they would not bother to have ideas; the pleasure of

cultivating the mind is sexual perversion in the female; the works

of literate men are strewn with vicious remarks against intellectual

women. Intellect in a woman is malignant. She is not ennobled by

a fine mind; she is deformed by it.

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. The

world need not be defined as rivers, mountains, and plains. The

world is anywhere that thought has consequences. In the most abstract philosophy, thought has consequences; philosophy is part of the world, sometimes its own self-contained world. Thinking is

action; so are writing, composing, painting; creative intelligence

can be used in the material world to make products of itself. But

there is more to creative intelligence than what it produces. Creative intelligence is searching intelligence: it demands to know the world, demands its right to consequence. It is not contemplative:

creative intelligence is too ambitious for that; it almost always announces itself. It may commit itself to the pure search for knowledge or truth, but almost always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence. It is not satisfied by recognition of the personality that carries it; it wants respect in its own right, respect for itself. Sometimes this respect can be shown

toward its product. Sometimes, when this intelligence exercises itself in the more ephemeral realm of pure talk or mundane action, respect for creative intelligence must be shown through respect for

the person manifesting it. Women are consistently and system atically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.

Women are not supposed to have creative intelligence, but when

they do they are supposed to renounce it. If they want the love of

men, without which they are not really women, they had better

not hold on to an intelligence that searches and that is action in the

world; thought that has consequences is inimical to fettered femininity. Creative intelligence is not animal: being fucked and reproducing w ill not satisfy it, ever; and creative intelligence is not decorative— it is never merely ornamental as, for instance, upper-class women however well educated must be. To stay a woman in

the male-supremacist meaning of that word, women must renounce

creative intelligence: not just verbally renounce it, though women

do that all the time, but snuff it out in themselves at worst, keep it

timid and restrained at best. The price for exercising creative intelligence for those born female is unspeakable suffering. “All things on earth have their price, ” wrote Olive Schreiner, “and for truth

we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sym pathy. The road

to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every

step you set your foot down on your heart. ” 11 Truth is the goal of

creative intelligence, whatever its kind and path; tangling with the

world is tangling with the problem of truth. One confronts the

muck of the world, but one’s search is for the truth. The particular

truth or the ultimate character of the truth one finds is not the

issue. The intrusion of an intelligent, creative self into the world to

find the truth is the issue. There is nothing here for women, except

intimidation and contempt. In isolation, in private, a woman may

have pleasure from the exercise of creative intelligence, however

restrained she is in the exercise of it; but that intelligence will have

to be turned against herself because there is no further, complex,

human world in which it can be used and developed. Whatever of

it leaks out will entitle all and sundry to criticize her womanhood,

which is the sole identity available to her; her womanhood is deficient, because her intelligence is virile.

“Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity. . . ” Florence Nightingale asked in 1852, “and a place in society where no one of these three can be exercised? ” 12 When she referred to moral

activity, she did not mean moralism; she meant moral intelligence.

Moralism is the set of rules learned by rote that keeps women

locked in, so that intelligence can never meet the world head on.

Moralism is a defense against experiencing the world. Moralism is

the moral sphere designated to women, who are supposed to learn

the rules of their own proper, circumscribed behavior by rote.

Moral intelligence is active; it can only be developed and refined by

being used in the realm of real and direct experience. Moral activity is the use of that intelligence, the exercise of moral discernment. Moralism is passive: it accepts the version of the world it has been taught and shudders at the threat of direct experience. Moral

intelligence is characterized by activity, movement through ideas

and history: it takes on the world and insists on participating in the

great and terrifying issues of right and wrong, tenderness and cruelty. Moral intelligence constructs values; and because those values are exercised in the real world, they have consequences. There is

no moral intelligence that does not have real consequences in a real

world, or that is sim ply and passively received, or that can live in a

vacuum in which there is no action. Moral intelligence cannot be

expressed only through love or only through sex or only through

domesticity or only through ornamentation or only through obedience; moral intelligence cannot be expressed only through being fucked or reproducing. Moral intelligence must act in a public

world, not a private, refined, rarefied relationship with one other

person to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Moral intelligence

demands a nearly endless exercise of the ability to make decisions:

significant decisions; decisions inside history, not peripheral to it;

decisions about the meaning of life; decisions that arise from an

acute awareness of one’s own m ortality; decisions on which one can

honestly and w illfully stake one’s life. Moral intelligence is not the

stuff of which cunts are made. Moralism is the cunt’s effort to find

some basis for self-respect, a pitiful gesture toward being human at

which men laugh and for which women pity other women.

There is also, possibly, sexual intelligence, a human capacity for

discerning, manifesting, and constructing sexual integrity. Sexual

intelligence could not be measured in numbers of orgasms, erections, or partners; nor could it show itself by posing painted clitoral lips in front of a camera; nor could one measure it by the

number of children born; nor would it manifest as addiction. Sexual intelligence, like any other kind of intelligence, would be active and dynam ic; it would need the real world, the direct experience of

it; it would pose not buttocks but questions, answers, theories,

ideas— in the form of desire or act or art or articulation. It would

be in the body, but it could never be in an imprisoned, isolated

body, a body denied access to the world. It would not be mechanical; nor could it stand to be viewed as inert and stupid; nor could it be exploited by another without diminishing in vigor; and being

sold on the marketplace as a commodity would necessarily be

anathema to it, a direct affront to its intrinsic need to confront the

world in self-defined and self-determining terms. Sexual intelligence would probably be more like moral intelligence than like

anything else: a point that women for centuries have been trying to

make. But since no intelligence in a woman is respected, and since

she is condemned to moralism because she is defined as being incapable of moral intelligence, and since she is defined as a sexual thing to be used, the meaning of women in likening moral and

sexual intelligence is not understood. Sexual intelligence asserts itself through sexual integrity, a dimension of values and action forbidden to women. Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and

women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realized for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action. Sexual

intelligence, like moral intelligence, would have to confront the

great issues of cruelty and tenderness; but where moral intelligence

must tangle with questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence

would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission.

One preordained to be fucked has no need to exercise sexual intelligence, no opportunity to exercise it, no argument that justifies exercising it. To keep the woman sexually acquiescent, the capacity for sexual intelligence must be prohibited to her; and it is. Her clitoris is denied; her capacity for pleasure is distorted and defamed; her erotic values are slandered and insulted; her desire to value her body as her own is paralyzed and maimed. She is turned

into an occasion for male pleasure, an object of male desire, a thing

to be used; and any willful expression of her sexuality in the world

unmediated by men or male values is punished. She is used as a

slut or as a lady; but sexual intelligence cannot manifest in a human

being whose predestined purpose is to be exploited through sex, by

sex, in sex, as sex. Sexual intelligence constructs its own use: it

begins with a whole body, not one that has already been cut into

parts and fetishized; it begins with a self-respecting body, not one

that is characterized by class as dirty, wanton, and slavish; it acts

in the world, a world it enters on its own, with freedom as well as

with passion. Sexual intelligence cannot live behind locked doors,

any more than any other kind of intelligence can. Sexual intelligence cannot exist defensively, keeping out rape. Sexual intelligence cannot be decorative or pretty or coy or timid, nor can it live on a diet of contempt and abuse and hatred of its human form.

Sexual intelligence is not animal, it is human; it has values; it sets

limits that are meaningful to the whole person and personality,

which must live in history and in the world. Women have found

the development and exercise of sexual intelligence more difficult

than any other kind: women have learned to read; women have

acquired intellect; women have had so much creative intelligence

that even despisal and isolation and punishment have not been able

to squeeze it out of them; women have struggled for a moral intelligence that by its very existence repudiates moralism; but sexual intelligence is cut off at its roots, because the woman’s body is not

her own. The incestuous use of a girl murders it. The sexual intimidation or violation of a girl murders it. The enforced chastity of a girl murders it. The separation of girl from girl murders it. The

turning over of a girl to a man as wife murders it. The selling of a

girl into prostitution murders it. The use of a woman as a wife

murders it. The use of a woman as a sexual thing murders it. The

selling of a woman as a sexual commodity, not just on the street

but in media, murders it. The economic value given to a woman’s

body, whether high or low, murders it. The keeping of a woman

as a toy or ornament or domesticated cunt murders it. The need to

be a mother so that one is not perceived as a whore murders it.

The requirement that one bear babies murders it. The fact that the

sexuality of the female is predetermined and that she is forced to be

what men say she is murders sexual intelligence: there is nothing

for her to discern or to construct; there is nothing for her to find

out except what men will do to her and what she will have to pay if

she resists or gives in. She lives in a private world—even a street

corner is a private world of sexual usage, not a public world of

honest confrontation; and her private world of sexual usage has

narrow boundaries and a host of givens. No intelligence can func

tion in a world that consists fundamentally of two rules that by

their very nature prohibit the invention of values, identity, will,

desire: be fucked, reproduce. Men have constructed female sexuality and in so doing have annihilated the chance for sexual intelligence in women. Sexual intelligence cannot live in the shallow, predestined sexuality men have counterfeited for women.

*

I respect and honor the needy woman who, to

procure food for herself and child, sells her body to

some stranger for the necessary money; but for that

legal virtue which sells itself for a lifetime for a

home, with an abhorrence of the purchaser, and

which at the same time says to the former, “I

am holier than thou, ” I have only the supremest

contempt.

Victoria Woodhull, 1874

The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one

thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other. And

there is no doubt that the wife envies the whore—or Marabel Morgan’s ladies would not be wrapping themselves in Saran Wrap or wearing black boots with lacy neon nighties—and that the whore

envies the domesticity of the wife—especially her physical sheltering and her relative sexual privacy. Both categories of women—

specious as the categories finally turn out to be—need what men

have to give: they need the material solicitude of men, not their

cocks but their money. The cock is the inevitable precondition;

without it there is no man, no money, no shelter, no protection.

With it there may not be much, but women prefer men to silence,

exile, to being pariahs, to being lone refugees, to being outcasts:

defenseless. Victoria Woodhull—the first woman stockbroker on

Wall Street, the first woman to run for president of the United

States (1870), the publisher of the first translation of the Communist

M anifesto in the United States (1871), the first person ever arrested

under the notoriously repressive Comstock Law (1872)*—crusaded

against the material dependency of women on men because she

knew that anyone who bartered her body bartered her human dignity. She hated the hypocrisy of married women; she hated the condition of prostitution, which degraded both wives and whores;

and especially she hated the men who profited sexually and economically from marriage:

It’s a sharp trick played by men upon women, by which

they acquire the legal right to debauch them without cost, and

to make it unnecessary for them to visit professional prostitutes, whose sexual services can only be obtained for money.

Now, isn’t this true? Men know it is . 13

Woodhull did not romanticize prostitution; she did not advocate

it as freedom from marriage or freedom in itself or sexual freedom.

Prostitution, she made clear, was for money, not for fun; it was

survival, not pleasure. Woodhull’s passion was sexual freedom, and

she knew that the prostitution and rape of women were antithetical

to it. She was a mass organizer, and the masses of women were

married, sexually subordinated to men in marriage. At a time

when feminists did not analyze sex directly or articulate ideas explicitly antagonistic to sex as practiced, Woodhull exposed marital rape and compulsory intercourse as the purpose, meaning, and

method of marriage:

Of all the horrid brutalities of this age, I know of none so

horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage.

* Woodhull wrote an expose of Henry Ward Beecher’s adulterous affair

with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his best friend. Beecher was an eminent

minister. His hypocrisy was the main issue for Woodhull. The expose was

published by Woodhull in her own paper, Woodhull and Clafin's Weekly.

She was arrested, as was her sister and co-publisher, Tennessee Clafin, for

sending obscene literature through the mails. She was imprisoned for four

weeks without trial.

Night after night there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions—yes, I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak—millions of poor, heartbroken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust. All married

persons know this is truth, although they may feign to shut

their eyes and ears to the horrid thing, and pretend to believe

it is not. The world has got to be startled from this pretense

into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among

pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests

men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their

wills. Yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I

say, eternal damnation sink such m orality! 14

Wives were the majority, whores the minority, prostitution the

condition of each, rape the underbelly of prostitution. Woodhull’s

aggressive repudiation of the good woman/bad woman syndrome

(with which women, then as now, were so very comfortable), her

relentless attacks on the hypocrisy of the “good woman, ” and her

rude refusal to call the sufferance of rape “virtue” had one purpose:

to unite women in a common perception of their common condition. Selling themselves was women’s desperate, necessary, unforgivable crime; not acknowledging the sale divided women and obscured how and why women were used sexually by men; marriage, women’s only refuge, was the place of mass rape. Woodhull proclaimed herself a “Free Lover, ” by which she meant that she

could not be bought, not in marriage, not in prostitution as commonly understood. In telling married women that they had indeed sold their sex for money, she was telling them that they had bartered away more than the prostitute ever could: all privacy, all economic independence, all legal individuality, every shred of control over their bodies in sex and in reproduction both.

Woodhull herself was widely regarded as a whore because she

proclaimed herself sexually self-determining, sexually active; she

spit in the face of the sexual double standard. Called a prostitute

by a man at a public meeting, Woodhull responded: “A man questioning m y virtue! Have I any right as a woman to answer him? I hurl the intention back in your face, sir, and stand boldly before

you and this convention, and declare that I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act. I am not ashamed of any act of m y

life. At the time it was the best I knew. Nor am I ashamed of any

desire that has been gratified, nor of any passion alluded to. Every

one of them are a part of m y own soul’s life, for which, thank God,

I am not accountable to yo u . ” 15 Few feminists appreciated her

(Elizabeth C ady Stanton was an exception, as usual) because she

confronted women with her own sexual vitality, the political meaning of sex, the sexual and economic appropriation of women’s bodies by men, the usurpation of female desire by men for the

purposes of their own illegitim ate power. She was direct and impassioned and she made women remember: that they had been raped. In focusing on the apparent and actual sexual worth of

wives and whores, she made the basic claim of radical feminism: all

freedom, including sexual freedom, begins with an absolute right

to one’s own body— physical self-possession. She knew too, in

practical as well as political terms, that forced sex in marriage led

to forced pregnancy in marriage: “I protest against this form of

slavery, I protest against the custom which compels women to give

the control of their maternal functions over to anybody. ” 16

Victoria Woodhull exercised sexual intelligence in public discourse, ideas, and activism. She is one of the few women to have done so. T his effort required all the other kinds of intelligence that

distinguish humans from animals: literacy, intellect, creative intelligence, moral intelligence. Some consequences of sexual intelligence become clear in Woodhull’s exercise of it: she made the women she addressed in person and in print face the sexual and

economic system built on their bodies. She was one of the great

philosophers of and agitators for sexual freedom—but not as men

understand it, because she abhorred rape and prostitution, knew

them when she saw them inside marriage or outside it, would not

accept or condone the violence against women implicit in them.

“I make the claim boldly, ” she dared to say, “that from the very

moment woman is emancipated from the necessity of yielding the

control of her sexual organs to man to insure a home, food and

clothing, the doom of sexual demoralization will be sealed. ” 17

Since women experienced sexual demoralization most abjectly in

sexual intercourse, Woodhull did not shy away from the inevitable

conclusion: “From that moment there will be no intercourse except

such as is desired by women. It will be a complete revolution in

sexual matters. . . ” 18 Intercourse not willed and initiated by the

woman was rape, in Woodhull’s analysis. She anticipated current

feminist critiques of intercourse—modest and rare as they are—by

a century. As if to celebrate the centennial of Woodhull’s repudiation of male-supremacist sexual intercourse, Robin Morgan in 1974

transformed Woodhull’s insight into a firm principle: “/ claim that

rape exists any tim e sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated

by the w om an, out o f her own genuine affection and d e s ir e ” 19 This

shocks, bewilders—who can imagine it, what can it mean? Now as

then, there is one woman speaking, not a movement. *

Woodhull was not taken seriously as a thinker, writer, publisher,

journalist, activist, pioneer, by those who followed her—not by

the historians, teachers, intellectuals, revolutionaries, reformers;

not by the lovers or rapists; not by the women. Had she been part

of the cultural dialogue on sexual issues, the whole subsequent development of movements for sexual freedom would have been different in character: because she hated rape and prostitution and

*In a recent essay, novelist Alice Walker wrote:. . I submit that any

sexual intercourse between a free man and a human being he owns or

controls is rape. ” (See “Embracing the Dark and the Light, ” Essence, July

1982, p. 117. ) This definition has the advantage of articulating the power

that is the context for as well as the substance of the act.

understood them as violations of sexual freedom, which male liber-

ationists did not. But then, this was w hy she was excluded: the

men wanted the rape and prostitution. She threatened not only

those sacred institutions but the male hallucinations that prettify

those institutions: those happy visions of happy women, caged, domesticated or wanton, numb to rape, numb to being bought and sold. Her sexual intelligence was despised, then ignored, because

of what it revealed: he who hates the truth hates the intelligence

that brings it.

Sexual intelligence in women, that rarest intelligence in a male-

supremacist world, is necessarily a revolutionary intelligence, the

opposite of the pornographic (which sim ply reiterates the world as

it is for women), the opposite of the w ill to be used, the opposite of

masochism and self-hatred, the opposite of “good woman” and

“bad woman” both. It is not in being a whore that a woman becomes an outlaw in this man’s world; it is in the possession of herself, the ownership and effective control of her own body, her

separateness and distinctness, the integrity of her body as hers, not

his. Prostitution m ay be against the written law, but no prostitute

has defied the prerogatives or power of men as a class through

prostitution. No prostitute provides any model for freedom or action in a world of freedom that can be used with intelligence and integrity by a woman; the model exists to entice counterfeit female

sexual revolutionaries, gullible liberated girls, and to serve the men

who enjoy them. The prostitute is no honest woman. She manipulates as the wife manipulates. So too no honest woman can live in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers

her body to another to use: and there is no basis for self-respect in

this carnal arrangement, however sanctified it may be by church

and state.

Wife or whore: she is defined by what men want; sexual intelligence is stopped dead. Wife or whore: to paraphrase Thackeray, her heart is dead (“Her heart was dead long before her body. She

had sold it to become Sir Pitt C raw ley’s wife. Mothers and daugh

ters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair” 20).

Wife or whore: both are fucked, bear children, resent, suffer, grow

numb, want more. Wife or whore: both are denied a human life,

forced to live a female one. Wife or whore: intelligence denied,

annihilated, ridiculed, obliterated, primes her to surrender—to her

female fate. Wife or whore: the two kinds of women whom men

recognize, whom men let live. Wife or whore: battered, raped,

prostituted; men desire her. Wife or whore: the whore comes in

from the cold to become the wife if she can; the wife thrown out

into the cold becomes the whore if she must. Is there a way out of

the home that does not lead, inevitably and horribly, to the street

corner? This is the question right-wing women face. This is the

question all women face, but right-wing women know it. And in

the transit—home to street, street to home— is there any place,

reason, or chance for female intelligence that is not simply looking

for the best buyer?

*

So ladies, ye who prefer labor to prostitution, who

pass days and nights in providing for the wants of

your family, it is understood of course that you are

degraded; a woman ought not to do anything; respect

and honor belong to idleness.

You, Victoria of England, Isabella of Spain— you

command, therefore you are radically degraded.

Jenny P. D’Hericourt, A Woman's Philosophy

of Woman; or Woman Affranchised, 1864

The sex labor of women for the most part is private—in the bedroom—or secret—prostitutes may be seen, but how the johns use them may not. Ideally women do nothing; women simply are

women. In truth women get used up in private or in secret being

women. In the ideal conception of womanhood, women do not do

work that can be seen: women only do hidden sex labor. In the real

world, women who work for wages outside of sex are dangerously

outside the female sphere; and women are denigrated for not being

ideal— apparently idle, untouched by visible labor.

Behind the smoke screen of ideal idleness, there is always

women’s work. Women’s work, first, is marriage. “In the morning

I’m always nervous, ” Carolina de Jesus wrote. “I’m afraid of not

getting money to buy food to eat.. . . Senhor Manuel showed up

saying he wanted to marry me. But I don’t want to. . . a man isn’t

going to like a woman who can’t stop reading and gets out of bed to

write and sleeps with paper and pencil under her pillow. T hat’s

why I prefer to live alone, for m y ideals. ” 21

The woman in marriage is often in marriage because her ideal is

eating, not writing.

Women’s work, second, is prostitution: sexual service outside of

marriage for money. “I’d like so much to have the illusion that I

had some freedom of choice, ” said J . in Kate M illett’s The P rostitution Papers. “M aybe it’s just an illusion, but I need to think I had some freedom. Yet then I realize how much was determined in the

way I got into prostitution, how determined m y life had been, how

fucked over I was. . . So I believed I’d chosen it. W hat’s most

terrifying is to look back, to realize what I went through and that I

endured it. ” 22

The woman in prostitution learns, as Linda Lovelace said in

Ordeal, “to settle for the smallest imaginable triumphs, the absence

of pain or the momentary lessening of terror. ” 23 The woman in

prostitution is often in prostitution because her ideal is physical

survival— surviving the pimp, surviving poverty, having nowhere

to go.

Women’s social condition is built on a simple premise: women

can be fucked and bear babies, therefore women must be fucked

and bear babies. Sometimes, especially among the sophisticated,

“penetrated” is substituted for “fucked”: women can be penetrated,

therefore women must be penetrated. This logic does not apply to

men, whichever word is used: men can be fucked, therefore men

must be fucked; men can be penetrated, therefore men must be

penetrated. This logic applies only to women and sex. One does

not say, for instance, women have delicate hands, therefore women

must be surgeons. Or women have legs, therefore women must

run, jump, climb. Or women have minds, therefore women must

use them. One does learn, however, that women have sex organs

that must be used by men, or the women are not women: they are

somehow less or more, either of which is bad and thoroughly discouraged. Women are defined, valued, judged, in one way only: as women—that is, with sex organs that must be used. Other parts of

the body do not signify, unless used in sex or as an indicator of

sexual availability or desirability. Intelligence does not count. It

has nothing to do with what a woman is.

Women are born into the labor pool specific to women: the labor

is sex. Intelligence does not modify, reform, or revolutionize this

basic fact of life for women.

Women are marked for marriage and prostitution by a wound

between the legs, acknowledged as such when men show their

strange terror of women. Intelligence neither creates nor destroys

this wound; nor does it change the uses of the wound, the woman,

the sex.

Women’s work is done below the waist; intelligence is higher.

Women are lower; men are higher. It is a simple, dull scheme; but

women’s sex organs in and of themselves are apparently appalling

enough to justify the scheme, make it self-evidently true.

The natural intelligence of women, however expanded by what

women manage to learn despite their low status, manifests in surviving: enduring, marking time, bearing pain, becoming numb, absorbing loss—especially loss of self. Women survive men’s use of them—marriage, prostitution, rape; women’s intelligence expresses

itself in finding ways to endure and find meaning in the unendurable, to endure being used because of one’s sex. “Sex with men, how can I say, lacks the personal, ” 24 wrote Maryse Holder in Give

Sorrow Words.

Some women want to work: not sex labor; real work; work that

men, those real humans, do for a living wage. T hey want an honest wage for honest work. One of the prostitutes Kate M illett interviewed made $800 a week in her prime. “With a P h. D. and after ten years’ experience in teaching, ” M illet wrote, “I was permitted

to make only $60 a w eek. ” 25

Women’s work that is not marriage or prostitution is mostly

segregated, always underpaid, stagnant, sex-stereotyped. In the

United States in 1981 women earned 56 to 59 percent of what men

earned. Women are paid significantly less than men for doing comparable work. It is not easy to find comparable work. The consequences of this inequity— however the percentages read in any given year, in any given country— are not new for women. Unable

to sell sex-neutral labor for a living wage, women must sell sex.

“To subordinate women in a social order in which she must work in

order to l i v e ” Jenny D’Hericourt wrote French socialist Joseph

Proudhon in the mid-1800s, “is to desire prostitution; for disdain

of the producer extends to the value of the product;. . . The

woman who cannot live by working, can only do so by prostituting

herself; the equal of man or a courtesan, such is the alternative. ” 26

Proudhon’s egalitarian vision could not be stretched to include

women. He wrote D’Hericourt:

. . . I do not admit that, whatever reparation may be due to

woman, of joint thirds with her husband (or father) and her

children, the most rigorous justice can ever make her the

EQUAL of man;. . . neither do I admit that this inferiority of

the female sex constitutes for it either servitude, or hum iliation, or a diminution of dignity, liberty, or happiness. I maintain that the contrary is true. 27

D’Hericourt’s argument constructs the world of women: women

must work for fair wages in nonsexual labor or they must sell

themselves to men; the disdain of men for women makes the work

of women worth less simply because women do it; the devaluation

of women’s work is predetermined by the devaluation of women as

a sex class; women end up having to sell themselves because men

will not buy labor from them that is not sex labor at wages that

will enable women to divest themselves of sex as a form of labor.

Proudhon’s answer constructs the world of men: in the best of all

possible worlds—acknowledging that some economic discrimination against women has taken place—no justice on earth can make women equal to men because women are inferior to men: this inferiority does not humiliate or degrade women; women find happiness, dignity, and liberty in this inequality precisely because they are women—that is the nature of women; women are being treated

justly and are free when they are treated as women—that is, as the

natural inferiors of men.

The brave new world Proudhon wanted was, for women, the

same old world women already knew.

D’Hericourt recognized what Victoria Woodhull would not:

“disdain of the producer extends to the value of the product. ”

Work for wages outside sex labor would not effectively free women

from the stigma of being female because the stigma precedes the

woman and predetermines the undervaluing of her work.

This means that right-wing women are correct when they say

that they are worth more in the home than outside it. In the home

their value is recognized and in the workplace it is not. In marriage, sex labor is rewarded: the woman is generally “given” more than she herself could earn at a job. In the marketplace, women are

exploited as cheap labor. The argument that work outside the

home makes women sexually and economically independent of

men is simply untrue. Women are paid too little. And right-wing

women know it.

Feminists know that if women are paid equal wages for equal

work, women will gain sexual as well as economic independence.

But feminists have refused to face the fact that in a woman-hating

social system, women will never be paid equal wages. Men in all

their institutions of power are sustained by the sex labor and sexual

subordination of women. The sex labor of women must be maintained; and systematic low wages for sex-neutral work effectively force women to sell sex to survive. The economic system that pays

women lower wages than it pays men actually punishes women for

working outside marriage or prostitution, since women work hard

for low wages and still must sell sex. The economic system that

punishes women for working outside the bedroom by paying low

wages contributes significantly to women’s perception that the sexual serving of men is a necessary part of any woman’s life: or how else could she live? Feminists appear to think that equal pay for

equal work is a simple reform, whereas it is no reform at all; it is

revolution. Feminists have refused to face the fact that equal pay

for equal work is impossible as long as men rule women, and right-

wing women have refused to forget it. Devaluation of women’s

labor outside the home pushes women back into the home and encourages women to support a system in which, as she sees it, he is paid for both of them— her share of his wage being more than she

could earn herself.

In the workplace, sexual harassment fixes the low status of

women irreversibly. Women are sex; even filing or typing, women

are sex. The debilitating, insidious violence of sexual harassment

is pervasive in the workplace. It is part of nearly every working

environment. Women shuffle; women placate; women submit;

women leave; the rare, brave women fight and are tied up in the

courts, often without jobs, for years. There is also rape in the

workplace.

Where is the place for intelligence— for literacy, intellect, creativity, moral discernment? Where in this world in which women live, circumscribed by the uses to which men put women’s sexual

organs, is the cultivation of skills, the cultivation of gifts, the

cultivation of dreams, the cultivation of ambition? Of what use is

human intelligence to a woman?

“Of course, ” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the learned women were

very ugly; but then they were very poor. She would like to feed

Chuffy for a term on Lucy’s rations and see what he said then

about Henry the Eighth. ” 28

“No, it would not do the slightest good if he read my manuscript. . . , ” wrote Ellen Glasgow in her memoir. “T h e best advice I can give you, ’ he said, with charming candor, ‘is to stop writing, and go back to the South and have some babies. ’ And I

think, though I may have heard this ripe wisdom from other men,

probably from many, that he added: T h e greatest woman is not

the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who

has had the finest babies. ’ That might be true. I did not stay to

dispute it. However, it was true also that I wanted to write books,

and not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies. ” 29

Woodhull thought that freedom from sexual coercion would

come with work in the marketplace. She was wrong; the marketplace became, as men would have it, another place for sexual intimidation, another arena of danger to women burdened already with too many such arenas. Woolf put her faith in education and

art. She too was wrong. Men erase; misogyny distorts; the intelligence of women is still both punished and despised.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They

see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they

see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having

ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage

means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see

that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired,

sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not

make them independent of men and that they will still have to play

the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no

way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in

the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better

to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value

whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not

wrong. T hey fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and

promiscuity as values, w ill make them more vulnerable to male

sexual aggression, and that they w ill be despised for not liking it.

They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. T hey know that they are valued for their sex—

their sex organs and their reproductive capacity— and so they try

to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity;

through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through

submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“fem ininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” T heir desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. T hey see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence

realized in a woman is a crime. T hey see the world they live in and

they are not wrong. T hey use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. T hey use the traditional intelligence of the female— animal, not human: they do what they

have to to survive.

3

Abortion

I have never regretted the abortion. I have regretted

both my marriage and having children.

A witness on forced motherhood,

International Tribunal on Crimes Against

Women, * March 1976

Before the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the

United States, abortion was a crime. Some abortions were medically licensed, but they were a minute percentage of the abortions actually undergone by women. This meant that there were no records of the illegal abortions performed (each abortion was a crime, each abortion was clandestine), no medical histories or records, no

statistics. Information on illegal abortions came from these sources:

(1) the testimonies of women who had had such abortions and survived; (2) the physical evidence of the botched abortions, evidence that showed up in hospital emergency rooms all over the country

every single d ay— perforated uteruses, infections including gangrene, severe hemorrhaging, incomplete abortions (in which fetal tissue is left in the womb, always fatal if not removed); (3) the

physical evidence of the dead bodies (for instance, nearly one half

*See testimony on forced motherhood, forced sterilization, and forced sex

in Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal, ed. Diana

E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven (Millbrae, Calif.: Les Femmes,

1976).

of the maternal deaths in New York State resulted from illegal

abortions); (4) the anecdotal reminiscences of doctors who were

asked for “help” by desperate women. These sources provide a

profile of the average woman who wanted and got an illegal abortion. Indisputably, she was married and had children: “. . . it has been repeatedly demonstrated that most criminal abortions today

are obtained by married women with children, ” 1 wrote Jerome E.

Bates and Edward S. Zawadzki in Criminal Abortion, published in

1964. An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal

abortions were married. * This means that up to two thirds of the

botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of

the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors

are married women. This means that most of the women who risked

death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps

one million married women each year. They were not shameless

sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in

traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the

homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were,

quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The

absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre

distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted

to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory

* Bates and Zawadzki, in their 1964 study of 111 convicted abortionists,

place the percentage of married women at 67. 6 percent. Other studies

range from the conservative 49. 6 percent (based on the records of two

abortionists in a single year, 1948; arguably, the figure is low compared to

other findings and estimates because women lied about marital status when

committing the criminal act of getting an abortion) to 7 5 percent (the sample being composed of women in charity hospitals from botched abortions). Bates and Zawadzki, who discuss both the 49. 6 percent figure and the 75 percent figure, conclude that they “could find no authority or piece

of research purporting to demonstrate that the majority of women undergoing abortion today are unmarried” (Criminal Abortion, p. 44).

reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one

decade. * The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. T hey thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet.

T heir reasons for keeping quiet are women’s reasons. Because

they are women, their sexuality or even perceptions of it can discredit or hurt or destroy them— inexplicably shame them; provoke rage, rape, and ridicule in men. Dissociation from other women is

always the safest course. T hey are not sluttish, but other women

who have had abortions probably are. T hey tried not to get pregnant (birth control being illegal in many parts of the country before 1973), but other women who had abortions probably did not.

They love their children, but other women who have had abortions

may well be the cold mothers, the cruel mothers, the vicious

women. T hey are individuals of worth and good morals who had

compelling reasons for aborting, but the other women who had

abortions must have done something wrong, were wrong, are

somehow indistinct (not emerged from the primal female slime as

individuals), were sex not persons. In keeping the secret they cut

themselves off from other women to escape the shame of other

women, the shame of being the same as other women, the shame of

being female. T hey are ashamed of having had this bloody experience, of having this female body that gets torn into again and again and bleeds and can die from the tearing and the bleeding, the pain

and the mess, of having this body that was violated again, this time

by abortion. Admitting to an illegal abortion is like admitting to

having been raped: whoever you tell can see you, undress you,

spread your legs, see the thing go in, see the blood, watch the pain,

almost touch the fear, almost taste the desperation. The woman

*A s this book is published, abortion has been legalized not quite one decade, but never without restrictions permitted by the Supreme Court and imposed by state legislatures and often with unconstitutional restrictions

imposed by state or local governments until overturned by federal courts

(paternal and parental consent requirements, for instance).

who admits to having had an illegal abortion allows whoever hears

her to picture her—her as an individual in that wretched body—in

unbearable vulnerability, as close to being punished purely for

being female as anyone ever comes. It is the picture of a woman

being tortured for having had sex.

There is the fear of having murdered: not someone, not real

murder; but of having done something hauntingly wrong. She has

learned (learned is a poor word for what has happened to her) that

every life is more valuable than her own; her life gets value through

motherhood, a kind of benign contamination. She has been having

children in her mind, and getting her value through them, since

she herself was a baby. Little girls believe that dolls are real babies.

Little girls put dolls to sleep, feed them, bathe them, diaper them,

nurse them through illnesses, teach them how to walk and how to

talk and how to dress—love them. Abortion turns a woman into a

murderer all right: she kills that child pregnant in her since her

own childhood; she kills her allegiance to Motherhood First. This

is a crime. She is guilty: of not wanting a baby.

There is the fear of having murdered because so many men believe so passionately that she has. To many men, each aborted pregnancy is the killing of a son—and he is the son killed. His

mother would have killed him if she had had the choice. These

men have a peculiarly retroactive and abstract sense of murder: if

she had had a choice, I would not have been born—which is

murder. The male ego, which refuses to believe in its own death,

now pushes backward, before birth. / was once a fertilized

egg; therefore to abort a fertilized egg is to kill me. Women keep

abortions secret because they are afraid of the hysteria of men

confronted with what they regard as the specter of their own extinction. If you had your way, men say to feminists, my mother would have aborted me. Killed me. “. . . I was born out of wedlock

(and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor), ”

Jesse Jackson writes in fervent opposition to abortion, “and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. ” 2 The woman’s re

sponsibility to the fertilized egg is im aginatively and with great

conviction construed to be her relation to the adult male. At the

very least, she must not murder him; nor should she outrage his

existence by an assertion of her separateness from him, her distinctness, her importance as a person independent of him. The adult male’s identification with the fertilized egg as being fully

himself can even be conceptualized in terms of power: his rightful

power over an impersonal female (all females being the same in

terms of function). “The p o w er I had as one cell to affect m y environment I shall never have again, ” 3 R. D. Laing laments in an androcentric meditation on prebirth ego. “M y environment” is a

woman; the adult male, even as a fertilized egg, one cell, has the

right of occupation with respect to her— he has the right to be

inside her and the rightful power to change her body for his sake.

This relation to gestation is specifically male. Women do not think

of themselves in utero when they think either of being pregnant or

of aborting; men think of pregnancy and abortion prim arily in

terms of themselves, including what happened or might have happened to them back in the womb when, as one cell, they were themselves.

Women keep quiet about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because they are humiliated by the memory of those abortions; they are humiliated by the memory of their desperation, the panic, finding the money, finding the abortionist, the dirt, the danger, the secrecy. Women are humiliated when they remember asking for help, begging for help, when they remember those who turned aw ay, left them out in the cold. Women are humiliated by

the memory of the fear. Women are humiliated by the memory of

the physical intrusion, the penetration, the pain, the violation;

countless women were sexually assaulted by the abortionist before

or after the abortion; they hate remembering. Women are hum iliated because they hated themselves, their sex, their female bodies, they hated being female. Women hate remembering illegal abortions because they almost died, they could have died, they wanted

to die, they hoped they would not die, they made promises to God

begging him not to let them die, they were afraid of dying before

and during and after; they have never again been so afraid of death

or so alone; they had never before been so afraid of death or so

alone. And women hate remembering illegal abortions because

their husbands experienced none of this: which no woman forgives.

Women also keep quiet about illegal abortions precisely because

they had married sex: their husbands mounted them, fucked them,

impregnated them; their husbands determined the time and the

place and the act; desire, pleasure, or orgasm were not necessarily

experienced by the women, yet the women ended up on the

butcher’s block. The abortionist finished the job the husband had

started. No one wants to remember this.

Women also keep quiet about abortions they have had because

they wanted the child, but the man did not; because they wanted

other children and could not have them; because they never regretted the abortion and did regret subsequent children; because they had more than one abortion, which, like more than one rape, fixes

the woman’s guilt. Women keep quiet about abortions because

abortion inside marriage is selfish, ruthless, marks the woman as

heartless, loveless—yet she did it anyway. Women also keep quiet

about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because the

woman who has had one, or tried to induce one in herself, is never

really trusted again: if she will do that to herself—hurt herself, tear

up her own insides rather than have a child—she must be the

frenzied female, the female gone mad, the lunatic female, the

female in rebellion against her own body and therefore against man

and God, the female who is most feared and abhorred, the Medea

underneath the devoted wife and mother, the wild woman, the

woman enraged with the sorrow between her legs, the woman

grief-stricken by the way men use her uterus, the woman who has

finally refused to be forced and so she must be punished by the

pain and the blood, the tearing and the terror.

The law gives a married woman to her husband to be fucked at

w ill, his w ill; the law forced the woman to bear any child that

might result. Illegal abortion was a desperate, dangerous, last-

ditch, secret, awful w ay of saying no. It is no wonder that so m any

respectable, m arried, God-fearing women hate abortion.

*

A n estimated 20 million illegal abortions are performed in the world each year and are a leading cause o f death among women of child-bearing age, a

study issued today said.

The report by the Population Crisis Committee

also said that another 20 million abortions were selfinduced annually and that the number was growing.

The New York Times, April 30, 1979

Women cannot be responsible for pregnancy, in the sense of acting

to prevent it, because women do not control when, where, how,

and on what terms they have intercourse. Intercourse is forced on

women, both as a normal part of marriage and as the prim ary sex

act in virtually any sexual encounter with a man. No woman needs

intercourse; few women escape it.

In marriage a man has the sexual right to his wife: he can fuck

her at w ill by right of law. The law articulates and defends this

right. The state articulates and defends this right. This means that

the state defines the intimate uses of a woman’s body in marriage;

so that a man acts with the protection of the state when he fucks

his wife, regardless of the degree of force surrounding or intrinsic

to the act. In the United States only five states have entirely abrogated the so-called marital rape exemption— the legal proviso that a man cannot be crim inally charged for raping his wife because rape

by definition cannot exist in the context of marriage, since marriage

licenses the use of a woman’s body by her husband against her

will. Nearly three times that many states have extended the husband’s right to forced intercourse to cohabiting men or, in some cases, even to so-called voluntary social companions. But even

where marital rape is illegal, the husband has at his disposal the

ordinary means of sexual coercion, including threat of physical violence, punitive economic measures, sexual or verbal humiliation in private or in public, violence against inanimate objects, and threats

against children. In other words, eliminating the legal sanctioning

of rape does not in itself eliminate sexual coercion in marriage; but

the continued legal sanctioning of rape underlines the coercive

character and purpose of marriage. Marriage law is irrefutable

proof that women are not equal to men. No person can enter into

an agreement in which her body is given to another and remain or

become or act as or effectually be his equal.

The law takes the form it does with divine sanction: civil law

reiterates religious dogma. The law enforces a relationship between

men and women that has its origins in so-called divine law; the law

enforces the divinely ordained subordination of women through its

regulation of sex in marriage. The law is an instrument of religion,

and it is precisely as an instrument of religion that law regulating

marriage gets its special character: laws against assault and battery

pale in importance when compared with the divine law giving a

man authority over his wife’s body. The man’s authority over his

wife’s body is willed by God—even if the same relationship outside of marriage and without reference to gender would be described as slavery or torture. The laws of God are upheld by the laws of this republic, this proud secular democracy. The marriage

laws fundamentally violate the civil rights of women as a class by

forcing all married women to conform to a religious view of

women’s sexual function. These same laws violate the civil rights

of women by compelling women to serve their husbands sexually

whether they will it or not and by defining women as a class in

terms of a sexual function that must be fulfilled. *

Women feel the pressure to submit in a m yriad of w ays, none of

which have to do with marital law as such. The woman is likely to

encounter marital law when she has been abused and seeks to act in

her own behalf as if she had a right to the disposition of her own

body. The point is that the law sets the standard for the disposition

of her body: it belongs to her husband, not to her.

The good wife submits; the bad wife can be forced to submit.

All women are supposed to submit.

One of the consequences of submission, whether conforming or

forced, is pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to intercourse, and women may

then be required to submit to the pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to the man, and women may

then be required to submit to the fetus.

Since the law sets the standard for the control, use of, function

of, purpose of, the wife’s body, and since the law supports the

right of the man to use force against his wife in order to have sex,

women live in a context of forced sex. This is true outside the

realm of subjective interpretation. If it were not true, the law

would not be formulated to sanction the husband’s forced penetra

*The American Civil Liberties Union has a handbook on women’s rights.

In that handbook, laws against prostitution are discussed in terms of the

right o f women to have sex: “the central focus of all these laws is to punish

sexual activity” (The Rights of Women, Susan C. Ross [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 176); equal right to sexual activity is seen to be the civil liberties

issue of paramount importance and laws against prostitution are simply a

cover for denying women the right to sexual activity. This is not a narrow

discussion o f laws on prostitution and their sex-discriminatory language or

enforcement. It is a position on what rights are for women, what freedom

is. There is no mention o f marital rape or o f the marital rape exemption as

violations of civil liberties and no discussion whatsoever of sexual coercion

in marriage sanctioned by law in letter and in practice as a violation o f civil

liberties. The discussion o f rape also makes no reference to marital rape or

the role o f law in upholding it.

tion of his wife. Marriage is the common state of adult women;

women live in a system in which sex is forced on them; and the sex

is intercourse. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex.

Women, it is not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment

against forced sex and a longing for freedom, which is often expressed as an aversion to sex. It is a fact for women that they must come to terms with forced sex over and over in the course of a

normal life.

Forced sex, usually intercourse, is a central issue in any woman’s

life. She must like it or control it or manipulate it or resist it or

avoid it; she must develop a relationship to it, to the male insistence on intercourse, to the male insistence on her sexual function in relation to him. She will be measured and judged by the nature

and quality of her relationship to intercourse. Her character will be

assessed in terms of her relationship to intercourse, as men evaluate

that relationship. All the possibilities of her body will be reduced

to expressing her relationship to intercourse. Every sign on her

body, every symbol—clothes, posture, hair, ornament—will have

to signal her acceptance of his sex act and the nature of her relationship to it. His sex art, intercourse, explicitly announces his power over her: his possession of her interior; his right to violate

her boundaries. His state promotes and protects his sex act. If she

were not a woman, this intrusion by the state would be recognized

as state coercion, or force. The act itself and the state that protects

it call on force to exercise illegitimate power; and intercourse cannot be analyzed outside this system of force. But the force is hidden and denied by a barrage of propaganda, from pornography to so-called women’s magazines, that seek to persuade that accommodation is pleasure, or that accommodation is femininity, or that accommodation is freedom, or that accommodation is a strategic

means to some degree of self-determination.

The propaganda for femininity (femininity being the apparent

acceptance of sex on male terms with goodwill and demonstrable

good faith, in the form of ritualized obsequiousness) is produced

according to the felt need of men to have intercourse. In a time of

feminist resistance, such propaganda increases in bulk geometrically. The propaganda stresses that intercourse can give a woman pleasure if she does it right: especially if she has the right attitude

toward it and toward the man. The right attitude is to want it. The

right attitude is to desire men because they engage in phallic penetration. The right attitude is to want intercourse because men want it. The right attitude is not to be selfish: especially about

orgasm. This prohibits a sexuality for women outside the boundaries of male dominance. This makes any woman-centered sexuality impossible. What it does make possible is a woman’s continued existence within a system in which men control the valuation of her existence as an individual. This valuation is based on her sexual conformity within a sexual system based on his right to

possess her. Women are brought up to conform: all the rules of

fem ininity— dress, behavior, attitude—essentially break the spirit.

Women are trained to need men, not sexually but m etaphysically.

Women are brought up to be the void that needs filling, the absence that needs presence. Women are brought up to fear men and to know that they must please men and to understand that they

cannot survive without the help of men richer and stronger than

they can be themselves, on their own. Women are brought up to

submit to intercourse— and here the strategy is shrewd— by being

kept ignorant of it. The rules are taught, but the act is hidden.

Girls are taught “love, ” not “fuck. ” Little girls look between their

legs to see if “the hole” is there, get scared thinking about what

“the hole” is for; no one tells them either. Women use their bodies

to attract men; and most women, like the little girls they were, are

astonished by the brutality of the fuck. The importance of this

ignorance about intercourse cannot be overstated: it is as if no girl

would grow up, or accept the hundred million lessons on how to

be a girl, or want boys to like her, if she knew what she was for.

The propaganda for fem ininity assumes that the girl still lives inside the woman; that the lessons of femininity must be taught and

retaught without letup; that the woman left to herself would repudiate the male use of her body, simply not accept it. The propaganda for femininity teaches women over and over, endlessly, that they must like intercourse; and the lesson must be taught over and

over, endlessly, because intercourse does not express their own

sexuality in general and the male use of women rarely has anything

to do with the woman as an individual. The sexuality they are

supposed to like does not recognize, let alone honor, their individuality in any meaningful way. The sexuality they must learn to like is not concerned with desire toward them as distinct personalities—at best they are “types”; nor is it concerned with their own desire toward others.

Despite the propaganda, the mountains of it, intercourse requires force; force is still essential to make women have intercourse—at least in a systematic, sustained way. Despite every single platitude about love, women and men, passion, femininity,

intercourse as health or pleasure or biological necessity, it is forced

sex that keeps intercourse central and it is forced sex that keeps

women in sexual relation to men. If the force were not essential,

the force would not be endemic. If the force were not essential, the

law would not sanction it. If the force were not essential, the force

itself would not be defined as intrinsically “sexy, ” as if in practicing force sex itself is perpetuated.

The first kind of force is physical violence: endemic in rape, battery, assault.

The second kind of force is the power differential between male

and female that intrinsically makes any sex act an act of force: for

instance, the sexual abuse of girls in families.

The third kind of force is economic: keeping women poor to

keep women sexually accessible and sexually compliant.

The fourth kind of force is cultural on a broad scale: woman-

hating propaganda that makes women legitimate and desirable sexual targets; woman-hating laws that either sanction or in their actual application permit sexual abuse of women; woman-hating

practices of verbal harassment backed by the threat of physical violence on the streets or in the workplace; woman-hating textbooks used to teach doctors, lawyers, and other professionals misogyny

as a central element of the practice of their profession; woman-

hating art that romanticizes sexual assault, stylizes and celebrates

sexual violence; woman-hating entertainment that makes women as

a class ridiculous, stupid, despicable, and the sexual property of

all men.

Because women are exploited as a sex class for sex, it is impossible to talk about women’s sexuality outside the context of forced sex or, at the least, without reference to forced sex; and yet, to

keep forced sex going and invisible simultaneously, it is discussed

every other w ay, all the time.

The force itself is intrinsically “sexy, ” romanticized, described as

a measure of the desire of an individual man for an individual

woman. Force, duress, subterfuge, threat—all add “sex” to the sex

act by intensifying the femininity of the woman, her status as a

creature of forced sex.

It is through intercourse in particular that men express and

maintain their power and dominance over women. The right of

men to women’s bodies for the purpose of intercourse remains the

heart, soul, and balls of male supremacy: this is true whatever style

of advocacy is used, Right or Left, to justify coital access.

Every woman— no matter what her sexual orientation, personal

sexual likes or dislikes, personal history, political ideology— lives

inside this system of forced sex. This is true even if she has never

personally experienced any sexual coercion, or if she personally

likes intercourse as a form of intim acy, or if she as an individual

has experiences of intercourse that transcend, in her opinion, the

dicta of gender and the institutions of force. This is true even if—

for her— the force is eroticized, essential, central, sacred, meaningful, sublime. This is true even if—for her— she repudiates intercourse and forbids it: if she subjectively lives outside the

laws of gravity, obviously the laws of gravity will intrude. Every

woman is surrounded by this system of forced sex and is encapsulated by it. It acts on her, shapes her, defines her boundaries and her possibilities, tames her, domesticates her, determines the

quality and nature of her privacy: it modifies her. She functions

within it and with constant reference to it. This same system that

she is inside is inside her—metaphorically and literally delivered

into her by intercourse, especially forced intercourse, especially

deep thrusting. Intercourse violates the boundaries of her body,

which is why intercourse is so often referred to as violation. Intercourse as a sex act does not correlate with anything but male power: its frequency and centrality have nothing to do with reproduction, which does not require that intercourse be the central sexual act either in society at large or in any given sexual relationship or encounter; its frequency and centrality have nothing to do with

sexual pleasure for the female or the male, in that pleasure does not

prohibit intercourse but neither does pleasure demand it. Intercourse is synonymous with sex because intercourse is the most systematic expression of male power over women’s bodies, both concrete and emblematic, and as such it is upheld as a male right

by law (divine and secular), custom, practice, culture, and force.

Because intercourse so consistently expresses illegitimate power,

unjust power, wrongful power, it is intrinsically an expression of

the female’s subordinate status, sometimes a celebration of that status. The shame that women feel on being fucked and simultaneously experiencing pleasure in being possessed is the shame of having acknowledged, physically and emotionally, the extent to

which one has internalized and eroticized the subordination. It is a

shame that has in it the kernel of resistance. The woman who says

no to her husband, whatever her reasons, also says no to the state,

no to God, no to the power of men over her, that power being both

personal and institutional. Intercourse is forced on the woman by a

man, his state, his God, and through intercourse an individual is

made into a woman: a woman is made. Whether a woman likes or

does not like, desires or does not desire, to be made a woman does

not change the meaning of the act. “There are many scarcely

nubile girls, ” wrote Colette, “who dream of becoming the show,

the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man.

It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfilment, a morbid

thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and

coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books and sticking

pins into the palm of the hand. ”4

Forced intercourse in marriage— that is, the right to intercourse

supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.

Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual

expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when

rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As

soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in

a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an

inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the

relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned

and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no

context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the

woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has

been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force

against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to

force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between

sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to

refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use

have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and

properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual

compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the

society’s commitment to forced sex is real: marriage defines the

normal uses to which women should be put, and marriage institutionalizes forced intercourse. Consent then logically becomes mere passive acquiescence; and passive compliance does become the

standard of female participation in intercourse. Because passive acquiescence is the standard in normal intercourse, it becomes proof of consent in rape. Because force is sanctioned to effect intercourse

in marriage, it becomes common sexual practice, so that its use in

sex does not signify, prove, or even—especially to men—suggest

rape. Forced intercourse in marriage, being both normal and state-

sanctioned, provides the basis for the wider practice of forced sex,

tacitly accepted most of the time. Forced intercourse in marriage as

the norm sanctioned by the state makes it virtually impossible to

identify (male) force or (female) consent; to say what they are so as

to be able to recognize them in discrete instances. The state can

and does make distinctions by category—for instance, sex with little girls is off limits—but no finer kind of distinction can be made because that would require a repudiation of force as a part of normal sex. Since the nearly universal acceptance of forced intercourse in marriage is a kind of universal callousness—an agreement as to

the disposition of married women’s bodies, thereby annihilating

any conception of their civil or sexual rights or any sensitivity to

force in sex as a violation of those women’s rights—it is easy to

extend the callous acceptance of men’s civilly guaranteed right to

use force to get sex to broader categories of women, also to girls,

and this has happened. There is the belief that men use force because they are men. There is the belief that women like force and respond to it sexually. There is the belief that force is intrinsically

sexy. There is the conceit that the married woman is the most

protected of all women: if force is right with her, with whom can it

be wrong? if a man does to another woman what he does to his

wife, it may be adultery but how can it be rape when in fact it is

simply—from his point of view— plain old sex? There is the definition of when a girl becomes a woman: a girl may be considered

adult because she has menstruated (at the age of ten, for instance)

or because she has a so-called provocative quality, which means

that a man wants to fuck her and that therefore she is presumed to

be a woman and to have adult knowledge of what sex is and what a

woman is. There is the definition of the female in terms of her

function, which is to be fucked; so it may be unfortunate that she

is fucked too early, but once fucked she has fulfilled a preordained

function as a woman and therefore is a woman and therefore can

legitim ately be fucked.

With respect to pregnancy, if a woman can be forced to bear a

child conceived by force in marriage, there is no logic in differentiating pregnancy as a result of rape or incestuous rape. Force is the norm; pregnancy is the result; the woman has no claim to a respected identity not predicated on forced intercourse— that is, at best her dignity inheres in being a wife, subject to forced intercourse and therefore to forced pregnancy; w hy would any woman’s body be entitled to more respect than the married woman’s? Rape,

rarely credited as such by men unless the display of force has been

brutal almost beyond imagining, is in fact an exaggerated expression of a fully accepted sexual relation between men and women; and incestuous rape adds a new element of exaggeration, but the

essential sexual relation— the relation of force to female— remains

the same. Therefore, men—especially men responsible for maintaining the right and role of sexual force in marriage (lawmakers and theologians)— cannot consider pregnancy resulting from rape

or incestuous rape as significantly different from pregnancy that results from the normal use of a married woman; and in their frame of reference regarding intercourse, it is not. The woman’s function

is to be fucked— and if she is pregnant, then she was fucked, no

matter what the circumstance or the means. Being fucked did not

violate her integrity as a woman because being fucked is her integrity as a woman. Force is intrinsic to fucking, and the state cannot allow women to determine when they have been raped (forced),

because rape (force) in marriage is supported by the state. The

willingness to consider rape or incestuous rape exceptions at all

comes from the male recognition that a man might not want to

accept the offspring of another man’s rape as his own; a father may

not want to be both father and grandfather to the daughter of his

daughter. These exceptions, to the extent that they are or will be

honored in legislation forbidding abortion, exist to protect men.

Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment forbidding Medicaid money to poor women for abortions and opponent of all abortion under all circumstances without exception for rape, was asked by a television interviewer if he would insist that his daughter

carry a pregnancy to term if she were pregnant as the result of

rape. Yes, he answered solemnly. But the question he should have

been asked was this one: suppose his wife were pregnant as the

result of rape? This would impinge not on his sentimentality, but

on his day-to-day right of sexual possession; he would have to live

with the rape and with the carnal reality of the rape and with the

pregnancy resulting from the rape and with the offspring or the

damaged woman who would have to bear it and then give it up.

Regardless of his answer to the hypothetical question, only the

male sense of what is at stake for him in actually having to accept a

pregnancy caused by rape or incestuous rape in his own life as a

husband to the woman or girl involved could make the rape or the

woman raped real. Abortion can protect men, and can be tolerated

when it demonstrably does. In terms of the woman used, herself

alone, she is her function; she has been used in accordance with her

function; there is no reason to let her off the hook just because she

was forced by a man not her husband.

*

Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with

the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the

wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.

The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more

there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should

fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that

girls should want to be fucked— as close to all the time as was

humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women

got fucked a lot more than men fucked.

Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in

Left ideologies and movements with regularity— in most countries,

in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies. ”

The sixties in the United States, repeated with different tonalities

throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic character. One did not have to read W ilhelm Reich, though some did. It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love

were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making

love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and

beautiful. T hey wanted peace. T hey talked love, love, love, not

romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). T hey grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going

to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No

wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their

special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.

The girls were real idealists. T hey hated the Viet Nam W ar and

their own lives, unlike the boys’, were not at stake. T hey hated the

racial and sexual bigotry visited on blacks, in particular on black

men who were the figures in visible jeopardy. The girls were not

all white, but still the black man was the figure of empathy, the

figure whom they wanted to protect from racist pogroms. Rape

was seen as a racist ploy: not something real in itself used in a

racist context to isolate and destroy black men in specific and strategic w ays, but a fabrication, a figment of the racist imagination.

The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them

had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists

especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that

they even thought it was intended for them too. They knew that

their mothers were not free—they saw the small, constrained,

female lives—and they did not want to be their mothers. They

accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more

than any other idea or practice, made them different from their

mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so

much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their

pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the longhaired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere.

This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which

their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same

time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible

home. In other words, the girls did not leave home in order to find

sexual adventure in a sexual jungle; they left home to find a

warmer, kinder, larger, more embracing home.

Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number

of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group

sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of

gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck

had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred—it

occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed

with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because

heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to

be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream

for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy

that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality

based on what men and women had in common, what the adults

tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a

sexual community more like childhood— before girls were crushed

under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence:

transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the

adults who made w ar not love. It was— for the girls— a dream of

being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling

equality, not the traditional male dominance.

Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make

it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man,

did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the

war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in

what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction. ” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,

they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:

fucking. The men grew more m anly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women— found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his

buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and

hers too)— traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,

turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated

into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose— it turned

out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,

and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was

an intensification of the experience of being sexually female— the

precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for

themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety

of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the

impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. T hey

discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,

ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were

characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex

as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female

fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.

In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and

practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an

issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and

it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not

climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of

and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.

When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored,

often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman

white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was

likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When

a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to

describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist.

When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of

recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and

white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given

time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them.

A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not

jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of

rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against

her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the

counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that

force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women

would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so

that it was repression, not force, that stood in the w ay of freedom.

Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-

intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor

did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of

women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited

that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by

more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No

persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of

women, unless the women themselves were blamed— usually for

not com plying in the first place. These were in the main women

who wanted to com ply—who wanted the promised land of sexual

freedom— and still they had lim its, preferences, tastes, desires for

intim acy with some men and not others, moods not necessarily

related to menstruation or the phases of the moon, days on which

they would rather work or read; and they were punished for all

these puritanical repressions, these petit bourgeois lapses, these

tiny exercises of tinier wills not in conformity with the w ills of

their brother-lovers: force was frequently used against them, or

they were threatened or humiliated or thrown out. No diminution

of flower power, peace, freedom, political correctness, or justice

was seen to be im plicit in the use of coercion in any form to get

sexual compliance.

In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture, pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male

demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross,

preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties,

the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was

sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access

to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion

was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for

saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced or persuaded aw ay, even by the most astute or dazzling ar

gument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway

were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever

they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however

much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had

consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men

nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality, and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy was the esteem in which “natural” women were held—women who

were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no

birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables

too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children, to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional ways for bearing the children—they were not labeled “bad” or

shunned—but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her

child—poor and relatively outcast—wandering within the counterculture changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got

in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck—and the

fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with

children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned,

a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal.

Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to

fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their

own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want

to die.

It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s—not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.

The decriminalization of abortion—for that was the political goal

—was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free. ” The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were

not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting

laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the w ay

great numbers of boys and men had always wanted— lots of girls

who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it aw ay.

The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued

for and even organized for and even provided political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The Left was m ilitant on the issue.

Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms— women who had been both politically and sexually active— became radical in new terms: they became

feminists. T hey were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. T hey had

fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them

were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights,

and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and

lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a

1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:

Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of

what passes for common practice in many places. A man can

bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and

remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for

no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up,

or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a

ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for

no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent

with her. If a macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied

by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that

anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5

Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and

he’s our friend. And dangerous. ” 6 Acknowledging the forced sex

so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if

she didn’t want to be raped. ” 7 These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded

women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used

women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers—they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing

that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually

exploited women within the movement. “But surely, ” wrote Robin

Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize

that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’—supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around

and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks— he's talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical? ” 8

It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister

but master-servant—that this brave new radical wanted to be not

only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem—that

proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they

had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual

liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another—something not done even when they had shared the same bed with the same man—and discovered that their experiences had

been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power:

they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were

revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but

even more important they hated the women for refusing to service

them anymore on the old terms— there it was, revealed for what it

was. The women left the men— in droves. The women formed an

autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to

fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight

for the sexual justice they had been denied.

From their own experience— especially in being coerced and in

being exchanged— the women found a first premise for their political movement: that freedom for a woman was predicated on, and could not exist without, her own absolute control of her own body

in sex and in reproduction. This included not only the right to

terminate a pregnancy but also the right to not have sex, to say no,

to not be fucked. For women, this led to many areas of sexual

discovery about the nature and politics of their own sexual desire,

but for men it was a dead end— most of them never recognized

feminism except in terms of their own sexual deprivation; feminists

were taking aw ay the easy fuck. T hey did everything they could to

break the back of the feminist movement— and in fact they have

not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of

heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an

intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who

could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion?

The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s

right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme

indifference.

Material resources dried up. Feminists fought the battle for decriminalized abortion— no laws governing abortion—on the streets and in the courts with severely diminished male support. In 1973,

the Supreme Court gave women legalized abortion: abortion regulated by the state.

If before the Supreme Court decision in 1973 leftist men expressed a fierce indifference to abortion rights on feminist terms, after 1973 indifference changed to overt hostility: feminists had the

right to abortion and were still saying no— no to sex on male terms

and no to politics dominated by these same men. Legalized abor

tion did not make these women more available for sex; on the contrary, the women’s movement was growing in size and importance and male sexual privilege was being challenged with more intensity, more commitment, more ambition. The leftist men turned from political activism: without the easy lay, they were not prepared to engage in radical politics. In therapy they discovered that they had had personalities in the womb, that they had suffered

traumas in the womb. Fetal psychology—tracing a grown man’s

life back into the womb, where, as a fetus, he had a whole human

self and psychology—developed on the therapeutic Left (the residue of the male counterculture Left) before any right-wing minister or lawmaker ever thought to make a political stand on the right of

fertilized eggs as persons to the protection of the Fourteenth

Amendment, which is in fact the goal of antiabortion activists. *

The argument that abortion was a form of genocide directed particularly at blacks gained political currency, even though feminists from the first based part of the feminist case on the real facts and

figures—black and Hispanic women died and were hurt disproportionately in illegal abortions. As early as 1970, these figures were

*The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, has five sections, the first

of which is crucial here, the second of which is interesting. Section 1: “All

persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge

the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any

State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process

of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection

of the laws. ” The second section guarantees the vote to all males. It was

purposely written to exclude women. Even though women have subsequently been given the vote, laws in the United States routinely abridge the privileges and immunities of women and deprive women of liberty and

property (there are still states in which married women cannot own property on their own)— and women do not have equal protection of the laws.

The fetus, once legally a “person, ” would have all the protections guaranteed by this amendment but not in practice extended to women. The Equal Rights Amendment was in large part an effort to extend the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to women.

available in Sisterhood Is P ow erfu l: “4 . 7 times as many Puerto Rican

women, and 8 times as many black women die of the consequences

of illegal abortions as do white women. . . In New York C ity, 80

percent of the women who die from abortions are black and

brown. ”9 And on the nonviolent Left, abortion was increasingly

considered m urder— murder in the most grandiose terms. “Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race, ” 10 wrote one male pacifist in a 1980 tract not at all singular in the scale and

tone of its denunciation. Without the easy fuck, things sure had

changed on the Left.

The Democratic Party, establishment home of many Left

groups, especially since the end of the 1960s ferment, had conceded abortion rights as early as 1972, when George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon and refused to take a stand for abortion

so that he could fight against the Viet Nam War and for the presidency without distraction. When the H yde Amendment cutting off Medicaid funding for abortions was passed in 1976, * it had

Jesse Jackson’s support: he had sent telegrams to all members of

Congress supporting the cutoff of funds. Court challenges delayed

the implementation of the H yde Amendment, but Jim m y Carter,

elected with the help of feminist and leftist groups in the Democratic Party, had his man, Joseph A. Califano, J r ., head of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, halt federal funding of abortion by administrative order. By 1977 the first documented death of a poor woman (Hispanic) from an illegal abortion had occurred: illegal abortion and death were again realities for

women in the United States. In the face of the so-called human-life

amendment and human-life statute— respectively a constitutional

amendment and a bill of law defining a fertilized egg as a human

being— the male Left has simply played dead.

The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful

* Except when the mother’s life is at stake in the original version (Hyde’s

version); as amended in the Senate, also in cases o f rape and incest.

reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and

anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing

from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also

the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter—if he

couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.

The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will

drive women back into the ranks—even fear of losing might do

that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The

Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill—this

the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism,

by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence;

it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own

bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation,

which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their

legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms,

as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except

at risk of death.

And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew

older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want

babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure

to get them.

*

Every mother is a judge who sentences the children

for the sins of the father.

Rebecca West, The Judge

The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives:

they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent

about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a w ife’s attitude

toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy,

fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as

a class— be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men— and

at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the

girls for sex, it was hard for the girls to understand how to like

boys and men without also liking the sex boys and men wanted.

The girls were told nice things about human sexuality and also told

that it would cost them their lives—one w ay or another. The

mothers walked a tough line: give the girls a good attitude, but

discourage them. The cruelty of the ambivalence communicated

itself, but the kindness in the intention did not: mothers tried to

protect their daughters from many men by directing them toward

one; mothers tried to protect their daughters by getting them to do

what was necessary inside the male system without ever explaining

why. T hey had no vocabulary for the w h y— w hy sex inside marriage was good but outside marriage was bad, w hy more than one man turned a girl from a loving woman into a whore, w hy leprosy

or paralysis were states preferable to pregnancy outside marriage.

T hey had epithets to hurl, but no other discourse. Silence about

sex in marriage was also the only w ay to avoid revelations bound to

terrify— revelations about the quality of the mothers’ own lives.

Sexual compliance or submission was presented as the wife’s natural function and also her natural response to her sexual circumstance. That compliance was never seen or presented as the result of actual force, threatened force, possible force, or a sexual and

social cul-de-sac. It has always been essential to keep women

riveted on the details of submission so as to divert women from

thinking about the nature of force—especially the sexual force that

necessitates sexual submission. The mothers could not ward off the

enthusiasm of sexual liberation— its energy, its hope, its bright

promise of sexual equality— because they could not or would not

tell what they knew about the nature and quality of male sexuality

as they had experienced it, as practiced on them in marriage. T hey

knew the simple logic of promiscuity, which the girls did not: that

what one man could do, ten men could do ten times over. The girls

did not understand that logic because the girls did not know fully

what one man could do. And the mothers failed to convince also

because the only life they offered was a repeat version of their own:

and the girls were close enough to feel the inconsolable sadness and

the dead tiredness of those lives, even if they did not know how or

why mother had gotten the way she was. The girls, having been

taught well by their mothers to like men because they were men,

picked flower-children boys over their mothers: they did not look

for husbands (fathers) as dictated by convention but for brothers

(lovers) as dictated by rebellion. The daughters saw the strained

silence of their mothers on sex as a repudiation of the pleasure of

sex, not as an honest though inarticulate assessment of it. The disdain, disapproval, repugnance for sex was not credited as having any objective component. What their mothers would not tell them

they could not know. They repudiated the putative sexual conservatism of their mothers for so-called sexual radicalism: more men, more sex, more freedom.

The girls of the counterculture Left were wrong: not about civil

rights or the Viet Nam War or imperial Amerika, but about sex

and men. It is fair to say that the silence of the mothers hid a real,

tough, unsentimental knowledge of men and intercourse, and that

the noisy sexuality of the daughters hid romantic ignorance.

Times have changed. The silence has been shattered—or parts

of it have been shattered. Right-wing women defending the traditional family are public; they are loud and they are many. Especially they are loud about legal abortion, which they abhor; and what they have to say about legal abortion is connected to what

they know about sex. They know some terrible things. Right-wing

women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They

saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easier fucks—

first the political use of the issue and then, after legalization, the

actual use of the medical procedure. When abortion was legal, they

saw a massive social move to secure sexual access to all women on

male terms— the glut of pornography; and indeed, they link the

two issues, and not for reasons of hysteria. Abortion, they say,

flourishes in a pornographic society; pornography, they say, flourishes in what they call an abortion society. What they mean is that both reduce women to the fuck. T hey have seen that the Left only

champions women on its own sexual terms— as fucks; they find the

right-wing offer a tad more generous. T hey are not dazzled by the

promise of abortion as choice, as sexual self-determination, as

woman’s control of her own body, because they know that the

promise is crap: as long as men have power over women, men will

not allow abortion or anything else on those terms.

Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion

makes easier, the generalizing of force. T hey see force in marriage

as essentially containable—contained within the marriage, limited

to one man at a time. T hey try to “handle” him. T hey see that

limitation—one man at a time— as necessary protection from the

many men who would do the same and to whom they would be

available on sexual-liberation terms— terms fortified and made genuinely possible by abortion rights. With all their new public talk, they continue the traditional silence of women in that they are silent about forced sex in marriage: but all they do is predicated on a knowledge of it, and they do not see how more force is better than

less force— and more men means more force to them.

Right-wing women accuse feminists of hypocrisy and cruelty in

advocating legal abortion because, as they see it, legal abortion

makes them accessible fucks without consequence to men. In their

view, pregnancy is the only consequence of sex that makes men

accountable to women for what men do to women. Deprived of

pregnancy as an inevitability, a woman is deprived of her strongest

reason not to have intercourse. Opposition to birth control is based

on this same principle.

Right-wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the male Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not

have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they

want. They know that abortion on strictly self-actualizing terms

for women is an abomination to men—left-wing men and right-

wing men and gray men and green men. They know that every

woman has to make the best deal she can. They face reality and

what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or

not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men; abortion in the

open takes away pregnancy as a social and sexual control over men;

once a woman can terminate a pregnancy easily and openly and

without risk of death, she is bereft of her best way of saying no—

of refusing the intercourse the male wants to force her to accept.

The consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will. The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she

has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he

will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages;

and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house.

If in order to keep pregnancy as a weapon of survival she has to

accept illegal abortion and risk death, she will do it—alone, in silence, isolated, the only reproach for her rebellion against actual pregnancy being death or maiming. In this mess of illegal abortion,

she will have confirmed what she has been taught about her own

nature as a woman and about all women. She deserves punishment; illegal abortion is punishment for sex. She feels shame: she may consider it the shame of sex but it is in part the shame that

any human in captivity feels in being used—women being used in

sex feel shame inseparable from sex. The shame will confirm that

she deserves suffering; suffering in sex and birth and aborted birth

is the curse of her sex; illegal abortion is deserved suffering. But

illegal abortion also serves her because it puts abortion out of sight.

No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice,

choosing not to be a mother. No one must face women openly with

priorities other than marriage and conformity. No one must face a

woman refusing to be bound by pregnancy. The women who rebel

against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.

With illegal abortion life or death is up to God: each time, one

submits to the divine hand, divine finger on divine revolver pointed

at the already bloody flesh of a woman, divine Russian roulette. It

is a final, humiliated submission to the will of a superior Male who

judges absolutely. Death is a judgment and so is life. Illegal abortion is an individual hell; one suffers, does penance: God decides; life is forgiveness. And no one need face it until it happens to

her— until she is the one caught. This is the w ay in which women

are moral idiots in this system: ignoring whatever has to do with

other women, all women, until or unless it happens to oneself.

Right-wing women also believe that a woman who refuses to bear a

child deserves to die. Right-wing women are prepared to accept

that judgment against themselves; and when they survive, they are

guilty and prepared to pay— to m artyr themselves for an act of will

to which they had no right as women. There is no better measure

of what forced sex does to women— how it destroys self-respect

and the w ill to survive as a self-determining human being— than

the opposition of right-wing women to legal abortion: to what they

need to save themselves from being butchered. The training of a

girl to accept her place in sex in marriage and the use of a woman

in sex in marriage means the annihilating of any will toward self-

determination or freedom; her personhood is so demeaned that it

becomes easier to risk death or maiming than to say no to a man

who will fuck you anyw ay, with the blessings of God and state, ’til

death do you part.

4

Jews and Homosexuals

A minister from Oklahoma, dressed in a shiny brown polyester

suit, hair greased down even shinier than the shiny suit, smile from

ear to ear even shinier than the shiny hair, was picketing, leaf-

leting, and preaching outside the Sam Houston Coliseum in

Houston. He was full of love for the Lord, love for his neighbors,

the love of Christ; it was sin he hated, especially when it was embodied in the filthy lesbians who had come to Houston to destroy the work of God. He kept preaching to the feminists converging on

the Coliseum that nothing was as loathsome as homosexuality; but

in women! to contemplate the abomination in women whom God

commanded to obey their husbands as Christ was so repugnant to

this minister that he predicted God might call down the walls of

the Coliseum then and there. I approached him alone to talk as

other women ignored him entirely. I asked him what he thought of

the high-spirited, vital women going in: did they all seem evil and

loathsome? could he tell which were lesbians and which were not?

what kind of harm did lesbians do to other people? if lesbians did

no one harm (for instance, did not murder, did not rape), w hy was

he, a minister, called on to denounce lesbians? was not this particular sin, so singularly lacking in malice, better left to God to judge?

why did lesbians provoke not only God’s judgment but also the

minister’s wrath? He referred to these passages from Romans: *

*The translation quoted is the King James Version. However, the phrases

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an

image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-

footed beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through

the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies

between themselves;

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped

and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed

for ever. Amen.

For this cause God g a v e them up unto vile affections: fo r even their

women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; *

And likewise also the m en, leaving the natural use o f the w om an,

burned in their lust one tow ard another; men w ith men working that

which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence o f their

error which was meet. (Italics mine)

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; t

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, t deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, convenant breakers, without natural

affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the ju d gm en t o f God, that they which com mit such

things are w orthy o f death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in

them that do them . % (Italics mine)

Romans 1: 22-32

indicated by a footnote reference are slightly different in the Revised Standard Version and are perhaps clearer in meaning, as shown in the following notes.

* Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and men likewise gave up natural relations with women. . .

* To a base mind and to improper conduct.

X Strife.

§ Though they know' God’s decree that those who do such things deserve

to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.

There is nothing like this in the Old Testament. According to

Maimonides:

Women are forbidden to engage in lesbian practices with one

another, these being the doings o f the land o f E gypt (Lev. 18: 3),

against which we have been warned. . . Although such an act

is forbidden, the perpetrators are not liable to a flogging, since

there is no specific negative commandment prohibiting it, nor

is actual intercourse of any kind involved here. Consequently,

such women are not forbidden for the priesthood on account of

harlotry, nor is a woman prohibited to her husband because of

it, since this does not constitute harlotry. It behooves the

court, however, to administer the flogging prescribed for disobedience, since they have performed a forbidden act. A man should be particularly strict with his wife in this matter, and

should prevent women known to indulge in such practices

from visiting her, and her from going to visit them . 1

I asked the minister how Christians who value obedience to God’s

literal word justified such a radical reinterpretation of the Old Testament. The New Testament, he said, was concealed in the Old Testament; nothing in it was really new in the sense of being original; the New Testament made God’s real meaning clear; the Jew s had become blind to the spirit of the law —enter the Holy Spirit

and the revealed word. I suggested that the anti-Jewish tone of

some of the New Testament might be considered new and that it

was possibly related to what I at least considered a new attitude

toward lesbians: Jew s and female homosexuals, politically united

by damnation for the first time. In Romans, Jew s are abandoned

by God the Father; the covenant of manhood, sealed by circumcision, loses its meaning:

For he is not a Jew , which is one outwardly; neither is that

circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:

But he is a Jew , which is one inw ardly; and circumcision is

that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter. . . *

Romans 2: 28-29

The Gentile gets God’s masculinity (a new God, God the Son)

without an outward mark. The cutting of the penis no longer

means masculinity; it begins to resemble castration. All the feminized creatures—Jews, unnatural women (lesbians), unnatural men (homosexuals)— are linked together in Romans and are promised

God’s “indignation and wrath” (Romans 2: 8). The Jews who obey

the law are replaced by the Christians who know the law not by

learning it but by being it. The first Christian hit list of sinners is

compiled: lesbians, male homosexuals, Jews.

Talk of the Jews animated the minister. He was married to a

Jewish girl. He supported the state of Israel: see Amos, ninth chapter. The Jews were up on his pedestal. But the Jews, I insisted, did not abhor lesbians or forbid lesbian acts or damn or search out or

ostracize lesbians: not by law or by actual practice. Christ, he said

at some length and with no small amount of bitterness, had died

because the Jews had overlooked a lot. The Jews had had some

funny ideas until Paul came along.

But where, I asked him, did he get his sense of personal repugnance? Didn’t I see how vile a sin it was, he asked, referring back to the New Testament, which condemned not only lesbians and all

homosexuals but also those who accepted in others this most

heinous of sins? And didn’t I understand what lesbians and male

homosexuals were by nature: filled with wickedness, covetousness,

maliciousness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; backbiters,

haters of God, inventors of evil things, without natural affection,

unmerciful. Romans, it must be apparent, is not kind in its estimation of homosexuals, male or female. Any Christian who meets homosexuality in the pages of the New Testament for the first time

* Revised Standard Version: “real circumcision is a matter of the heart,

spiritual and not literal. ”

is likely to fear homosexuals, hate homosexuals, and despise any

liberal tolerance for that viciousness that God abhors. The New

Testament damns those who tolerate homosexuality; and the New

Testament does say that homosexuals “are worthy of death. ”

In the course of m y conversation with the minister, a group of

women had gathered around us. The weather was beautiful, the

convention exciting, the women were high on goodwill and feminist dreams of sisterhood and solidarity. The women, it must be said, were nice and happy and enthusiastic and everyone was

pretty from radiant smiles and high hopes. The minister’s style

was nice too—outgoing, sincere, warm, expansive, full of prejudiced conviction but without meanness. He did not want to hurt anyone. He hated sin, and especially he found lesbian sin loathsome; but it was a conviction pure in its detachment from individual human beings— he had never seen one. M any of the women listening giggled as he and I talked. But what about these women, I

asked, or what about me? Are we all damned? Are we bad? Do

you know which of us is lesbian? Are we all full of envy, murder,

strife, deceit, m alignity? Are we without natural affection or unmerciful? He looked up and around and his skin crawled. He reacted to the sight of us suddenly as frightened girls do to mice or bugs or spiders.

The women’s movement, he said, was a communist conspiracy,

an internal poison in America. The communists wanted abortion

legalized in the United States in order to exterminate Americans

and to damn us in God’s eyes. The Russians invented abortion and

they insidiously had the ideology of abortion planted in the United

States by agents and dupes; and the liberals and the Jew s spread

it. And now the communists had new tactics— lesbians in the

women’s movement. It was a Russian plot to turn the United

States into Sodom and Gomorrah so that God would hate the

United States and destroy it and the Russians would win; and

Marx, the anti-Christ, had been a Jew , and a lot of lesbians were

Jew s, he was no anti-Semite, he had married a Jewish girl but

of course she had been baptized and had accepted Christ. The

Bible—meaning the New Testament because the Old Testament

had really become irrelevant since the New Testament fully revealed what had been concealed in the Old Testament—was the only hope for America’s survival because it revealed God’s will. A

strong and righteous nation depends on fulfilling God’s will. God’s

will is that wives obey their husbands, who are as Christ to them.

Husbands must love their wives; wives must obey their husbands.

The feminists in Houston (who were, in fact, entering the Coliseum almost two by two in a sacrilegious if unintentional parody of Noah’s Ark) were part of the communist plan to spread lesbianism,

destroy the family by destroying the wife’s obedience to Christ

through the agency of her husband: the feminists were going to

destroy the United States by spreading evil. The minister’s eyes

were darting in all directions and he seemed visibly sick from the

sudden recognition that the women around him and the woman he

was talking to might actually be lesbians, and some certainly were:

full of malignity, inventors of evil things. I asked him if I could

talk with him again, some other time. He moved away, repelled,

nervous, silent, the rich evangelical blather with which he had

been fulminating when I first encountered him now stopped entirely. He had actually been near some real ones, unnatural, worthy of death.

Inside the Coliseum too there was a right-wing Christian presence. In Mississippi and Utah, official convention delegates not only embodied opposition to all women’s rights, including the

Equal Rights Amendment, but were linked with the Ku Klux

Klan. The Utah delegation, in a press release, denied any association with the Klan and claimed that the sponsors of the conference

“have sought to destroy our credibility by name-calling and trying

to link us with extremist groups like the Ku-Klux Klan. ” The Utah

delegation considered the whole conference a propaganda effort

“carefully designed to quash the views of women opposing the

Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive freedom recommendations. ” 2 The National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) announced in September, two months before the conference, its decision to uphold the right of all elected

delegates to participate in the convention unless election fraud

could be proven. State elections were supposed to include in the

official delegations “groups which work to advance the rights of

women; and members of the general public, with special emphasis

on the representation of low-income women, members of diverse

racial, ethnic and religious groups, and women of all ages. ” 3 The

true wrath of the IWY Commission was, in fact, for the racist

composition of several of the delegations from right-wing states.

Alabama was cited as a state “whose population is 26. 2 per cent

black, yet w ill be represented in Houston by 24 delegates, 22 of

whom are w hite. ”4 Mississippi stood out as the most vicious violator of the law ’s intent. The IWY Commission characterized M ississippi as “a state whose population is 36. 8 per cent black, and yet will be represented in Houston by an all-white delegation, five of

whom are men, whose election is alleged by local authorities to be

the result of Klanlike activities. ” An individual who identified himself as Grand Dragon of the Realm of Mississippi, United Klans of America, Inc., Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed: “Wre controlled the one [delegation] in M ississippi. ” 5

I interviewed a man from the Mississippi delegation on the convention floor. Press access to the official elected delegates when the convention was in session was tightly controlled. The system of

access strongly favored male reporters, since permanent floor

passes were handed out to dailies, whose representatives were

mostly male. The women’s monthly magazines were low on the

priority list of media coverage: and most of the reporters for those

monthly women’s journals were women. As a result, someone like

myself, representing M s. , had at most a half hour on the floor with

the delegates at any single time, a very long wait for that half hour

of access—and the prospect of being physically thrown out as soon

as one’s time was up. So when I raced in, I raced right over to the

Mississippi delegation.

I asked several women to talk with me. They refused even to

look at me. Whoever managed them disciplined them well. They

were a wall of silence. Finally I approached a man sitting on an

aisle. I said that I was from Ms. magazine and would like to ask

him some questions. I was wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and a

press pass with Ms. in large inked letters was hanging from my

neck. The man laughed and turned to the woman next to him,

whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the woman next to

her and whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the

woman next to her and whispered in her ear, and so on down the

row of delegates. The man did not turn back to me until the identification had been passed to the end of the line. Some of the women had not laughed; they had gasped.

I asked the man why he was at the conference. He said that his

wife had wanted him to be there to protect women’s right to procreate and to have a family. I asked him if he was a member of the Klan. He claimed high office in the organization. He talked about

the Klan’s militant role in protecting women from all kinds. He

himself was physically rather slight, not particularly tall, wore

glasses; I suspected I was physically stronger than he was. Many

times during the interview I realized that it would take a white

sheet and all that that white sheet symbolized to hide this man’s

own physical vulnerability to attack. He himself was nondescript;

the Klan was not. When I recognized the fear this man inspired in

me, and measured that fear against his own physical presence, I

felt ashamed: and yet I was still afraid of him . *

*Klan and Nazi groups threatened violence at the convention: we were

promised bombings and beatings. Some women were in fact beaten up,

others were physically threatened, and the possibility of being hurt was

considered both real and immediate by all the conference participants with

whom I talked.

He said that women needed the protection of men. He said that

the Klan had sent men to the convention to protect their womenfolk from the lesbians, who would assault them. He said that it was necessary to protect women’s right to have families because that

was the key to the stability of the nation. He said that homosexuality was a Jew sickness. He said that homosexuality was a lust that threatened to wipe out the family. He said that homosexual

teachers should be found out and run out of any town they were

in. T hey could all go to Jew New York. T ryin g to keep up m y end

of the conversation, I asked him w hy he was against homosexual

teachers, especially if their homosexuality was private. He said that

there was no such thing as private homosexuality, that if homosexuals were in schools, children would be corrupted and tainted and molested and taught to hate God and the fam ily; homosexuality

would claim the women and the children if they were exposed to

it; its presence at all, even hidden, anywhere, would take people

from family life and put them into sin. His description was almost voluptuous in that no one, in his estimation, would remain untouched.

Are you really saying, I asked slowly and clearly and loudly (so

that the women delegates could continue to overhear the conversation), that if homosexuality were openly visible as a sexual possibility or if there were homosexual teachers in schools, everyone would choose to abandon heterosexuality and the family? Are you

really saying, I asked carefully and clearly and slowly, that homosexuality is so attractive that no one would choose the heterosexual family over it? He stared at me, silent, a long time. 1 am afraid of

violence and the Klan, and I was afraid of him. 1 repeated my

questions. “You’re a Jew , ain’t y a , ” he said and turned away from

me, stared straight ahead. All the women in the row who had been

looking at me also turned away and stared straight ahead in utter

silence. The only woman whose head had been otherwise engaged

had not looked up except once: she had taken one hard stare at me

in the beginning and had then turned back to her work: knitting

blue baby booties, the Klan’s own Madame Defarge; and I could

imagine my name being transferred by the work of those hands

from the press pass on my chest into that baby-blue wool. She sat

next to the Klansman, and she knitted and knitted. Yes, I am a

Jew , I said. I repeated my questions. He memorized my face, then

stared straight ahead.

In my few remaining minutes on the floor, I implored the Mississippi women to talk to me. I went hurriedly from row to row, expecting somewhere to find one rebellious sign of interest or simple compassion. One woman dared to speak to me in whispers, but did not dare look at me; instead she looked down into her own lap,

and the woman next to her got jittery and upset and kept telling

her to “think again. ” She whispered that she was against the Equal

Rights Amendment because girls would have to go to war. I said:

we say we love our children but isn’t it true that if we send our

boys to war we can’t love them very much? why are we willing to

have them killed if we love them? At this point the marshals forced

me physically to leave the floor. They did not ask or tell or say,

“Tim e’s up”; they pushed. *

In the face of the Klan and the marshals, I risked one more trip

back to the Mississippi delegation. On the floor, delegates were

milling around; it was a brief recess (but the same strict time limits

applied for journalists). In the sheer confusion of the numbers and

the noise, the discipline of the Mississippi delegation had relaxed

slightly. A Mississippi woman explained to me that as a Christian

woman she was in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position. I asked her if she really meant to say that boys were less valuable; and was that why

we sacrificed them in wars— because we didn’t think they were

worth very much? She said that it was the nature of boys to guard

*The system o f press access to the convention floor that favored male

journalists over female was set up by a male “feminist. ” It was outrageously, unashamedly, and inexcusably sex-discriminatory.

and to protect, which included going to war and also taking care of

their families. She was not prepared to say that boys were less

valuable than girls, only that women were superior to men in

Christianity, had a favored place based on and because of the

male’s role as protector. God, she said, wanted her husband to

protect her. The Equal Rights Amendment would force her to take

responsibility for decision making and for money. She did not

want to take this responsibility because to do so would be against

the w ill of God. She then said that she was equal spiritually in

God’s eyes but in no other w ay. I said that seemed to mean that in

every other w ay she was inferior, not superior. She said that feminists want women and men to be the same but that God says they are different. The Equal Rights Amendment would permit homosexuality because men and women would no longer be as different as God wanted them to be. Being homosexual was a sin because

women tried to be the same as men, and homosexuality confused

the differences between men and women, those differences being

the will of God. The recess ended, and with the return of order

(delegates seated and under discipline again) no more talk between

the Mississippi woman and m yself was possible. The marshals approached; don’t you fucking touch me, I said loudly, ending forever the possibility of further conversation with the Mississippi delegation; and I ran out fast so that the marshals fucking wouldn’t

touch me.

The Utah delegation had women supporters who attended the

convention as observers, a non voting status. Most of the right-wing

women did not care to attend the conference unless they were delegates; instead they attended Phyllis Schlafly’s counterconvention in another part of town. I was interested in the Utah women because

they had wanted to show themselves in an arena where they were a

small and unpopular minority. T hey all wore similar black dresses,

mourning I supposed for the unborn, mourning perhaps for us all,

the feminists so ungodly who surrounded them. The Mississippi

delegation had been a unit unto itself, not interacting at all with the

world of people and ideas around them. M y own evaluation was

that indeed the Mississippi delegation had strong Klan participation and leadership; more generally, it was not only male-dominated but male-controlled, almost martially controlled. The Utah

delegation with its supporters who dared to mingle with the enthusiastic feminists who numbered in the thousands acted with a different kind of conviction: the women were especially concerned with stopping abortion; they were passionate advocates of their values, tied to the Mormon Church, perhaps under direct orders, but nevertheless speaking for themselves with emotional conviction. A

state legislator from Utah, an official delegate, was stern, forbidding, serious, and willing to exercise what power she had in the service of her beliefs: the Equal Rights Amendment legalizes abortion; * the Supreme Court, in saying that all women could have abortions, opened the door for the state to say that all women must

have abortions; pro-ERA women are ignorant and malicious; she is

a feminist and introduces legislation in behalf of women, but finds

that pro-ERA feminists do not know what the interests of women

are; the interests of women are in a strong home and strong laws

protecting the family in which the man, not the state, protects the

woman; also the federal government in following any kind of feminist program takes freedom from her directly as a state legislator, which she finds a violation of states’ rights. Another Utah delegate

said she attended the convention because she did not want her tax

money to go to pay for abortion. I asked her about Viet Nam War

tax resisters: they withheld taxes because they did not want their

money to pay for the war; did she withhold taxes to keep her

money from paying for abortion? Yes, she said. Then, as an afterthought, she said that actually she didn’t pay any taxes at all. Did her husband pay them, I asked. She thought so.

During the ratification of the resolution supporting homosexual

rights, I sat in the audience. There was yelling and cheering;

*Sec chapter 1, p. 33, for an explanation of this non sequitur.

balloons were let loose through the whole hall when the resolution

was finally ratified after some debate. The scene was one of wild

exhilaration: the thousands of delegates and observers were celebrating. In the highest balcony I spotted a group of Utah women, dressed in their black dresses all the same, slowly, grim ly exiting.

There were maybe ten of them; they had seen it through to the

end; they were not happy. I raced to the high balcony to talk with

them. It was deserted up there; all the noise was hundreds of feet

below us; them and me.

T hey were somber. How did they feel about this, I asked. It

was horrible, the end of everything, the death of the country, an

affront to God; homosexuality was a sin that deserved death, and

here women had voted for it, were clapping and cheering in behalf

of it. T hey were mortified, ashamed of women, ashamed of the

ignorance of women’s libbers. T hey admitted to never having

known any homosexuals; they admitted that churchgoing men in

their own communities were sexually molesting their own daughters; they admitted that they were surrounded by men who went to church and were at the same time adulterers. I asked them why

then they were afraid of homosexuals. One woman said, “If you

had a child and he was playing out in the street and a car was

coming you would move him out of the w ay, wouldn’t you? W ell,

that’s all we’re trying to do—get homosexuality away from our

children. ” I began to argue that the car coming down the street was

more likely to be a heterosexual male neighbor, or even daddy,

than a male homosexual or a lesbian. One woman stopped being

nice. “You’re a Je w , ” she said, “and probably a homosexual too. ” I

found m yself slowly being pushed farther and farther back against

the balcony railing. I kept trying to turn m yself around as we

talked, to pretend that my position in relation to the railing and the

fall of several hundred feet was not precarious; I kept talking with

them, lowering the threshold of confrontation, searching m y mind

for pacifist strategies that would enable me to maneuver away from

the railing by getting them to turn at least slightly toward it. T hey

kept advancing, pushing me closer and closer to the railing until

my back was arched over it. They kept talking about homosexuals

and Jews. I kept saying pleasant things about how I respected their

religious views; I kept asking them about their own lives and plans

and ideas. They closed in around me. I was completely isolated up

there, and I was getting panicky, they were getting moblike and

intransigent, I kept trying to make myself human for them, they

kept at transforming me into the embodiment of every homosexual

Jew in the hall, the direct cause of their frustration and anger, they

kept saying there was no middle ground and sin had to be wiped

out and they hated sin; and I was deciding that I had better risk

breaking through what had become a menacing gang, breaking

away from the railing by pushing them as hard as I could, knowing

that if I didn’t make it they would start beating on me, when two

dykes, one of whom I knew well, appeared there and just stood,

watching. I made the religious women aware of the presence of the

lesbian women, just standing, watching; and they moved away

slightly, they moved reluctantly backward. I straightened up,

moved away from that dreadful railing. I kept talking and slowly

walked through the group of them, and the two lesbian feminists

and 1 exited. I was shaking a lot. The woman I knew said quietly:

we saw you up there and thought you might be in trouble, you just

kept getting closer and closer to that railing, they were crowding

you pretty bad, you shouldn’t have been up there alone with them.

She was right; but in common with so many other women I did

not take the danger to myself seriously—a self-deprecating habit.

Jew , lesbian, feminist: I knew the hatred was real, but I had not

imagined these apparently docile women hating so much that with

tiny steps they would become a gang: so full of unexamined hate

that they would have pushed me over that railing “accidentally” in

defense of Christianity, the family, and the happily heterosexual,

churchgoing child molester down the block. In my own body, bent

back over that railing, I knew the cold terror of being a homosexual

Jew in a Christian country.

*

“Anti-Sem itism , ” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “does not fall within the

category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it

is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a p a s sio n ”6

The great hatreds that suffuse history, pushing it forward to inevitable and repeated horror, are all first passions, not ideas. Hatred of blacks, hatred of Jew s, and long-standing, intense, blood-drenched nationalist hatreds* are forms of race hatred. Hatred of

women and hatred of homosexuals are forms of sex hatred. Race

hatred and sex hatred are the erotic obsessions of human history:

passions, not ideas. “If the Jew did not exist, ” Sartre wrote, “the

anti-Semite would invent him . ” 7 The carrier of the passion needs

the victim and so creates the victim; the victim is an occasion for

indulging the passion. One passion touches on another, overlays it,

burrows into it, enfolds it, is grafted onto it; the configurations of

oppression emerge.

In patriarchal history, one passion is necessarily fundamental

and unchanging: the hatred of women. The other passions molt.

Racism is a continuous passion, but the race or races abused

change over the face of the earth and over time. The United States

is built on a hatred of blacks. In Western Europe, the Jew is the

primary target. This does not stop the black from being hated by

those who hate Jew s first, or the Jew from being hated by those

who hate blacks first. It means instead that one, and not the other,

signifies for the dominant culture its bottom, its despised, its

expendables. Homosexuality is elevated and honored in some societies, abhorred in others. In societies where hatred of homo

* Noting the high opinion Amerikan slaveholders had of Irish laborers,

English actress Fanny Kemble wrote in 1839: “How is it that it never

occurs to these emphatical denouncers o f the whole Negro race that the

Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves. . . ” See

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18 3 8 -18 3 9 (New York: New

American Library, 1975), p. 129.

sexuality has taken hold, fear of homosexuality is a terrifically

powerful tool in the social manipulation and control of men: pitting

groups of men—all of whom agree that they must be m en, higher

and better than women—against each other in the futile quest for

unimpeachable masculinity. Hatred of homosexuality makes possible astonishing varieties of social blackmail and male-male conflict.

In racism, the racially degraded male is sexually stereotyped in one

of two ways. Either he is the rapist, the sexual animal with intense

virility and a huge and potent member; or he is desexualized in the

sense of being demasculinized—he is considered castrated (unmanned) or he is associated with demeaning (feminizing) and demeaned (not martial) homosexuality. It is the relationship of the dominant class to masculinity that determines whether males of the

racially despised group are linked with rape or with castration/

homosexuality. If the dominant group insists that the racially

despised male is a rapist, it means that the dominant males are

effeminate by contrast; it is they who are tinged with homosexuality in that they are less manly. They will climb the masculinity ladder by killing or maiming those whom they see as racially inferior but sexually superior. The Nazis transparently craved

masculinity. It was the Jew who had stolen it from them by stealing the women they should have had. According to Hitler in Mein Kampf:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth

lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his

blood, thus stealing her from her people. 8

German men unmanned by their own recent history (World War I)

and a host of social and psychological inadequacies, as exemplified

in their leader, found a savage redemption: the annihilation of a

racial group of men perceived as being more male *—which, in this

*The racist perception of the Jewish woman “as a harlot, wild, promiscuous, the sensuous antithesis of the Aryan female, who was blond and

setting, means more animal, less human, not the human husband

but the animal rapist. This annihilation was an act of mass cannibalism by which one group of men, lacking m asculinity, got it from a mountain of corpses and from the actual killing as well.

In the United States, the black man was characterized as a rapist

after the end of slavery. During slavery, his condition as chattel

was seen to unman him entirely. His degradation was as a sym bolically castrated man; a mule, a beast of burden. (His use as a stud to impregnate black women slaves to increase the slave wealth

of the white master does not contradict this. ) Vis-a-vis the white

man, he was unmanned; and vis-^-vis the white woman he was

unmanned. * Early in Reconstruction, M ay 1866, a fairly optimistic

Frederick Douglass wrote that, though sometimes he feared a genocidal slaughter of blacks by whites, the movement of the former slaves “to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education”9 would lead finally to acceptance by whites. He recognized that even in success there was danger,

for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among

them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The Negro as

a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of

the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race

than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, pure” (see Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women [New*

York: Perigee Books, 1981], p. 147) also exacerbated the conviction that

the racially superior men were not man enough: she provoked them endlessly with her savage eroticism, but they could not tame or satisfy her—

they could not satisfy their craving for what they took her to be.

*The raping, impregnating, and whipping o f black female slaves, women

and girls, affirmed their gender: their slavery was an intensification o f how

men use women, not a contradiction of how women should be used in

terms of sex. Slavery unmanned a man; it sexed a woman, made her even

more absolutely available for sex and sadism. White male sexual domination of her, unrestrained use of her, made Southern white manhood supreme and irrefutable.

and yet I think that that resistance will gradually yield to the

pressure of wealth, education, and high character. 10

By 1894, scores of black men had been murdered, lynched, beaten;

mob violence against black men was frenzied and commonplace.

“Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states, ” Douglass wrote in “Why Is The Negro Lynched? ” published in a pamphlet in 1894, “that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood. ” 11 The white Southerners, deprived of their unmanned

slaves, had found a justification for racist hatred: the black man—

as part of his racial nature—raped white women. “It is a charge of

recent origin, ” wrote Douglass rightly, “a charge never brought

before; a charge never heard of in the time of slavery or in any

other time in our history. ” 12 The end of slavery unmanned the

white slaveowners. It was the former slaves who reminded them at

every turn of that lost manhood, that lost power. It was gone,

someone had taken it; they had been humiliated by the loss of the

war and the loss of their slaves (those who had not owned slaves

were still humiliated by the loss of them). The whites created the

black rapist to reflect what the whites had in fact lost: the right to

systematic rape of women across race lines. The whites created the

black rapist to justify the persecution and killing of black men—

and the literal castration of individuals to stand in for the symbolic

castration of the whole group under them in slavery, the foundation of their sense of male power, the material basis of their male power. Rape has been traditionally viewed as a crime of theft: a

woman stolen from a man to whom she rightfully belongs as wife

or daughter. The black rapist was accused of a crime of theft, only

what he stole was not the white woman; he stole the master’s masculinity. The crime had nothing to do with women— it almost never does. The white men, unmanned, were accusing the black

man of having raped them; the white woman was used as a figurehead, a buffer, a symbolic carrier of sex, a transmitter of sex

man-to-man*— she almost always is.

Jew ish males have experienced many turns of this homophobic

screw. As the putative killers of Christ, it was hard for the “turn-

the-other-cheek” Christians to take m asculinity from them: killing

God is a virile act. But the early Christians did just that. Jew s and

homosexuals are linked together in Romans in a propagandistic,

highly evocative w ay. What has gone wrong? There are lesbians

and male homosexuals, and the Jew ish relationship to God through

law is not enough. Lesbians are explicitly named to make the social

consequences of sin clear: the women have become unnatural; they

are no longer sexually submitting to men. The men are not just

having sex with each other; they are unmanly enough to leave the

women to each other. Naming lesbians provides a frame of reference in which one can gauge the loss of m asculinity inherent in the unnatural acts of men. The unnatural acts of men are seen to lessen

the polarization of the sexes. (In a society that admires male homosexuality, for instance, ancient Greece, these same acts are seen to heighten that polarization by glorifying maleness and so serve male

suprem acy. ) So Paul, in Romans, establishes that homosexuals—

lesbians named first— are full of m alignity and worthy of death and

then goes on to blame the failure of Jew s and Jew ish law for all that

is most odious in the world— nam ely, homosexuality first:

* Strindberg wrote in his diary when his third wife left him: “It is as if,

through her, I was entering into forbidden relationships with men. . .

This torments me, for I have always had a horror o f intimacy with my

own sex; so much so that I have broken off friendly relations when the

friendship offered became o f a sickly nature, resembling love. ” (See

August Strindberg, Inferno and From an Occult Diary, trans. Mary Sand-

bach [New York: Penguin Books, 1979], p. 314. ) He also quotes Schopenhauer: “M y thoughts are led through my woman to the sexual acts of an unknown man. In certain respects she makes a pervert o f me, indirectly

and against my w ill” (p. 310).

And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had

left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like

unto Gomorrha.

What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed

not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even

the righteousness which is of faith.

But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness,

hath not attained to the law of righteousness.

Romans 9: 29-31

The Jew is even insidiously likened to the Greek, that pederast of

universal fame: “For there is no difference between the Jew and the

Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon

him” (Romans 10: 12).

Then there is circumcision. According to Paul, it no longer signifies manly connection with God. Paul’s denunciation of Jewish law virtually effeminizes not only the law—ineffectual against sin

as it is—but the Jew , whose carnality could be restrained or governed by it. Paul’s repudiation of Jewish law sounds almost like a sexual boast: “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am

carnal, sold under sin” (Romans 7 : 14). Anti-Semitism has been so

versatile in so-called Christian societies because the Christians,

nominal or passionate, could exploit the Jews both as killers of

Christ (rapists*) or as overt or covert homosexuals (unmanly,

wicked, deceitful, full of strife, malignity, unnatural; intellectuals

tied to the abstract, ineffective law; smart as men who know the

law are and also devious the way men who know the law are; faithless to God because they engaged in homosexual acts, because women castrated or effeminized them by being lesbian, because

they socially tolerated homosexuality). Early on, Paul understood

that his pacifist God nailed in exemplary masochistic sexual passion

*The sadism o f this deicide establishes a basis for attributing to the Jews

the most vile acts of cruelty, all tinged with sexual sadism: slaughter of

infants to use their blood is a charge that, with rape, reappears cyclically.

to a cross had to offer converts masculinity: otherwise, C hrist’s

suffering would not play in Peoria. The sexual brilliance of the

passion could not hide the morbid fem ininity of the Jew who suffered it— w illingly, as an act of human w ill. It was Paul’s genius to link ineffective and effeminate Jewish law and Jew s with unnatural

homosexuals worthy of death. It was Paul’s genius to exploit Christ

as the prototypical Je w — he suffered like a female, it was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration— and then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, a Christian nature: it dies, then rises. The son, born a Jew , was worthy of death— homosexual as Jew s are, effeminate as Jew s are, with their weak law and tenuous m asculinity. The son resurrected triumphed over the

father and over death. Those who were like him, Christians,

shared in the victory, got closer to the real God (the one who won);

got more masculine than that Jew who had died in unspeakable

agony on the cross because the resurrected Christ was more masculine. The crucifixion without the resurrection would have left Jews and their God the repositories of patriarchal religious authority. The resurrection turned Jews from patriarchs into pansies, except when it was more useful to concentrate on them as the killers of Christ. The simple, cruel, rather monotonous God of the Jews could scarcely compete with the trebled divinity: The Father,

The Son, The Holy Ghost—a father whose son superseded him in

range of affect, emotion, and bravery, and whose Holy Ghost was

purely and ideally phallic and all-penetrating. It was Paul, back on

earth, who established the social ramifications of this religion of

revelation rather than of law for the Jew s who might be queer

enough to cling to one god rather than his trebled usurper: like

homosexuals, you are worthy of death.

*

The Old Testament does not contain the bloodlust against homosexuals and homosexuality found in the New Testament. There is

no mention of lesbians at all. Lesbian acts are inferred to be among

the “doings of Egypt” prohibited in Leviticus. No textual reference

to Gomorrah suggests that it was destroyed because of lesbianism:

this too has been inferred. It is not women who are commanded:

“The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover” (Leviticus 18: 9). All of the

sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, including the prohibition against

male homosexuality, are rules for effectively upholding the dominance of a real patriarch, the senior father in a tribe of fathers and sons. The controlling of male sexuality in the interests of male

dominance—whom men can fuck, when, and how—is the essential in tribal societies in which authority is exclusively male. The rules in Leviticus are blueprints for minimizing intratribal sexual

conflict among men. In chapter 18 of Leviticus, incest is broadly

defined and prohibited; adultery, male homosexuality, intercourse

with a menstruating woman, and intercourse with animals are also

forbidden. In chapter 20 of Leviticus, death by stoning is the sentence “for every one that curseth his father or his mother” (Leviticus 20: 9), for adulterers, for one who has intercourse with his father’s wife or his daughter-in-law, for male homosexuality, for

bestiality. Incest with one’s sister and intercourse with a menstruating woman are not capital crimes: the punishment is being cut off from one’s people. The heinous crime is not in the sexual

act committed per se; it is certainly not in any abuse of women per

se. The heinous crime is in committing a sexual act that will exacerbate male sexual conflict and provoke permanently damaging sexual antagonism in the tribe among men. For the Hebrews, sexual transgression that warranted death had the potential, if widely

practiced, to cause the erosion of the power of men as a class by

creating internecine sexual warfare within the class. The subordination of women was a means to male social cohesion. The regulation of that subordination through a regulation of male sexual behavior was straightforward and eminently practical: men were

supposed to sacrifice some measure of pleasure to maintain power.

Incest with one’s sister did not incite male-male conflict so much as

did intercourse with one’s daughter-in-law or with the wife of one’s

father. Therefore, the punishment was not death by stoning. The

prohibitions in Leviticus on sexual practices are without exception

shrewd and pragmatic in these terms. All of the prohibitions further the aims of male dominance in the patriarchal tribe and contribute to the stability of male power. This is true too of the oft quoted prohibition of male homosexuality: “Thou shalt not lie with

mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18: 22).

This means sim ply that it is foul to do to other men what men

habitually, proudly, m anfully, do to women: use them as inanimate, em pty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex. The abomination is in the meaning of the act: in a male-supremacist system, men cannot simultaneously be

used “as women” and stay powerful because they are men. The

abomination is also, perhaps most of all, in the consequences of the

act in a rigidly patriarchal tribal society: sexual rivalry among men

meant trouble, feuds, war. The Jews were a tribe perpetually at

war with others; they could not afford war among them selves. *

And from the real beginning—once outside of Eden— the Jew s

reckoned with the anarchistic evil of fratricide: Cain and Abel,

Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers— all were tragic stories

of brothers torn apart by jealous conflict over the blessing that

showed they were the beloved, and these struggles to be the bestloved had huge historical consequences for the Jew s. Actual carnal sex, the patriarchs recognized, would have made it worse, not better, intensified the conflict. Sexual acts among men threatened the social harmony on which the power of men depended, a social harmony made tenuous enough by the kind of sexual lust that male

*A more complex martial society, which the Hebrews became, could

more easily socially tolerate homosexual liaisons, which the Hebrews apparently did. See discussion of David and Jonathan, p. 134.

dominance produces: the lust for forced sex. Directing that lust

toward women, and trying to regulate which women, made the

lust produced by male dominance work in behalf of male dominance, not against it so that it would collapse of its own sexual weight. In the Hebrew system, adultery and some other sexual

transgressions of the familial pact were genuinely construed to be

as bad as male homosexuality. There is no special repudiation of

male homosexuality in the laws of Leviticus. There is no special

punishment for it, though the punishment is death. There is no

special characterization of the one who commits the act: he is not

different in kind or degree from those who break other sexual prohibitions and are judged to deserve death by stoning.

The fact that the Hebrews attributed no special significance to

the prohibition against male homosexuality in Leviticus and had no

strictly sexual repugnance for the act is revealed and underscored

by Maimonides’ explication of the law, which will no doubt astonish modern readers:

In the case of a man who lies with a male, or causes a male

to have connection with him, once sexual contact has been initiated, the rule is as follows: If both are adults, they are punishable by stoning, as it is said, Thou shalt not lie with a male

(Lev. 18: 22), i. e. whether he is the active or the passive participant in the act. If he is a minor, aged nine years and one day, or older, the adult who has connection with him, is punishable

by stoning, while the minor is exempt. I f the minor is nine years

old, or less, both are exempt. It behooves the court, however, to have the adult flogged for disobedience, inasmuch as he has

lain with a male, even though with one less than nine years of

age. 13 (Italics mine)

The Hebrews wanted the perpetuation of male dominance. A male

child under nine did not have male status. Sex with that male child

did not count as a homosexual act. Maimonides takes it on himself

to remind the court that the child is male—though not male

enough to warrant the real protection provided by capital punishment as a deterrent, which is what the death sentence was in the Hebrew system. The rules governing judgments of guilt were so

strict in actual practice that it is unlikely that capital punishment

could have been invoked for private, consensual sexual acts of any

sort. It was the intrusion of sex into the larger society that concerned the Hebrews. A male child under nine, at any rate, did not warrant that protection because he was not yet part of the ruling

class of men.

Sim ilarly, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah shows that it is

essential to male power (to the power of men as a class) to protect

men from the sexual lust of other men— to protect men from

forced sex by putting women in their place. No legal piety interferes with protecting men from homosexual assault by other men (in the story of Sodom, homosexual gang rape). The story of

Sodom is meant to show that when the simple mechanical strategy

of using women, not men, as targets for nonconsensual sex breaks

down entirely, a patriarchal society w ill be destroyed. So God ordains; so the Old Testament describes: and it is an accurate assessment of the importance of keeping women the objects of forced sex so that men w ill not be subjected to it and need not fear it.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah begins with a conversation

between God and Abraham: God says that “[b]ecause the cry of

Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18: 20-21). Abraham asks God if he will

destroy Sodom if there are fifty righteous men in the city. God

promises that if there are fifty, he w ill spare the city. Abraham,

after a few more interchanges, gets God to promise: “I w ill not

destroy it for ten’s sake” (Genesis 18: 32). Two angels go to Sodom,

where Lot bows down to them and offers them hospitality: safety

in his home, washing of the feet, unleavened bread:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men

of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young,

all the people from every quarter:

And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the

men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us,

that we may know them.

And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door

after him.

And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known

man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye

to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.

Genesis 19: 4 -8

The crowd, “both old and young, all the people from every quarter, ” attacked; the angels who appeared as men pulled Lot inside to save him, and “they smote the men that w ere at the door of the

house with blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied

themselves to find the door” (Genesis 19: 11). The angels told Lot

to leave Sodom because they were going to destroy it. Lot told his

sons-in-law, but they did not believe him. In the morning, the

angels told Lot to take his wife and two unmarried daughters; he

lingered, the angels transported Lot and the women outside the

city. God told Lot to go into the mountains and not to look back;

Lot pleaded to be able to go to a nearby city; God said he would

spare that city for Lot’s sake: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom

and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of

heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the

inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground”

(Genesis 19: 24-25). God remembered Lot, and spared him, and in

the wave of destruction of cities, God sent Lot into the mountains,

where Lot lived with his two daughters: “And the firstborn said

unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the

earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: Come,

let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that

we may preserve seed of our father” (Genesis 19: 31-32). On successive nights, each had sex with her drunken father and both became pregnant. Both had sons, a blessing, and each of those sons became the father of a whole people, a blessing.

That the people of Sodom meant the strangers harm is clear.

The nature of that harm is less clear. The demand of the mob to

bring the strangers out “that we may know them” is sexual because

the use of “know” usually is in biblical diction. The attempt of Lot

to substitute his virgin daughters for the men suggests that the mob

would have gang-raped the men. Whether the women in the mob

were voyeurs or purveyors of other forms of violence is impossible

to know: and yet the threat to the men does not seem to be only

sexual; it seems to include sexual assault by men, beating, maiming, and murder. The mixed mob indicates the breakdown of male class power in the same w ay that the assault on the male visitors

does: the rules that keep men exercising power as a class over

women as a sexually and socially subject group have broken down

absolutely; that is the destruction of the city. The destruction of

Sodom is certainly not for breaking a sexual prohibition on homosexuality. The daughters who get their father drunk to have intercourse with him and bear his children also break laws: yet they are blessed. The lesson is not that the inferred homosexual assault is

worse than the accomplished incest because one is homosexual and

the other is heterosexual. Laws against incest come first in Lcvit-

icus and are repeated or invoked in other parts of the Old Testament. The lesson is that when men are not safe from other men— a safety that can only be achieved by keeping women segregated and

for sex— the city w ill be wiped out. The daughters, in committing

incest, broke the law in order to perpetuate patriarchal power: as a

result of what they did, peoples, tribes, cities, were created. W hatever furthers male dominance, even when forbidden, will not destroy the city but build it. Sin, in the Old Testament, is first of all political. Law in the Old Testament is the regulation of society for

the purposes of power, not morality. The Old Testament is a

handbook on sexual politics: the rights of patriarchs and how to

uphold them.

David perhaps also breaks a sexual prohibition. His love for

Jonathan is indisputable, probably carnal, and goes beyond the

abomination of lying with mankind as with womankind: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of

women” (II Samuel 1: 26). David makes this declaration of love on

learning of Jonathan’s death in battle. Jonathan’s father, Saul, also

died, and he is remembered in the most heterosexual of frameworks: “Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put ornaments of gold upon

your apparel” (II Samuel 1: 24). The passage on Jonathan follows

the passage on Saul, so the contrast is very marked. And then there

was a lot more war and David became king and time passed; but

still, David’s concern was with Jonathan: “Is there yet any that is

left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for

Jonathan’s sake? ” (II Samuel 9 : 1). David found that Jonathan had a

son who was lame and serving another family. David restored all

Saul’s land to this son “for Jonathan thy father’s sake” (II Samuel

9: 7) and claimed Jonathan’s son as his own: “he shall eat at my

table, as one of the king’s sons” (II Samuel 9 : 11). There is no sin,

no condemnation, no wrath of God. Like the incest of Lot and his

daughters, this union made Israel stronger, not weaker. The homosexual bond extended the loyalty and protection of King David to Jonathan’s son, the grandson of Israel’s first king, Saul. David,

through his love of Jonathan, a love “passing the love of women, ”

having survived Jonathan, might be seen as Saul’s logical heir.

Hebrew society had become more complex than in the early tribal

days; Saul and David led armies; in a martial society, homosexuality is often seen to contribute to social cohesion among men. At least in this period, the Hebrews seem to have viewed it that way;

with David and Jonathan in particular it worked that w ay; and

Israel, its patriarchy intact (unlike that of Sodom), thrived. The

God of the Jew s may not have been tolerant, but he was practical.

There is nothing in the Old Testament to justify the vilification

of homosexuals or homosexuality that began with Paul and still

manifests virulently in the fundamentalist Right in Amerika. It

takes the magical claim that the New Testament is “concealed” in

the Old to sustain the illusion of divine sanction for this special

hatred of homosexuality. It is more than concealed; it is not there.

Paul saw the power of the father in decline. The power of the son

was taking its place. The Jew s were confused and divided, and

patriarchal power was not effectively being maintained by Jew ish

law. Paul worshiped male power; therefore Paul worshiped the

son, was converted to the son’s side when he saw the potential of

that side for power. He was opportunistic, politically brilliant, and

a master of propaganda. It was the shrewd Paul who finally undermined the law that had for centuries kept patriarchal power intact but now was failing, in decline. He scapegoated homosexuals as

unnatural, deceitful, full of m alignity, worthy of death, the source

of intolerable evil; and then he blamed the Jew s, and especially the

law of the Jew s, for the existence of homosexuality. “Therefore, ”

Paul proclaimed in Romans 3: 20, “by the deeds of the law there

shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. ” Paul introduced the hatred of homosexuality into the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he introduced the hatred of Jew s

into it too. In Christian countries, the two groups have suffered contempt, persecution, and death in each other’s shadow ever since; they have been linked by demagogues seeking power

through hate—demagogues like Paul; trying to pacify the likes of

Paul, they have often enough repudiated and hated each other; and

each group has hidden from the soldiers of Christ in its own w ay.

*

Democracies electing their sewage

till there is no clear thought about holiness

a dung flow from 1913

and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud

and the american beaneries

Filth under filth. . .

Ezra Pound, “Canto 91”

The textual bases for what became the major anti-Semitic charges

against the Jews are in the Gospels. Some Jews were money

changers in the temple, tax collectors, liked money; some Jews

plotted to have Christ killed; some Jews asked Christ tricky legalistic questions to try to expose him as a poseur or a heretic (claiming to be God violated Jewish law); it was a crowd of Jew s—but not all

the Jew s—that demanded the crucifixion of Christ. Jews denied

Christ and Jews believed in Christ. Most Jews may have been the

enemy of this new God because they did not recognize him; but it

was Paul who made all Jews into the enemy of all Christians. The

acts against Christ came to represent, as Paul saw it, the Jewish

character; the acts against Christ summed up the Jews. It is Paul

who begins to build institutional Christianity by destroying the

institutions of Judaism; and it is Paul who begins to build a distinctly Christian character by annihilating the character of the Jews. The roots of the continuing association of the Jews as a people with culture, social liberalism (tolerating sin), and intellectual-ism go back to Paul: he constructed the modern Jew in history.

Before the coming of Christ, the law was God’s word. The law

signified God’s presence on earth and among his people. The law

had a divine significance. The Jews did not consider the law social;

for them, one obeyed because it was written—obedience was faith.

The coming of Christ meant that God’s will was embodied in a

person: son of man. In Paul’s interpretation, the law became a

body of dogma that interfered with faith. It became cultural, not

sacred. It was the legalism of the Jews, their intellection, their pedantry, that kept them in sin, kept them from recognizing the Christ: in practical terms, the law became the symbol of Jewish

resistance to this personal God, this God whom Paul knew— unlike Abraham, Moses, or David. Paul could speak in behalf of this new God, and any adherence to law that challenged Paul’s authority was wickedness. The law of the Jew s, the intellect of the Jew s, and the culture of the Jew s in fact were the enemies of Paul’s

authority as one, sim ply, who knew Christ.

In undermining the authority of Jew ish law, Paul over and over

linked that law to sin, especially to homosexuality. It was the social

tolerance of the Jew s for homosexuality in private that proved the

corruption of Jew ish law. It was the lack of m asculinity implicit in

this tolerance that lost the Jew s physical circumcision as their mark

of supreme manhood; spiritual circumcision, the kind that would

not tolerate homosexuality, became the proof of manhood.

Paul named the Jew s the enemy of Christ, of Christianity, and

of Paul. He emphasized the Jew ish character, which he invented:

legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant in putting law over revelation and faith, lost to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism, having a false relationship to God (no longer God’s people).

Paul was not talking about some Jews who did this and some Jew s

who did that; Paul was talking about the Jews.

It was especially important for Paul, in getting power, to change

the perception of what Jew ish law was and how it functioned.

Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the

work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the

relative. A nything cultural can be changed or abandoned or manipulated. The people whose law begins to represent culture, not divinity, are more imperiled than they were because their status depends on the status of culture in general in any given society: the

infamous “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”

denotes how low the status of culture can be with obvious consequences to those who represent it. Also, unless the law is made concrete because people obey it, it is abstract: and the abstraction

of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;

in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally

turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith

in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and

writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.

What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of

homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;

Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise

of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.

Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals

(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For

hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass

murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems

of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews

have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all

manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual

intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In

at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to

purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or

exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution

has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader

said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would

wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us

and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to

their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was

the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we

were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are

God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as

recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have

shown.

Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew

is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates

the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the

Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient

in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one

will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,

Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.

First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest

were talking. T he priest said: we feel about abortion the w ay you

feel about Israel. I think we can talk, said the rabbi. It is in the

interests of male Jew s (the power structure) to increase the population of Jew s. The trade-off—abortion for Israel— is in the interests of Jew s both for the sake of Israel and for the sake of rebuilding a

Jewish population in the easiest w ay— through male domination.

Second, there is the effort to dissociate the Jewish men from any

perception of fem ininity, being less masculine. Israel, of course,

makes Jew s more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a

nation, having an arm y, having borders to defend and to transgress. In associating with the Christian Right, there is a repudiation of homosexuality, liberal social tolerance of it (still blamed on Jews), a strong move against women (reestablishing male dominance), and in general making an alliance with the rulers— with the

Christians who run a Christian country.

Third, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are greedy Jews who think that power

means safety and also who take pleasure in power. The Christian

Right offers Jews not only a means of dissociation from homosexuality but also real dominance over women, if the social order the Christians want is effectively legislated.

Fourth, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are Jews who hate homosexuals, women,

blacks, children, reading, writing, air, trees, and everything else

the Christian Right seems to hate.

Fifth, the right-wing emphasis on the importance of property

offers Jews a way of changing the history of Jews with respect to

property—whether the property is Israel or land or housing or factories or farms. The protection of property suggests to Jews that they will not be driven off what they own.

Sixth, religious conservatism has its analogue in social conservatism, in that both particularly uphold the rights of men to ownership of women and children. Right-wing Jews who are religiously orthodox see the secular pluralism of Western society in general and the United States in particular as taking Jews away

from Judaism: this, despite the emphasis that Judaism puts on

learning, makes them hostile to secular learning, secular intellectuals, secular Jew s, any education that is not strictly and explicitly Jewish. This brings them into a harmony of values with Christians

who do not like Jews because Jews represent learning: the right-

wing Jews are under the illusion that they and the Christian Right

dislike the same Jews for similar reasons.

Seventh, strangely enough it is in this quasi-religious coalition

with the Christian Right that right-wing Jews seek to find the assimilation that has always been the hope of Jews. We feel the same way you do, they say; we have the same values you have, the same

ideals, the same goals, and we are doing our share. It has been

brilliant strategy on the part of the Christian Right in the United

States to welcome the participation of Jew s, to support the state of

Israel, and to use pedestal anti-Semitism: rather than being ground

under stomping boots, Jew s loyal in their right-wing values are

being lifted up onto a pedestal— where the footing is always precarious, as women know. Believing they can fit in— assimilate

—these Jew s are turning to the one group of people— the fundamentalists— who w ill never forget that “the Jew s killed C hrist. ”

Anything not to be that castrate, that homosexual; there is more

dignity in the killing of Christ than in the concentration camps

when the measure is masculinity.

In the contemporary world, Jew s have an extra burden as creators of culture: Freud and Marx were Jew s. The ideas of both are repugnant to the Christian Right. Freud, right or wrong, made sex

a central social issue. Marx brought half the world to revolution. It

is Marx that the United States government and the Christian Right

are fighting; armies are raised and missiles are built to do it. It is

Freud who asked w hy the family works the w ay it does and suggested that the fam ily was a sexual unit. The intellectual Jew Freud had ideas that undermined what the Christian Right regards

as the cornerstone of Amerikan life: the family. The real question,

of course, was not about the family as such but about the paterfamilias: who is daddy having sex with and why? Freud refused to ask that question finally; but perhaps it would not have ever been

asked, or no one would be asking it now, if Freud had not dissected the sexual underbelly of the family with his formidable intellect.

Right-wing Jew s have a special stake in repudiating the ideas of

both Freud and Marx. Ideas are sissifying, and Jew s need masculinity. The ideas of these two Jewish intellectuals are dangerous: dangerous because right-wing Christianity hates them, therefore

dangerous to Jew s who do not want to be hated. Jew s are cultural

radicals and political revolutionaries by contamination. It’s the

damn Jews, a Klan member will say; and even he will mean Freud

and M arx. * Ideas, however potent, do not serve to masculinize

Jews. Ideas only make Jews more Jewish: more effeminate as

intellectuals.

In the end, Jewish men join up with the Christian Right because

they want domination over women and children, which is the social program of the Right; and because they want to be the opposite of homosexual, whatever that is.

*

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in

woman hath one solution— it is called pregnancy.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Within the frame of male domination, there is good reason for

women to adhere to conservative or right-wing or orthodox Judaism or conservative or right-wing or fundamentalist or orthodox Christianity; and within the frame of male domination, there is

good reason for women to hate homosexuality, both male and

female.

* Charles Darwin, whose ideas are as radical and as central to the contemporary epoch as are Freud’s and Marx’s, was not a Jew, but never mind.

Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a neo-Nazi movement that is getting

powerful in the United States, claims that “the Zionist evil” is one of the

“key arms of the British intelligence body which is behind the operation to

destroy America” and that the Anti-Defamation League is “literally the

Gestapo of the British secret intelligence” in the United States. In the

propaganda of Lyndon LaRouche, who has been behind such diverse

groups as the U . S. Labor Party, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the

National Democratic Policy Committee, and the National Anti-Drug

Coalition, “British” is virtually a synonym for “Jewish. ” (See “Lyndon

LaRouche’s Goon Squads, ” Alan Crawford, Inquiry, February 15, 1982,

pp. 8 - 1 0 . ) “Creationism” (God created the world in seven days, there was

no evolution) is a main tenet of the orthodox (not neo-Nazi) Right; the

ideas of Darwin are as despised as the ideas of Freud and Marx.

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly

less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get

is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is

all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best

thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact

that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered

a cause of battery (stress on the male, don’t you know): in perhaps

25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant

woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean

both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other

ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to

women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the

happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim

private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside

history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,

women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means

having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the

babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,

for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and

rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run

ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction

women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make

the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of

women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have

one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of

domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,

and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is

sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or

her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk

used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex

tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only

having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them

up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.

If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or

make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing

or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If

the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not

perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-

wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and

having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children

too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes

women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for

will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock

of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests

a world without women altogether—a world in which women are

extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed

Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”

until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her

Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On

expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman

knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,

such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided

altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and

the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that

Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there

is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on

this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed

her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity

and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely

necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an

absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an

absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women

whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy

talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did

not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives

would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her

womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to

her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for

her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they

force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being

useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished

by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in

them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—

despised because they are associated with women—is more than

self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it

does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with

women. But the perception that having children is the only edge

women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute

perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for

and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without

reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,

bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,

no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women

afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous

anyway.

5

The Coming Gynocide

Rich as you are

Death will finish

you: afterwards no

one will remember

or want you;. . .

Sappho

In A Room o f One's O w n, first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient

Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience

to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who

warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,

women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a

courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that

she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She

knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for

anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she

understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her

kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is

a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that

is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.

Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be

altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population control: there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways

to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a

humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less

burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving

birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.

There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to

be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those

dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women

on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and

sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the

Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a

plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would

give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising

was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions

were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion

laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis

established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s

movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in

1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that

must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-

ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these

women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may

get rewards for meeting them but outside of them she has no

chance. While the racially inferior women are being used one way,

the racially superior women are being used in what appears to be

an opposite way: but it is not. These are two sides of the same

coin. The two sides travel together, materially inseparable and yet

unalterably divided. Neither side, in this case, has a life outside

totalitarian womanhood. In such a society, the racially privileged

woman has the best deal; but she is not free. Freedom is something

different from the best deal—even for women.

State-run population programs always have the racist tinge and

are sometimes explicitly and murderously racist. Population-con-

trol programs run by any state or state-controlled agency or beholden to any male interest or clique are very different from the ideology and practice of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom has as its basic premise the notion that every individual woman must control her own reproductive destiny. She has a right

to be protected from state intrusion and from male intrusion: she

has a right to determine her own reproductive life. Abortion on

demand, for instance, is at the will of the pregnant woman; sterilization of poor women is usually at the will of the male doctor who represents his race and class and is often paid by the state or acts

in accordance with the interests of the state. Sterilization abuse in

the United States has been practiced primarily on very poor black

and Hispanic women. Contraceptives are tested on the women in

Puerto Rico, which has the virtue of being a U . S. colony as well as

having a brown-skinned population. Contraceptive drugs known to

be highly toxic are tested systematically on women in the Third

World with that astonishingly familiar misogynist justification—

“They want it. ” The evidence of this collective will is that the

women line up for injections of such drugs. It is frequently not

mentioned that a chicken or other food is payment for taking the

shot, and the women are starving and so are their children. Those

who have seen institutionalized programs of population control as a

humane and sensible solution to some aspects of mass poverty have

been unable to face the problem intrinsic to these programs: the

poor are often also not white, and the enthusiasm of state planners

for population control is often based on this fact. Children of these

women long ago ceased to be altogether desirable; and these

women long ago ceased to be altogether necessary.

The marginality of these masses of women because of race has

obscured how much their expendability has to do with being

women. “Made in South America Where Life Is Cheap” read the

advertisements for the pornographic film Snuff\ which purported to

show the torture, maiming, and murder of a woman for the purposes of sexual entertainment: the removing of the woman’s uterus from her slit abdomen was the sexual act to which the man in the

film who was doing the cutting supposedly climaxed. Life is cheap

for both women and men wherever life is cheap, and life is cheap

wherever people are poor. But for women, life is in the uterus; and

the well-being of women—economic, social, sexual—depends on

what the value of the uterus is, how it will be used and by whom,

whether or not it will be protected and why. Whatever her race or

class—however much she is privileged or hated for one or both—a

woman is reducible to her uterus. This is the essence of her political condition as a woman. If she is childless, she is not worth much to anyone; if her children are less than desirable, she is less than

necessary. On a global scale, racist population programs already

exist that provide the means and the ideological justifications for

making masses of women extinct because their children are not

wanted. The United States, a young, virile imperialist power compared to its European precursors, has pioneered this kind of reproductive imperialism. The United States was the perfect nation to do so, since the programs depend so much on science and tech

nology (the nation’s pride) and also on a most distinctive recognition of precisely how expendable women are as women, simply because they are women. Obsessed with sex as a nation, the

United States knows the strategic importance of the uterus, abroad

and at home.

Inside the United States, gynocidal polices are increasingly discernible. The old, the poor, the hungry, the drugged, the mentally ill, the prostituted, those institutionalized in wretchedly inhumane

nursing homes and mental hospitals, are overwhelmingly women.

In a sense, the United States is in the forefront of developing a

postindustrial, post-Nazi social policy based on the expendability

of any group in which women predominate and are not valued for

reproduction (or potential reproduction in the case of children).

Public policy in the United States increasingly promises to protect

middle-class or rich white women owned in marriage who reproduce and to punish all other women. The Family Protection Act— a labyrinthian piece of federal legislation designed to give

police-state protection to the male-headed, male-dominated, fe-

male-submissive fam ily— and the Human Life Amendment, which

would give a fertilized egg legal rights adult women are still without, would be the most significant and effective bludgeoning instruments of this public policy if passed. Along with already actual cutbacks in Social Security, Medicaid, and food programs, these

laws are intended to keep select women having babies and to destroy women who are too old to reproduce, too poor or too black or brown to be valued for reproducing, or too queer to pass. This, in

conjunction with the flourishing pornography industry in which

women are sexually consumed and then shit out and left to collect

flies, suggests that women will have to conform slavishly to right-

wing moral codes to survive; and that, too poor or too old, a

woman’s politics or philosophy however traditionally moral will

not make her life a whit more valuable. The use the state wants to

make of a woman’s uterus already largely determines— and will

more effectively determine in the future— whether she is fed or

starved, genuinely sheltered or housed in squalor, taken care of or

left in misery to pass cold, hungry, neglected days.

The association of women with old age and poverty predates the

contemporary Amerikan situation, in which women are the bulk of

both the old and the poor. In 1867, Jean Martin Charcot, known

primarily for his work with the institutionalized insane, did a systematic study of old age. The population he studied was old women in a public hospital in Paris—female, old, poor, urban.

Since that time, many psychological and sociological generalizations about the old have been framed as if the population under discussion were male, even when it was exclusively female as in

Charcot’s study. Many observations about the old were made by

professional men about poor women. As if to signal both the symbolic and actual relationship between old age and women, the first person in the United States to receive a Social Security check after

the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 was a woman, Ida

M. Fuller. Now in the United States, when there is no doubt

whatsoever that the old are primarily female, that the poor are prim arily female, that those on welfare are primarily female, that those in nursing homes are primarily female, that those in mental

institutions are primarily female, there is still no recognition that

the condition of poverty is significantly related to the condition of

women; or that the status of old people, for instance, is what it is

because the bulk of the old are women. “Indeed, ” writes one writer

on old age, “relatively recent trends in the aging of America may

have changed the status of older Americans. It is conceivable, for

instance, that the elderly have become a much larger burden to

society since World War I. After all, women, very old persons,

and those ‘stuck’ in deteriorating locations now constitute a greater

proportion of the aged population than ever before. ” 3 Women,

very old persons, and those “stuck” in deteriorating locations:

women, women, and women. “After all, ” women, women, and

women “now constitute a greater proportion of the aged population

than ever before”—the status of the old has changed, gone down;

they are more of a burden; “after a ll, ” they are women. In 1930,

there were more men over sixty-five than women; by 1940, there

were more women. In 1970, there were 100 women to 72 men over

sixty-five. In 1990, for every 100 women there w ill “only” be 68

men (as the experts put it). The situation is getting worse: because

the more women there are, the fewer men, the worse the situation

gets. Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. T hey live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death. Their tenacity in holding on to life is held against them.

Cuts in Social Security and food programs for the old directly issue

from the willingness of the U . S. government to watch useless

females go hungry, live in viciously degrading poverty, and die in

squalor. On the television news, social workers tell us several times

a week that old people are going hungry: “they have just enough

food to keep them alive, ” one said, “but they never eat enough to

stop them from being hungry. ” Then we see the interviews with

old people, the cafeterias where old people who can walk go to get

their one meal of the day. T hey are mostly women. T hey say they

are hungry. We can observe, if we care to, that they are female and

hungry.

W ithin this population of the old, there are the people in nursing

homes. “There are more than 17, 000 nursing homes in the United

States— as opposed to roughly 7, 000 general hospitals— and their

aggregate revenues exceed $12 billion a year, ” writes Bruce C.

Vladeck in U nloving Care: The N ursing Home Tragedy. “T hey have

been described as ‘Houses of Death, ’ ‘concentration cam ps, ’ ‘warehouses for the d yin g. ’ It is a documented fact that nursing home residents tend to deteriorate, physically and psychologically, after

being placed in what are presumably therapeutic institutions. The

overuse of potent medications in nursing homes is a scandal in itself. Thousands of facilities in every state of the nation fail to meet minimal government standards of sanitation, staffing, or patient

care. The best governmental estimate is that roughly half the na

tion’s nursing homes are ‘substandard. ’”4 In 1978, according to

Vladeck, there were still nursing homes “with green meat and

maggots in the kitchen, narcotics in unlocked cabinets, and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures. ” 5 Over 72 percent of the nursing home population is female. Women in nursing

homes are generally widows or never married, white, poorer than

most of their peers (70 percent having incomes under $3000 a year

consisting mainly of Social Security benefits), and have several

chronic diseases. According to The New York Times (October 14,

1979), the average age of the person in such an institution is 82 and

50 percent have no family, get no visitors, and are supported by

government money. Conditions are most terrible in nursing homes

supported by government funding of patient care: nursing homes

for the destitute, for those on Medicaid. The policy of the United

States government is that old people must become paupers: * spend

any money of their own that they have, after which the government takes over; the paupers are unable to defend themselves

*See “Loose Laws Make Care of Aged Costly, ” by Gertrude Dubrovsky,

The New York Times, October 21, 1979. In a subsection called “How the

Programs W ork, ” Dubrovsky explains:

“As of April 1977, the last period for which such figures were available,

a nursing-home patient under Medicaid could not have an income greater

than $533. 39 a month. However, should this same person want to remain

at home and receive community-based health-related services, his monthly

income must be less than $200.

“Thus, Medicaid laws are biased in favor of institutional care.

“Morever, Medicaid imposes strict personal-asset limits of $ 1 , 500 for a

single person or $ 2 , 500 for a couple.

“To be accepted by a nursing home under Medicaid, a person must sell

his home, liquidate his assets and turn them over to Medicaid as a gift, in

which case he stays on Medicaid.

“Or, he may give the funds directly to the nursing home as a private

payment until the money falls below the allowable level. When that happens, the patient reapplies for Medicaid, but may be put on a waiting list. ”

against the conditions in the homes in which they are kept. Once

paupers, they must accept confinement on the state’s terms because

they have no money and nowhere to go. The state’s terms all too

frequently are neglect, degradation, filth, and not infrequently outright sadism.

The nursing home population is markedly white. Blacks die

younger than whites in the United States— perhaps the result of

systematic racism, which means inadequate health care, shelter,

and money over a lifetime. Blacks alone comprise a full 11. 8 percent of the U . S. population and yet only 9 percent of the old are people of color, including Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics. N ationally, so-called nonwhites (including blacks) comprise

only 5 percent of the nursing home population. In New Jersey, for

instance, according to The New York Times (October 21, 1979), out

of 8, 683 beds in eighty nursing homes, blacks occupied 532 and

Hispanics or “others” occupied 38 (6. 5 percent). It seems that

blacks especially are left to suffer the diseases of old age on their

own and to die on their own; and that whites are institutionally

maintained in appalling conditions— kept alive but barely. If this is

true, the social function of nursing homes becomes clearer: out of

sight, out of mind. Blacks are already invisible in ghettos— young,

middle-aged, old. Black women have been socially segregated and

marginalized all their lives. Perceptions of their suffering are easily

avoided by an already callous white-supremacist populace, the so-

called mainstream. It is white women who have become poor and

extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who might be demoralized at what is in store

for them once they cease to be useful. Kept in institutions until

they die as a punishment for having lived so long, for having outlived their sex-appropriate work, old white women find themselves drugged (6 . 1 prescriptions for an average patient, more than half

the patients given drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril); sick from

neglect with bedsores, urinary, eye, and ear infections; left lying in

their own filth, tied into so-called geriatric chairs or tied into bed;

sometimes not fed, not given heat, not given any nursing care;

sometimes left in burning baths (from which there have been

drownings); sometimes beaten and left with broken bones. Even in

old age, a woman had better have a man to protect her. She has

earned no place in society on her own. With a man, she will most

likely not end up in a prison for the female old. She has more social

value if she has a man, no matter how old she is—and she will also

have more money. After a lifetime of systematic economic discrimination—no pay for housekeeping, lower pay for salaried work, lower Social Security benefits, often with no rights to her husband’s pension or other benefits even after decades of marriage if he has left her—a woman alone is virtually resourceless. The euphemistically named “displaced homemaker” foreshadows the old woman who is put away.

The drugging of the predominantly female nursing home population continues in old age a pattern established with awful frequency among women: women get 60 to 80 percent of the prescriptions for mood-altering drugs (60 percent of the prescriptions for barbiturates, 67 percent for tranquilizers, and 80 percent for

amphetamines). Women are prescribed more than twice the drugs

that men are for the same psychological conditions. One study of

women in Utah, cited by Muriel Nellis in The Female Fix, “showed

that 69 percent of women over the age of thirty-four who were not

employed outside the home and who were members in good standing of the Mormon Church use minor tranquilizers. ”6 Such women are considered a high-risk group for addiction by the time

they are forty-five or fifty.

The dimensions of female drug addiction and dependency are

staggering. In 1977, 36 million women used tranquilizers; 16 million, sleeping pills; 12 million, amphetamines; and nearly 12 mil

lion women got prescriptions for these drugs from doctors for the

first time. As N ellis, who cites these figures, * makes clear:

Those numbers do not include whole classes of prescribed pain

killers, all of which are mood altering and addictive. Nor do

they include the billions of doses dispensed to patients directly, without a prescription, in doctors’ offices, in m ilitary, public, or private hospitals, and in clinics or nursing homes. 7

According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 1977

and 1980 Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United

States.

At best it can be said that the woman’s lot in life, the female

role, necessitates a lot of medical intervention in the form of mood-

altering drugs. At worst it must be said that these drugs are prescribed to women because they are women— and because the doctors are largely men. The male doctor’s perception of the

female patient, conditioned by his belief in his own difference from

her and superiority to her, is that she is very emotional, very upset, irrational, has no sense of proportion, cannot discern what is trivial and what is important. She has no credibility as an observer

of her own condition or even as one who can report subjective

sensations or feelings with any integrity or acuity. She is overwrought not because of any objective condition in her life but because she is a woman and women get emotional and overwrought simply because that is how women are. Doctors have prescribed

tranquilizers to women for menstrual cramps, which have a physiological cause; for battery— the battered woman is handed a prescription and sent home to the batterer; for pregnancy—a woman is chem ically helped to accept an unwanted pregnancy; for many

* Testimony in 1978 by the acting director o f the National Institute on

Drug Abuse before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and

Control.

physiologically rooted diseases that the doctor does not care to investigate (but he would examine a man carefully, not give a tranquilizer); and for physiological and psychological conditions that result from stress caused by environmental, political, social, or

economic factors. When a man and a woman go to doctors complaining of the same symptoms, she is dismissed or handed a tranquilizer and he is examined and given tests. Hysteria means suffering of the womb. Since antiquity it has denoted biological

womanhood. Freud is credited by some sentimentalists as a feminist because he insisted that men could be genuinely hysterical too.

He was the first to assert that hysteria could manifest in someone

without a womb. This was very liberal and rebellious, and Freud’s

was a lone voice. Medical opinion was that hysteria as a pathology

was exclusively limited to women because women had wombs and

because women were obviously hysterical. Despite Freud’s apostasy and its subsequent acceptance in psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is still associated with the female. She does not have reason or intellect; she has emotion. She starts with a lot of emotion by virtue of being female; when she gets more emotion than is socially acceptable, or when emotion begins to interfere with the exercise

of her female functions or the performance of her female duties,

then she is sedated or tranquilized. Female complaints to male doctors are perceived as emotional excrescences; and indeed, women learn as girls that either they convince through emotional display

or they do not convince at all, so that women do tend to persuade

by force of feeling and do learn early to compensate for the almost

certain knowledge that they will not be believed because they are

not credible no matter how accurate, restrained, or logical they are.

The solution to female emotional excess, whether expressed by the

woman—appropriately by her lights—or hallucinated by the male

doctor, is keeping women calm or numb or asleep with drugs. The

dulling of the female mind is neither feared nor noticed; nor is the

loss of vitality or independence. The female is valued for how she

looks—sometimes droopy eyelids are quite in fashion—and for do

mestic, sex, and reproductive work, none of which requires that

she be alert. She is given drugs because nothing is lost when she is

drugged, except what is regarded as the too thick edge of her emotional life. She is given drugs because she is not much valued; she takes the drugs because she is not much valued; she stays on the

drugs because she is not much valued; the doctors keep prescribing

the drugs because she is not much valued; the effects of addiction

or dependency on her are not much noted because she is not much

valued. These are prescription drugs, regarded as appropriate medications for women. The junkie, for the most part, is left to the violent life of the streets; the woman addicted to prescribed drugs

has already been tamed and is kept tamed by the drugs. The drugs

are prescribed to these huge numbers of women each and every

year because their usage not only supports but significantly upholds social policy with respect to women: their effects reinforce women in traditional female roles, postures, and passivity; they

dull women’s perceptions of and responses to an environment and

predetermined social status that are demeaning, aggravating, and

enraging; they quiet women down. The use of these drugs to

numb these masses of women shows only how little women are

worth— to the doctors who do the prescribing, to the women

themselves, to the society that depends on this mass drugging of

women to help in keeping women as a class quiescent and women

as individuals invisible or aberrant. Thirty-six million women can

be tranquilized in a year and the nation does not notice it, does not

miss their energy, creativity, wit, intellect, passion, commitment—

so much are these women worth, so important is their contribution, so indelible is their individuality, so essential is their vigor.

In addition to being too emotional, women can be too fat. In

fact, it is hard not to be; and it is sometimes pointed out that

Amerikan standards of beauty dictate a leanness closer to the skeletal depravity of concentration camp victims than to any other socially recognized physiognomy. Most amphetamines are prescribed as diet pills, although women use them to propel themselves

through the normal routine of a day. Depression is commonplace

among women because housework is boring, sex is boring, cooking

is boring, children are boring, and the woman resents being bored

but cannot change it. Depression is commonplace among women

because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at

what they must do because they are women, at the way they are

treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger

turned inward. Depression is commonplace among women because

a woman’s life is often a series of dead ends, joy in which is the

measure of femininity. A decade or two ago, doctors prescribed

amphetamines with a reckless abandon. Now they are more cautious, and not only because amphetamines wreak havoc on the human body: amphetamines lead women away from femininity toward aggression, social dysphoria, and a paranoia that threatens

the women’s compliance as a sexual partner; tranquilizers and

sleeping pills interfere much less with the female life as it should be

lived, no matter how serious the addiction. Doctors justify the use

of amphetamines—by those 12 million women users in one year,

for instance—in terms of getting women thinner. Women get the

drug by saying they want or need to be thinner no matter how thin

they are; or doctors prescribe the drug without explanation as to its

qualities and effects—especially they make no reference to its addictive nature and to the high it produces. The woman knows her value is in becoming what the man wants to have; she has no sense

of self outside his evaluation of what she should be. Male doctors

essentially share the same male values; and women accept their

authority as men, not just as doctors. The woman’s body is evaluated according to a sexual aesthetic, not according to a medical ethic. Amphetamines prescribed by a doctor reinforce the misogynist rule that a woman’s only wealth is her body as an object; and that any act of self-destruction—like taking amphetamines— is

both justified and sexually enhancing if it makes her what men

want. Doctors accept and sometimes encourage this logic; doctors

often subscribe to it and pass it on to women. If women are not

thin, what are they? This is not a standard that can be applied to a

respected or self-respecting individual or to a respected or self-

respecting group; it is applied ruthlessly to women and it is not

applied to men.

But the doctors know that women use amphetamines not just to

get thinner but also to stay awake in the course of brutally soporific

days; to push aw ay paralyzing bouts of depression that come from

the quality of the woman’s life— her accurate perception of it; to

get the energy to put one foot in front of another in a life she hates

but feels powerless to change. So that even the use of amphetamines— with effects that are apparently opposite to those of tranquilizers and sedatives— keeps the woman in her life as it is and as a male-dominated society wants it to be; it keeps her functioning in

the domestic sphere, whether exclusively or not; it keeps her going

through the habits of being female; it keeps her executing the routines of a life that dissatisfies her profoundly. And the social imperative is to keep her there, no matter what the cost to her as an individual. So the doctors write the prescriptions. Prescribed

amphetamines keep the woman conforming when she was ready to

stop dead in her tracks, keep her female when she would rather be

genuinely inert and inanimate, keep her doing what she could not

bring herself to do without them.

These drugs— amphetamines,

tranquilizers,

sedatives— are

agents of social control; an elite male group does the controlling;

women are the class controlled. The willingness of the doctors—

male medical professionals—to use these drugs on women systematically and the perceptions of women that lead them to do so are evidence of the expendability of women, the essential worthlessness of women when measured against a human standard as opposed to a standard of female function. One does not dump drugs on society’s best and brightest; nor is a drug habit encouraged in

those who have work to do, a future with some promise, and a

right to dignity and self-esteem. Through the use of drugs, the

doctors are doing their part in the social control of women. T hey

have shown themselves willing—even eager sometimes—to go further. Decades ago clitoridectomies were all the rage as doctors did their surgical bit to control sexual delinquency in women. Now,

after being out of fashion for a few short years, the doctors are

trying to bring psychosurgery back into style. In a violent society,

they say, it is more than useful; it is necessary. The ideal patient

for lobotomy is considered to be a black female. Her violence, apparently, is simply in being a black female. She is ideal for the operation because afterward she can still perform the functions for

which she is best suited: she can be female in all the conventional

ways, and she can still clean other people’s houses.

Surgeons, however, need step in only where welfare programs

have already failed to provide a pool of cheap black female labor.

In R egulating the Poor: The Functions o f Public W elfare, * Frances Fox

Piven and Richard A. Cloward show that black women have been

given less money than white women in welfare payments and as a

result have had to do menial work to achieve the barest subsistence;

or have been kept off the welfare rolls altogether by administrators

who have manipulated regulations to exclude blacks, in keeping

with the racist policies of local or state governments. This pattern

of discrimination was particularly evident in the South, but it was

also found in other regions of the country:

There are many mechanisms by which Southern welfare departments deny or reduce payments to blacks, thus keeping them in the marginal labor market. The “employable mother”

rule [that a mother must work if the welfare agency determines

*A n important book that analyzes the economic value of racism under

capitalism but sadly fails to address the exploitation of women as such; as a

result, the social and sexual controls on the welfare population are understood superficially; the ubiquitous and almost self-renewing nature of the controls is not taken seriously enough— it is not recognized that as long as

the sexual oppression is intact, the controls will keep appearing, even if

reform seems to have eliminated them.

that there is appropriate work for her]. . . has been applied

discrim inatorily against black women: when field hands are

needed, Southern welfare officials assume that a black woman

is employable, but not a white woman. 8

These machinations of the welfare system are commonplace and

pervasive. A great effort has been made—contrary to public perceptions— to keep black women off the welfare rolls, to make them even more marginal and often even poorer than those on welfare.

The specifics can change— for instance, which women must work,

when, and w h y— but the kind of control the welfare system seeks

to exercise over poor women does not change. The first “em ployable mother” rule was invoked in Louisiana in 1943; Georgia adopted the same kind of regulation in 1952; in 1968 a federal court

in Atlanta struck down Georgia’s “employable mother” rule, which

was w idely considered to have negated the force of that rule in the

states where it existed; and yet in 1967 Congress had required

states to make mothers on welfare report for work or work training— a law erratically enforced and therefore subject to the same abuses as the old “employable mother” regulation. The kind of

control welfare exercises over poor women does not change because

the population welfare is designed to control does not change:

female.

The question of suitable employment is raised persistently

within the welfare system: what is to be expected of women with

children? should they work or stay home? what kind of work are

they offered or forced to take? is that work entirely determined by

prejudgments as to their nature— what can and should be expected

of them because they are female, female and black, female and

white, female and poor, female and unmarried? In New York C ity,

women on welfare say that they have been strongly encouraged by

welfare workers to turn to prostitution, the threat being that the

individual woman may in the future be denied welfare benefits be

cause the caseworker knows the woman could be making big bucks

on the street; or in emergencies, women on welfare are told to raise

the money they need by turning a trick or two. In Nevada, where

prostitution is legal, women on welfare have been forced off welfare because they refused to accept the suitable employment of prostitution; once it is a legal, state-regulated job, there is no basis

for refusing it. Prostitution has long been considered suitable employment for poor women whether it is legal or not. This is particularly cynical in the welfare system, given the fact that women on welfare have been subjected to “fornication checks”—questioned about their sexual relations at length, questioned as to the identity of the fathers of so-called illegitimate children, questioned

as to their own sexual habits, activities, and partners—and have

been denied welfare if living with a man or if a man spends any

time in the domicile or if having a sexual relationship with a man.

Their homes could be inspected anytime: searches were common

after midnight, when the welfare workers expected to find the contraband man; the courts put a stop to late searches but daytime searches are still legal. Beds, closets, and clothes were inspected to

see if any remnant of a male presence could be found. Sometimes

criminal charges of fornication were actually brought against the

mothers of illegitimate children; the purpose was to keep them

from getting welfare. For instance, in one typical case, a New

Jersey woman was convicted of fornication and given a suspended

sentence; she was forced to name the father, who went to prison.

Welfare workers were allowed to interrogate children concerning

the social and sexual habits of their mothers. Women on welfare

have even been required to tell when they menstruate. Women on

welfare have had no rights to sexual privacy; and in this context,

turning them toward prostitution goes right along with refusing to

allow them private, intimate, self-determined sexual relations.

Prostitution is the ultimate loss of sexual privacy. Gains made in

the courts in the 1960s to restore rights of privacy to these women

are being nullified by new welfare policies and regulations designed

to control the same population in the same old w ays— practices

that reappear in new guises but are built on the same old attitudes

and impinge on the welfare population in the same old and cruel

ways. The state is a jealous lover, except when it pimps.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is the largest

federal welfare program: this is welfare for women and their dependent children. As of 1977, 52. 6 percent of the recipients were white, 43 percent were black, and 4 . 4 percent were designated as

“American Indian and other. ” Welfare fundamentally articulates

the state’s valuation of women as women; the condition of women

determines the philosophical bases and practical strategies of the

welfare system; * the racist structure of class provides a framework

in which women can be isolated, punished, and destroyed as

women. In the welfare system, racism increases the jeopardy for

black women in particular in a m ultiplicity of w ays. But the degradation built into the welfare system in general and AFDC in particular originates in social attitudes toward women: in sexual contempt for women; in paternalistic assumptions about women; in

moral codes exclusively applied to women; in notions of immorality that have no currency except when applied to women.

Women not on welfare are cruelly hurt by these same endemic

woman-hating attitudes; but women on welfare have nothing between them and a police-state exercise of authority and power over them in which and by which they are degraded because they are

women and the state is the real head of the household. AFDC

controls women who have no husbands to keep them in line; it

caretakes women, keeps them always hungry and dependent and

desperate and accessible; it keeps them watching their children go

*This is not to suggest that welfare does not have devastating consequences for black men. It is to suggest that the whole system, including its impact on black men, is ultimately comprehensible only when we understand to what extent the feminizing of the oppressed is part of public policy and therefore fundamentally related to the degradation of women as

a class.

hungry and underclothed and uneducated; it tells them exactly

what they are worth to their lord and master, the state, in dollars

and cents. In 1979 they were worth $111 per month in Alabama,

$144 per month in Arkansas, $335 per month in Connecticut, $162

per month in Florida, and so on. In Hawaii they were worth most:

$389 per month. In Mississippi they were worth least: $84 per

month. In New York State, with the largest welfare budget, they

were worth $370 per month. These were average payments per

month per family (for the woman and her dependent children).

Suitable employment standards, for instance, in whatever form

they appear, are used to degrade women: to punish women for

being poor by enclosing them in a terrible trap—they have children to raise and the only work they are offered will not feed their children, it is degrading work, it is a dead end, it is meaningless, it

is intrinsically exploitative; and women with husbands who have

some money or good jobs or steady jobs are being pressured to stay

home and b e go o d mothers. How is the mother in the welfare population supposed to be a good mother? The answer is always the same: she is not supposed to have had the children to begin with,

and she is not supposed to have any more, and her suffering is no

more than she deserves. The welfare system combines the imperatives of sex and money: get a man to marry and support you or we will punish you and yours until you wish you were all dead. The

welfare system also combines the imperatives of morality and

money: your shameless bad ways got you knocked up, girl; now

you be good or we are going to do you in. Even when the issue is

suitable employment, it is always in the air: you wouldn’t be here

if you hadn’t done wrong; so where we send you is where you go

and what we tell you to do is what you do— because you deserve it

because you are bad.

So, in addition to suitable employment, the welfare system has

been—and will continue to be—preoccupied with what are called

“suitable homes” and with what can be called “suitable m orality, ”

something of a redundancy. Most AFDC programs were estab

lished by 1940; by 1942 over half the states had “suitable homes”

laws. These laws demanded that women meet certain social and

sexual standards in order to qualify for welfare benefits: illegitim ate

children, for instance, would make a home not suitable; any infraction of conventional social behavior for women might do the same; any overt or noticeable sex life might do the same. The women

could keep the children— the homes were suitable enough for

that— but were not entitled to any money from the chaste government. As Piven and Cloward make very clear, this meant that the women had to work doing whatever menial labor they could find;

they simply had no recourse. But it also meant that the state had

become the instrument of God: welfare’s mission, from the beginning, was to punish women for having had sex outside of marriage, for having had children outside of marriage, for having had children at all— for being women. With righteousness on its side, the welfare program and those who made and executed its policies punished women through starvation for having “unsuitable homes, ” that is, illegitim ate children.

Mothers and their dependent children are purged en masse from

the welfare rolls whenever a state government decides its purity is

being sullied because it gives money to immoral women. A typical

purge, for instance, took place in Florida in 1959. Seven thousand

families with over 30, 000 children were deprived of benefits because of the suitable home law. According to a report for the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, these families met

all the eligibility requirements for welfare but were denied benefits

“where one or more of the children was illegitimate. . . or where

the welfare worker reported that the mother’s past or present conduct of her sex life was not acceptable when examined in the light of the spirit of the law . ”9 Other states, including Northern states,

have done the same. By virtue of being illegitim ate, the children

are being reared in unsuitable homes; therefore, they can starve.

This is a fine exercise in state morality. The benefit to the state is

concrete: the women must do the cheapest labor; in economic

terms, welfare is a refined instrument of state power and of capitalism. In what looks like chaos, it accomplishes a serious goal—creating and maintaining a pool of degraded labor, cheaper than dirt. In terms of its other function, it is not so refined an instrument yet. It

is supposed to keep these women from having children; it is supposed to discourage them, punish them, force them to have fewer children. It is supposed to use the twin weapons of money and

hunger—reinforced by fear of suffering and death—to stop these

women from reproducing. Sterilization has a legislative history in

the United States: in 1915 thirteen states had mandatory sterilization laws (for “degenerates”); and by 1932 twenty-seven states had laws mandating sterilization for various kinds of social misfits. As

Linda Gordon said in Woman's B ody, Woman's R ight: “The sterilization campaign tended to identify economic dependence with hereditary feeble-mindedness or worse. ” 10 It has been proposed over and over again: if these women are going to keep having these bastards, after the second or third or fourth, we have the right to stop them, sterilize them—for their own good and because we are paying the bills. Sterilization has been practiced on poor women piecemeal. So far there is no judicial carte blanche that extends the power of the state explicitly to the tying of tubes because a woman

is on welfare. But when doctors sterilize Medicaid women, they

know they are acting in concert with the best interests of the government that administers welfare; and the government does not hesitate to pay the doctor for his good deed. So far, the strategies

of the state in stopping women on welfare from having children

have been crude. The government has tried to police their sexual

relations, enforce chastity, keep men out of their homes, punish

them for having illegitimate children, starve them and their children: state policy is one of absolute, cruel, murderous paternalism.

Welfare policy has usually been interpreted in terms of its impact on black men. From the state (police) side, the effort is to keep a shiftless man from living off the welfare benefits of a woman; to

keep men from defrauding welfare by using benefits intended for

women and children; to get black families back into the patriarchal

mode, that is, headed by males, for reasons of traditional morality

or economics; to force black men to marry black women and be

legally responsible for the children. From the antiracist side, w elfare policy has been seen as a blanket effort to destroy black men or the black fam ily, which, when headed by a woman, is seen as inherently degraded. The absent black male is the political focus and priority. But neither side penetrates to the real meaning of welfare

policy because both sides keep their eye on the man as the significant figure in the drama. The state, obviously, does not intend any economic dignity for that man or that same state would not promote black male unemployment in its economic policies and create a situation, through welfare, in which husbands are forced to abandon women and children so as to be sure they do not starve. From the antiracist perspective, the efforts of welfare have been deeper

and far more malevolent than can be realized if its impact on men

is seen as prim ary, because the effort has been to stop or significantly diminish reproduction through social control of women.

The notion that the state has acted to promote the conventional

male-dominated fam ily (by persecution of unmarried mothers, for

instance) is only superficially viable. If that were its real interest,

other state policies would support that same goal. Instead, welfare

policy has directly concerned itself with controlling women. The

most intrusive and degrading regulations back from the beginning

of welfare all have to do with women as women: all have to do with

a gender-specific regulation of motherhood and sex. These policies

all articulate the reproductive worth of women on welfare to the

state, and that value is almost entirely negative. *

The causes of the need for welfare (from the human, not the

state, point of view) are in the systematic economic discrimination

against women, with black women suffering the most stark eco

*The one positive value is that the women and their progeny are cheap

labor, as discussed previously in this chapter.

nomic deprivation, and in the systematic sexual degradation of

women. Welfare is the barest maintenance for those who, being

female and poor, would otherwise slowly die. Those kicked off the

welfare rolls in the endless quest for those who are poor but pure

get jobs where they are paid less than welfare provides; and welfare

provides shit. They work, keeping those upholders of the Protestant work ethic happy, and go hungry at the same time. The poverty of women is appalling. As of December 1981, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment for females who

headed households was nearly twice that of males who headed

households: 10. 6 percent for the women; 5. 8 percent for the men.

Gay Talese, who wrote about the sex industry, found it meaningful in terms of sexual liberation that the women in massage parlors giving him handjobs were college graduates and even Ph. D . ’s. It is

meaningful—but in terms of what women have to do to earn

money, even with college educations and advanced degrees. The

welfare system that seeks to control women, and ultimately to destroy expendable women (black and poor white women, Hispanics, the females of any marginal groups), can count on the continuing

poverty of these women as women; they are never going to do

better because they are women and there are no social means to

enable them to do better, except marriage upward. The poverty of

these millions of women is assured; and so is the state’s continued

access to them; and so too is their continuing sexual humiliation by

state intrusion, the welfare agencies being thus far the major enforcement arm of state policy. Since reproductive containment (at best) has been the goal of welfare, there will be continued state

intrusion into the reproductive lives of poor women—with the endemic racism of the United States putting black women consistently at the highest risk. The intrusion will be under the guise of morality, as it has always been, a morality applied exclusively to

women, a morality that no right-wing senator or congressman

would ever think of using the state to apply to men. It will also be

disguised— by those more secular—as concern for the black fam

ily: controlling the sexual promiscuity of the woman, reinstating

the black man in the master’s bedroom, such as it is on his block.

Under the surface, there w ill be a different truth: the state,

through the welfare system as a whole, wants to control the fertility of the woman and w ill not ever let the black man come in out of the cold. The state regulates the sexual use of non welfare women

for the benefit of men as a class, and it attempts to control the

fertility of nonwelfare women in cooperation with the men whose

interests it represents: the men who are lovers, fathers, husbands,

rapists, and police all at the same time. But the state directly ow ns

the sexuality of women on welfare— at least from its point of view

it does— and it wants to own their fertility outright too. Sometimes

the state explicitly exercises the ownership it has in enforcing so-

called moral standards for a subject group of women: sometimes it

punishes women for having had children against its w ill. The slow

starving and degrading of these women is not yet w idely viewed as

genocidal; genocide is not articulated as state policy. That is because the political and legal tools available to welfare in its pursuit of reproductive control of poor women have been crude. But illegal

abortion, which looms large on the horizon in the form of the monstrous Human Life Amendment, and forced sterilization, practiced sporadically so far but lurking for decades as what the government

really wants to do, w ill make a genocidal policy practical, effective,

and frankly inevitable. When abortion is illegal, black women, H ispanic women, and poor women get slaughtered. * Allowing the government to regulate the uterus— as in the Human Life Amendment— w ill directly preface an overt policy of forced sterilization.

Forced sterilization cannot be explicit state policy until a measure

like the Human Life Amendment is adopted: until abortion is absolutely reckoned murder legally and is punished as murder, so that the state is empowered literally to investigate the woman’s womb,

her menses, her discharges. Once every fertilized egg must be

*See chapter 3, “Abortion, ” pp. 9 8 -9 9 .

brought to term, what are we to do with all those poor, promiscuous, dumb sluts who keep having bastards? After all, doesn’t the government have the right to force such women to stop having

babies? isn’t the government paying for them? aren’t those women

immoral, fucking around and having babies for the money? If

every fertilized egg is going to be brought to term—under penalty

of a murder charge for failing to discharge that obligation—isn’t it

best just to insist that women taking government money have their

tubes tied? And doesn’t this combination of illegal abortion—prohibited in a way never existing before, prohibited from conception—and forced sterilization finally meet the not-so-hidden agenda of welfare: doesn’t it finally provide the state with a way to

control—absolutely and effectively—the fertility of poor women?

Enough poor women can be kept having enough babies to provide

whatever cheap labor is essential; but the rest are expendable.

And what is going to happen to women, these women and all

women, when the tools of reproductive control of women are no

longer technologically (medically) crude? when the technology

catches up with the political and legal leap into the Orwellian future? What is going to happen to women when life can be made in the laboratory and men can control reproduction not just socially

but also biologically with real efficiency?

The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive

value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether

necessary because their children in particular are not altogether desirable? The old women starving in poverty are starving because their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because

their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The

women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too

many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly

killed through state-sponsored neglect because they are having children, because they reproduce too much, because the value put on their reproducing is negative and characterized by annihilating

disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon

millions of them each year, through the judicious application of

mood-altering drugs, are kept chem ically happy, calm, tranquil, or

energetic so that they w ill hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming.

T hey too are part of a throwaway population of females: because

their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined

standard of what a woman is and what a woman does and what a

woman needs to be a woman (she needs to keep doing female

things, whether she wants to or not). What are the lives of all these

women worth? Is there anything in the w ay they are viewed or

valued that upholds their human dignity as individuals? T hey already matter very little. T hey are treated with cruelty or callous indifference. T hey have already been thrown aw ay. It is public

policy to throw them aw ay. What is going to happen to women

when reproduction— the only capacity that women have that men

really need (Portnoy’s piece of liver can substitute for the rest in

hard times)— is no longer the exclusive province of the class

women? W hat is going to happen to women who have only one

argument for the importance of their existence— that their reproductive capacities are worth a little something (shelter, food, solace, minimal respect)— when men can make babies?

*

And yet, there is a solitude which each and every

one o f us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner

being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch o f man

or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the

caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum o f the oracle;

the hidden chamber o f Eleusinian m ystery, for to it

only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take,

dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech,

January 18, 1892

There is no thing named love in the world.

Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are

creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned

people and hippies. We march off to learn about

hand-to-hand combat. Blynton grins and teases and

hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya

gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile. ” We chant the

words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all

rhyme.

Tim O’Brien, I f I Die in a Combat Zone

There are two models that essentially describe how women are

socially controlled and sexually used: the brothel model and the

farming model.

The brothel model relates to prostitution, narrowly defined;

women collected together for the purposes of sex with men;

women whose function is explicitly nonreproductive, almost anti-

reproductive; sex animals in heat or pretending, showing themselves for sex, prancing around or posed for sex.

The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class

planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit

they bear, like trees; women who run the gamut from prized cows

to mangy dogs, from highbred horses to sad beasts of burden.

These two poles of the female condition are only superficially

and conceptually distinct and opposite. Men say the two are poles

to begin with, distinct and opposite. That male conceit is registered and repeated until it is easier to repeat the concept by rote than to see the reality. But the concept is only accurate (descriptive) from a male point of view—that is, if one accepts the male definitions of both the acts involved and the women involved. In

the course of women’s lives, and therefore from a woman-based

perspective, the two conditions overlap and intersect, each reinforcing the efficacy of the other. Any woman can be both a prostitute and a mother, a prostitute and a wife (a potential mother), or one then the other in either order; and any woman can be subject

to the imperatives of both the brothel and the farming models of

female usage. On a grand scale, more women become mothers,

fewer prostitutes.

In general, the euphemisms of religion and romantic love keep

women from ever recognizing the farming model as having to do

directly and personally with them. Modern women do not think of

themselves as cows, nor as land that the man seeds; but maleheaded marriage incorporates both these vivid traditions of female definition; and the laws have been built on these same images and

ideas of what women are for; and the real history of women has

had as its center the actual use of women as cows and as land. The

w ay women are treated, valued, and used has remarkably little in

common with how women perceive themselves. The legend says

that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, but in this case the

vampires’ victims cannot see themselves: what would stare back—

the cow, the land, the uterus, the crop, the plowing, the planting,

the harvest, being put out to pasture, going d ry — would annihilate

the delusion of individuality that keeps most women going. The

laws that made women chattel derived from an analogy between

women and cows that hundreds of centuries of men found apt, and

the sexual slur was apparently a neutral observation infused with

the spleen of the moment— she’s a cow. The idea that the male

plants and the woman is planted in originates in antiquity, and

Marcuse among others has reiterated the idea that woman is the

land in more modern times. The farming model is not discussed as

such, even among feminists. It too clearly reveals the hopeless impersonality, degradation, and futility implicit in women’s subordinate position.

The brothel model is more familiar, partly because the situation

of prostitutes is held up to all women as warning, threat, inevitable

doom and damnation, the hellish punishment of girls gone wrong:

punishment for being women involved in sex without the protection of marriage and the purpose of reproduction; punishment for being bad or rebellious or sexually precocious; punishment for

being female without the cleansing sacraments.

In the brothel model, the woman is acknowledged to be for sex

without reference to reproduction. She will still have babies perhaps, but no one owes her anything: not the father, not the state, not the pimp, not the john, no one. Some women on the Left

accept the male leftist view that this is a giant step for womankind:

that this separation of sex and reproduction is in fact a form of

freedom—freedom from domestic constraint and domestic submission, freedom from an intrinsically totalitarian association of sex with reproduction. They do not recognize that in the brothel

model sex is dissociated from reproduction so that the sex can be

sold, so that sex (not babies) is what is produced, so that an intrinsically totalitarian association is forged between sex and money expressed lucidly in the selling of the woman as a sexual commodity.

In the brothel model, the woman is considered to be sexually free

even by those who think prostitution is bad or wrong; sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are. Whatever

the conditions of the woman’s life, there is no perception that prostitution is by its nature antithetical to freedom. Sometimes the prostitute is construed to be economically liberated. In selling sex,

money passes through her hands: more money than the housewife

or the secretary will have in hand on any given night. The brothel

model particularly fosters these obfuscations of the female condition because the women are entirely interchangeable; perceived in terms of function they are entirely interchangeable; even among

themselves, any one could step out of her own life into the life of

the next woman and not notice the difference. Nothing that happens in the brothel is seen or has to be seen or recognized or re

membered or reckoned with: these women live outside of history

and what happens to them happens behind closed doors and in a

place constructed to control the kind of women in it. T hey live

entirely on male terms. Whatever happens to them is appropriate

on those male terms because of what they do and what they are, all

of which is expressed in where they are. The impersonality of the

brothel as a working place is precisely congruent with the impersonality of their sexual function; men romanticize the place and the function for themselves, to themselves, for their own sakes, men

among men; but even men are not so dense as to try to romanticize

prostitution to the prostitute.

In the brothel model, the women are held to a strictly sexual

standard of behavior and accountability: they sell themselves for

sex, not to make babies. T hey do what men want them to do for

money that men pay them and that then they usually turn over to a

man. Women are defined strictly with reference to sex and they are

defined unfailingly without reference to personality or individuality or human potential; they are used without reference to anything but sex orifices and sex class and sex scenes. In the brothel model, several women belong to one man or in some cases are supervised by an older woman who is herself accountable to a rich man or men. The job of the women is to bring in— to a man or to a

house— a certain amount of money by servicing a certain number

of men. T hey sell parts of their bodies— vagina, rectum, mouth;

and they also sell acts— what they say and what they do. In

sex, they absorb, endure, or get indifferent toward an enormous

amount of male aggression, hostility, and contempt. Men have few

restraints in expressing to prostitutes—during sex or in any sexual

scenario— their real attitudes toward women as a class; they have

no reason to feel constrained, since the woman is there to be a

woman, period— to be inferior, subservient, and used. She is there

because the man wants a woman, someone exactly of her class,

someone who is her sex function, not human but an it, a cunt: she

is there for that reason, not for anything human in her. Her func

tion is limited, specialized, sex-specific, and intensely and intrinsically dehumanizing.

It is essential to recognize how genuinely accepted both the

brothel model and prostitution are in the social structure, and how

this disposition of women is simply accepted as inevitable because

they are women. However evil prostitution is held to be, however

righteous or religious men are said to be, the brothel model does

more than endure; it thrives. However marginal the women are

said to be, they form the sex nucleus of a sex industry that is in no

sense marginal. The brothel model thrives because men accept it

and all that is part of it as proper treatment for sexual women:

women who are sexual in male terms, women who get fucked by

many men, women who get fucked outside the protective custody

of a traditional father or husband. The staying power of both the

brothel as an institution and prostitution as a practice comes from

the efficacy of both for regulating the sexual use of women and the

disposition of sexually exploitable women. Think of what it means.

The brothel is most often something like a prison—women cannot

come and go freely. Women are displayed, used, and treated like

sexual things or sexual animals, all penned up. The brothel exists

usually with the tacit or overt protection of police and politicians;

the brothel is used by the rich and powerful as well as by all other

kinds of men; the brothel is the kind of place men like to have

women in, confined in, locked in, penned in, shut in; the brothel

suggests a wealth of women available to the man, it means he is

rich in having so many women in one place for him, it means he

chooses absolutely and his will is done by whomever he chooses.

Prostitution is the way women are used in the brothel model; it is

what women are shut in for, penned in for. The street comer

merely extends the brothel beyond the walls of a building into the

cold and rain. Pimps run several prostitutes; and usually some or

all live together, whether business is done in the domicile or not.

This is a version of the brothel: a kind of public harem. The

brothel model can sim ply be imposed on a neighborhood, which

then becomes a ghetto for prostitutes. In some cities with good

reputations for socially advanced ideas, women sit in windows,

posing for potential customers. This is w idely regarded as a humane and civilized w ay of conducting the business of prostitution.

The brothel, in such cities, is considered a nice place, good for the

girls. It is the acceptance of the brothel model as an appropriate

w ay of treating some women, these women, sexed women, prostituted women, used women, degraded women, public women, any women, that has unyielding and unchanging social significance

for all women. Once a prostituted woman exists, she can be shut

up in a house where men come to find and use women like her, to

use her because she is a woman. It is naughty to force her to prostitute herself, though women and girls are m ainly forced into prostitution; but once prostituted— by whatever means— she is for sex and the brothel is her proper abode and the use made of her there

is proper; it is a woman’s place, and this is accepted by the religious and irreligious, police and outlaws, users and abstainers. A pimp’s women are referred to as his “stable, ” but the analogy with

horses is misleading. Horses are treated better, being more valuable. Prostitutes get treated like women; no analogy fits. For men this w ay of life would be seen clearly as a deprivation of human

freedom; for women it is appropriate to what they are— women.

These women are not missed; in fulfilling this sexual function, it is

not thought that they are wasted. There is a difference between

female garbage and human waste. In the United States, there are

hundreds of thousands of these women; in the world, millions

upon millions. The brothel model keeps these women locked in for

sex, and both the devout and the sexually liberated think that is the

way it should be. Both think this is a sexy w ay for women to live.

The women are disposed of, used for what they are seen to be,

used as their sex, their class-defined essence and function, the sex

work to which some percentage of the sex class must be dedicated.

This use of women is thought to be not only an inevitable and

appropriate use of women but one that always was and always will

be.

The defenses of the brothel model applied to women are entrenched. In his study of prostitution, first published in 1857, William Acton articulated what has come to be accepted as a moderate, sensible point of view:

It seems to me vain to shut our eyes to the fact that prostitution must always exist. Regret it as we may, we cannot but admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her own

person, and that the State has no right to prevent her. It has a

right, however, in my opinion, to insist that she shall not, in

trafficking with her person, became a medium of communicating disease, and that, as she has given herself up to an occupation dangerous to herself and others, she must, in her own interest and that of the community, submit to supervision. 11

The state creates the conditions in which the woman is prostituted,

sanctions force against her to effect her prostitution by systematically ignoring it, creates the economic conditions that mandate her prostitution, fixes her social place so that her sex is a commodity; and then, prostitution is seen to exist because the woman wills it and the political question is whether or not the state should

interfere with this expression of her will. What is seen as the eternal dimension of prostitution—why it must always exist—is that the will of women to prostitute themselves will always exist. This

means, simply, that men accept that the conditions that create

prostitution are acceptable, fixed, and appropriate because prostitution is a proper use of women, one congruent with what women are. The harm done is when she carries disease. Wherever prostitution is legal and regulated, it is usually to control disease, to protect men from disease; the woman is the instrument by which harm

comes to the man.

It is the social and economic construction of the woman’s will

that is the issue: both in that feminists assert that this w ill is constructed outside the individual and in that apologists for the sexual exploitation of women— again both religious and irreligious— insist

that the w ill is interior, individual, an individual assertion of a

female sexual nature.

The notion of female w ill always articulated in discussions of

prostitution (and currently pornography) also is central in a new

area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A

man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby;

he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother— a

woman who w ill accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization— in which the egg is

extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then

vaginally introjected into the female— expands the possibilities

of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune

response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one

woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. * T hey have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so. These two

reproductive technologies— artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization— enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of

female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to

the womb for experimentation and for power. A doctor can be the

agent of fertilization; he can dominate and control conception and

* According to Gena Corea, an expert in these technologies and their

effects on women, “men are hoping to fertilize an egg inside a woman’s

body (in vivo), flush it out and then transfer that embryo to another

woman. That has not yet been done. ” Letter to the author, February 12,

1982. The pure sadism of this seems outstanding.

reproduction. Women can sell reproductive capacities the same

way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones but without the stigma of

whoring because there is no penile intrusion. It is the womb, not

the vagina, that is being bought; this is not sex, it is reproduction.

The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this

new kind of sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in

discussions of prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere

with this exercise of individual female will (in selling use of the

womb)? if a woman wants to sell the use of her womb in an explicit

commercial transaction, what right has the state to deny her this

proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace? Again, the state

has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in

which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary

to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of

individual w ill—the only kind of assertion of individual will in

women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of

those who pontificate on female freedom. The state denies women

a host of other possibilities, from education to jobs to equal rights

before the law to sexual self-determination in marriage; but it is

state intrusion into her selling of sex or a sex-class-specific capacity

that provokes a defense of her will, her right, her individual self—

defined strictly in terms of the will to sell what is appropriate for

females to sell.

This individual woman is a fiction—as is her w ill—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class. As long as issues of female sexual and reproductive destiny are posed as if they are resolved by individuals as individuals, there is no way to confront the actual conditions that perpetuate the sexual exploitation of women. Women by

definition are condemned to a predetermined status, role, and function. In terms of prostitution, Josephine Butler, a nineteenth-century crusader against prostitution, explained the obvious

implications of its sex-based nature:

M y principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to

pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them

out o f any p la ce so long as they behave decently, but to attack

organized p rostitu tion , that is when a third party, activated by

the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women

are sold to m en . 12

This is the opposite of what the state does when prostitution is

illegal: the state harasses and persecutes individual prostitutes and

leaves the institutions and the powerful who profit from them

alone. It does this because it is accepted that prostitution expresses

the w ill of the prostitute, and that therefore punishing her is the

proper expression of hostility toward prostitution. It is precisely

this notion of individual responsibility (when in fact there is only a

class-determined behavior) that perpetuates prostitution and protects the profits and power of those who sell women to men. Feminists, unlike the state, go after the institutions and the powerful, not the individual women, because feminists recognize above all

that the prostitute is created by material conditions outside herself. * In the new prostitution of reproduction, which is just beginning to unfold, the third party that w ill develop the female population for sale w ill be the scientist or doctor. He is a new kind

of pimp, but he is not a new enemy of women. The formidable

institutions of scientific research institutes and medical hospitals

will be the new houses out of which women are sold to men: the

use of their wombs for money.

*This does not mean that prostitution is reinvented in every generation

only through material conditions. The colonialization o f women is both

external and internal, as Kate Millett made clear in Sexual Politics. Sexual

exploitation and abuse create in women a psychological submission to self-

denigration; in The Prostitution Papers Millett went so far as to describe this

submission as “a kind o f psychological addiction to self-denigration. ” (See

The Prostitution Papers [New York: Avon, 1973], p. 9 6 . )

Before the advent of any reproductive technologies, the farming

model used to be very distinct from the brothel model. Even

though the woman was not human—the land—or was less than

human—a cow—farming had the symbolic overtones of old-fash-

ioned agrarian romance: plowing the land was loving it, feeding the

cow was tending it. In the farming model, the woman was owned

privately; she was the homestead, not a public thoroughfare. One

farmer worked her. The land was valued because it produced a

valuable crop; and in keeping with the mystique of the model itself, sometimes the land was real pretty, special, richly endowed; a man could love it. The cow was valued because of what she produced: calves, milk; sometimes she took a prize. There was nothing actually idyllic in this. As many as one quarter of all acts of battery

may be against pregnant women; and women die from pregnancy

even without the intervention of a male fist. But farming implied a

relationship of some substance between the farmer and what was

his: and it is grander being the earth, being nature, even being a

cow, than being a cunt with no redeeming mythology. Motherhood ensconced a woman in the continuing life of a man: how he used her was going to have consequences for him. Since she was

his, her state of being reflected on him; and therefore he had a

social and psychological stake in her welfare as well as an economic

one. Because the man farmed the woman over a period of years,

they developed a personal relationship, at least from her point of

view: one limited by his notions of her sex and her kind; one

strained because she could never rise to the human if it meant

abandoning the female; but it was her best chance to be known, to

be regarded with some tenderness or compassion meant for her,

one particular woman. Nevertheless, the archaic meaning of the

verb to husband is “to plow for the purpose of growing crops. ”

There is not a lot of room for tenderness or compassion in that.

Still, it is no wonder that women hang on possessively to any generic associations of women as such or “the female” with the land, nature, earth, the environment, even though those culturally sane-

tioned associations posit a female nature that is not fully human

and perpetuate a hard and mean tradition of exploitation: there is

some splendor and some honor in the association. The association

has a deep resonance for men too, though not the same sentimental

meaning: they after all did the plowing. The cultural and sexual

intersection of women and earth is potent for men when they

bomb “her, ” strip-mine “her, ” scorch “her, ” torch “her, ” denude

“her, ” defoliate “h er, ” pollute “her, ” despoil “her, ” rape “her, ”

plunder “h er, ” overcome, manipulate, dominate, conquer, or destroy “her. ” The significance of the farming model is both wide and deep. It has been the major w ay of using women— as mothers

to produce children; metaphorically speaking, men have used the

earth as if it were female, a huge fertile female that— one w ay or

another— they w ill fuck to death. There are limits to how much

the land can endure and produce, plowed so much, respected so

little.

Both the farming model and the brothel model dispose of women

as women: they are paradigms for the mass use of a whole class; in

both there is no hum anity for women. The brothel model has been

efficient. It uses the women in it until they are used up. Men get

sex from them with a graceful economy of means: effective force;

hunger, degradation, drugs; rare escape. The woman is easily reduced to what she sells. Women under the yoke of the brothel model do not organize political movements; they do not rebel collectively; the yoke is too heavy. Quite sim ply, a percentage of the class women is given over to the brothel model; whatever its laws,

societies accept this disposition of a significant number of females

for sex service. Once within that model, these women are controlled and used; what men want from them they get; their bodies go where their sex is wanted; there is an absolute equation between

what they are and what they provide, between their physical

bodies and their function, between their sex and their work. There

is no wasted energy here: a prostituted female serves her purpose

absolutely. The farming model has always been relatively ineffi

cient. It is sloppier. Picking a woman who lives in the home with

the man on a continuing basis is harder. Picking a woman who can

and will have children is harder. There is more leeway for her

attitudes to interfere. She has ways of saying no or subverting male

sexual and reproductive intentions. The brothel model simply requires that the women under it be women: it does not matter who they are or what they are like or where they come from or what

they think; they get worn down fast by being used the same way

and being reduced to the same common denominator; nothing is

necessary except that they be female. The farming model requires

the constant application of force (explicit or implicit, usually a nice

combination), incentive, reward; and a lot of plain luck with respect to fertility and reproductive vigor. When a man wants sons, as most do, the inefficiency inherent in the model is particularly

emphasized: no matter how many babies she has, there is no certainty that any of them will be male. And, for all the coercion of the farming model, the women subject to it have organized politically, have found ways to seize the time between babies and domestic chores—here and there, now and then—to foment some rebellion. The very fact that such women have been involved in

movements, especially feminist movements, argues for the inefficiency of the farming model. The farming model has haphazard success: there are too many factors besides the efficacy of the fuck

that can interfere with the harvesting of the crop. The quality of

the crop cannot really be predetermined either. Men, recognizing

the inefficiency of the farming model, have simply imposed it on

all women not prostituted so as not to miss a chance: they use

social and economic sanctions to punish women who try to live

outside it, especially so-called spinsters and lesbians. To anticipate

and counterbalance the failures, the losses, the tremendous element

of chance, the bad breaks, the power of men as a class has been

exercised to keep all women not prostitutes reproducing under the

explicit domination of a husband. This has been the best way men

have had to control reproduction, to appropriate the uteruses of

women in order to have children, to keep the women subject to the

reproductive w ill of the men. The use of women by men in this

reproductive tyranny has been presented as what women are for: a

proper use of females, the best actualization of their human potential because, after all, they are women.

Reproductive technology is now changing the terms on which

men control reproduction. The social control of women who reproduce— the sloppy, messy kind of control— is being replaced by medical control much more precise, much closer to the efficiency

of the brothel model. T his change-over— applying the brothel

model to reproduction— is just beginning. It is beyond the scope of

this book to explore or explain all the new technological intrusions

into conception, gestation, and birth, * except to say that reproduction w ill become the kind of commodity that sex is now. Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, sex selection, genetic engineering, fetal monitoring, artificial wombs that keep the fetus alive outside the mother’s body, fetal surgery, embryo transplants, and eventual cloning (some experts predict that human cloning w ill be

accomplished within twenty-five years; however long it takes, it

will be done)— all these reproductive intrusions make the womb

the province of the doctor, not the woman; all make the womb

extractable from the woman as a whole person in the same w ay the

vagina (or sex) is now; some make the womb extraneous altogether

or eventually extraneous; all make reproduction controllable by

men on a scale heretofore unimaginable. The issue is not the particular innovation itself—whether it is intrinsically good or bad; the issue is how it w ill be used in a system in which women are

sexual and reproductive commodities already, exploited, with lives

that are worthless when not serving a specific sexual or reproduc

*See Gena Corea, The Mother Machine (forthcoming, 1984). This book will

explain the reproductive technologies, the experiments being done on

women and animals to develop the technologies, and the view of women

central to both the experimentation and the technologies.

tive purpose. For instance, cesarean sections saved women’s lives

when used in orthodox medical emergencies; but now doctors use

them because they give doctors dominion over labor, because they

involve cutting into the female body—a male pleasure—and so

that the natural process of birth can be circumvented for the social

convenience of the doctor. Cesarean sections are now used to express endemic male contempt for women. So it will be with reproductive technology or other medically sophisticated intrusions into reproduction. The ideology of male control of reproduction

will stay what it is; the hatred of women will stay what it is; what

will change will be the means of expressing both the ideology and

the hatred. The means will give conception, gestation, and birth

over to men—eventually, the whole process of the creation of life

will be in their hands. The new means will enable men—at last—

really to have women for sex and women for reproduction, both

controlled with sadistic precision by men.

And there will be a new kind of holocaust, as unimaginable now

as the Nazi one was before it happened: something no one believes

“mankind” capable of. Using now available or soon to be available

reproductive technology in conjunction with racist programs of

forced sterilization, men finally will have the means to create and

control the kind of women they want: the kind of women they

have always wanted. To paraphrase Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka

when she is defending Stalin’s purges, there will be fewer but better women. There will be domestics, sex prostitutes, and reproductive prostitutes. Is there any reason to think that this projected future does not reflect the commonly accepted devaluation of

women with which we live with relative complacency? Look again

at what we have done—are doing now—to the old, those in nursing homes, the drugged, the prostituted, those on welfare, and to those bastions of female worth, wives and mothers, whose rape the

law protects, whose battery the society invites, whose uteruses the

state wants.

*

We come after. We know now that a man can read

Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play

Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at

Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner, Language and Silence

Yet the enigma of woman’s nature (if she has, that is,

a nature, and is not merely a person altogether

equal, hoof to human hoof, with man), the enigma,

if it exists, is that women respond to him, of course

they do, it is the simple knowledge of the street that

murderers are even sexier than athletes. Something

in a woman wishes to be killed went the old wisdom

before Women’s Liberation wiped that out, something in a woman wishes to be killed, and it is obvious what does—she would like to lose the weakest part of herself, have it ploughed under, ground under, kneaded, tortured, squashed, sliced, banished, and finally immolated.

Norman Mailer, Genius and Lust

Not wanting to die, and knowing the sadism of men, knowing

what men can do in the name of sex, in the fuck, for the sake of

pleasure, for the sake of power, knowing torture, having been able

to predict all the prisons from her place in the bedroom and the

brothel, knowing how callous men are to those less than themselves, knowing the fist, bondage, the farming fuck and the brothel fuck, seeing the indifference of men to human freedom, seeing the

enthusiasm of men for diminishing others through physical domination, seeing the invisibility of women to men, seeing the absolute disregard of humanity in women by men, seeing the disdain of

men for women’s lives, and not wanting to die — and not wanting to

die—women propose two very different solutions for themselves in

relation to men and this man’s world.

The first honors the sexual and reproductive imperatives of men.

This is the right-wing solution, though those who pursue it are—

in terms of male-defined politics—all along the political spectrum

from far Right to far Left. In this solution, women accept the definition of their sex class, and within the terms of that definition fight for crumbs of self-respect and social, economic, and creative

worth. Socialist movements and revolutions are predicated on an

acceptance of this sex-class definition, as are right-wing movements

and counterinsurgencies. The far-Right expression of this solution

is usually highly religious, and it is the religious idiom that makes

it distinguishable from other expressions of what is essentially the

same accommodation to male power. Specifically, the sex-class accommodation is seen as a function of religious orthodoxy: in accommodating, women are faithful to a divine father; women accept traditional religious descriptions of women, female sexuality, and

female nature; women accept the duties of sexual and reproductive

submission to men. The far-Right solution translates the presumed

biological destiny of women into a politics of orthodox religion:

even in a secular republic, far-Right women live in a theocracy.

Religion shrouds women in real as well as magical grace in that the

sex-class functions of women are formally honored, carefully

spelled out, and exploited within clear and prescribed boundaries.

The second solution is offered by feminists. It proposes, in the

words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “the individuality of each human soul. . . In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny. . . ” 13 This is simply a recognition of the human condition, in which women are included. It is also the precondition for the realization of Marx’s greatest ethical

idea: from each according to her ability, to each according to her

need. It is the imposition of the sex-class definition of women on

women—by any means necessary—that devastates the human capacities of women, making them men’s subordinates, making them

“women. ” Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as indi

vidual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. T his is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of

individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a

separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the

individuality of each human soul, ” feminists propose that women

are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing— a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life— including each woman’s life— must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself.

Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of

women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

In the face of advancing reproductive technology, there w ill be

even fewer women who dare claim their right to human life, human dignity, and human struggle as unique and necessary individuals, fewer and fewer women who will fight against the categorical disposition of women. Instead, more and more women w ill see

protection for themselves as women in religious and devotional ideologies that formally honor the special sanctity of motherhood.

This is the only claim that women can make under the sex-class

system to a sacred nature; and religion is the best w ay to make that

claim— the best available w ay. Against the secular power of male

scientists women w ill try to pit the political power of misogynist

males in religion. Women w ill try to use male theology and religious tradition wherever and however it sanctifies the mother giving birth. Women w ill hide behind theology; women w ill hide behind orthodox religious men; women w ill use conservative religious ideas against the science that w ill make women less necessary than they have ever been.

The power of the reproductive scientists w ill be advanced, how

ever, precisely through the political and legislative initiatives of the

theocrats: prohibiting abortion and then mandating forced sterilization will establish absolute state control of the uterus. The clash between reproductive scientists and male theocrats in terms of absolute values—especially the orthodox formulation of what constitutes the family—only appears to be irresolvable. When these two schools of unconditional male power over women have to negotiate public policy to the mutual benefit of both, the men of theology, with that remarkable resourcefulness that allowed for the

burning of the witches, will find great virtue in any program in

which fertilized eggs truly do supersede women in importance.

They will also enjoy having both sex and reproduction on their

own terms: being God in the concrete rather than worshiping him

in the abstract. They will also enjoy— for its own sake—the extraordinary control they will have over women: more than Leviticus gives; more than Christ mandates; more than men have ever had, though no doubt still less than men deserve. Women will argue like the true believers they are for that old-time religion, but male theocrats will discover that God intended men to be the sole

creators of life all along: did not God himself create Adam without

female help and is not baptism the religious equivalent of being

born of a male God? This is not farfetched for those who justify

the subordination of women to men on the ground that God is a

boy.

Ironically, cruelly, so typical of history ineluctably moving on,

Right to Life groups are the only organized political opposition to

reproductive technology, especially in vitro fertilization, * and are

also the agents of its ascendancy in engineering legislation that

would give the uterus and the fertilized egg to the state to protect

and control. Even in giving the state the right to define when life

begins, which Right to Life groups insist on doing, Right to Life

*Each fertilized egg in a petri dish is regarded as a human life; each time

one is thrown away or “dies, ” murder has been done.

groups are taking that power from religion and transforming it into

a police power of the state. For the sake of religion, they are taking

from religion its moral authority to demand obedience from the

faithful and turning that authority over to a soulless state apparatus

incapable of moral discernment. They are taking from God what

no atheist would dare and giving to Caesar what he has never dared

claim for himself. The women in Right to Life groups want to

protect not fertilized eggs but motherhood and their own worth as

women in God’s eyes as well as man’s. They will learn the crudest

lesson of history: “Every decent End consumes itself. You kill

yourself trying to reach it, and by the time you get there it’s been

turned inside out. ” 14 The words were written by Soviet dissident

Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), but every passionate political activist of conscience—whatever the “decent End”—has had occasion to say them, in trouble and in grief. What one means to do goes

wrong, it becomes what one abhors. Right to Life women will see

it too late: they will stay mesmerized by the small tributes men pay

to the idea—not the reality—of women as mothers. The power the

Right to Life women are fighting so hard to put into the hands of

the state will eventually and inevitably be used (1) to redefine when

life begins and what life is so that the male becomes its sole creator

and (2) to determine and enforce which women reproduce, when,

and how. The women not needed will have no claim to civil dignity or civil protection. The reason for female submission finally will be very simple and overwhelmingly clear: for women submission will be a matter of life or death, with the right of appeal to the sacredness of women as mothers no longer in the vocabulary of

male supremacy.

When women cease to be altogether necessary, politically dissident women become altogether unnecessary. Once women are biologically expendable on a grand scale, political women need no longer be tolerated on any scale. Politically dissident women are

considered unnecessary now: this is the mood toward feminists and

other women who rebel; someday it will be policy, not a mood.

The criteria for politically dissident women—troublemakers—will

be extended to include any women not domestics, sex prostitutes,

or reproductive prostitutes. The religiously orthodox women will

find themselves characterized as politically dissident women one

day too: there they will be, advocating and upholding old laws,

customs, and ideas that are no longer in the best interests of men.

They will be demanding more than men want them to have and

there will be no concessions from men: because men will be able to

control reproduction without the mass complicity of women. Reduced to its simplest elements, the old misogyny was expressed by the ancient Greek Hipponax of Ephesus: “The two days in a

woman’s life a man can best enjoy are when he marries her and

when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” 15 In the misogyny of

the future—in the coming gynocide—he will have one day he can

best enjoy: “when he carries her dead body to the grave. ” We come

after, as George Steiner wrote; and we are women. We know what

men can do.

6

Antifeminism

some men

would rather see us dead than imagine

what we think of them/

if we measure our silence by our pain

how could the words

any word

ever catch up

what is it we could call equal

Ntozake Shange, “Slow Drag, ” from

Some Men

Feminism is a much-hated political philosophy. T his is true all

along the male-defined, recognizable political spectrum from far

Right to far Left. Feminism is hated because women are hated.

Antifeminism is a direct expression of m isogyny; it is the political

defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one w ay or another) embodies the nature of women,

that the w ay women are treated in sex and in society is congruent

with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between

men and women— in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy— is

both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an im

plicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should

eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the

distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is

called “sex, ” women are not abused when used as women—but

merely used for what they are by men as men. It is admitted that

there are excesses of male sadism—committed by deranged individuals, for instance—but in general the massive degradation of women is not seen to violate the nature of women as such. For

instance, a man’s nature would be violated if anyone forcibly penetrated his body. A woman’s nature is not violated by the same event, even though she may have been hurt. A man’s nature would

not provoke anyone to forcibly penetrate his body. A woman’s nature does provoke such penetration—and even injury is no proof that she did not want the penetration or even the injury itself, since

it is her nature as a woman to desire being forcibly penetrated and

forcibly hurt. Conservatively estimated, in the United States a

woman is raped every three minutes, and in each and every rape

the woman’s nature is at issue first and foremost, not the man’s act.

Certainly there is no social or legal recognition that rape is an act of

political terrorism.

Antifeminism can accommodate reform: a recognition that some

forms of discrimination against women are unfair to women or that

some kinds of injustice to women are not warranted (or entirely

warranted) by the nature of women. But underneath the apparent

civility, there are facile, arrogant assumptions: that the remedies

are easy, the problems frivolous; that the harm done to women is

not substantial nor is it significant in any real way; and that the

subordination of women to men is not in and of itself an egregious

wrong. This assessment is maintained in the face of proved atrocities and the obvious intractability of the oppression.

Antifeminism is always an expression of hating women: it is way

past time to say so, to make the equation, to insist on its truth.

Antifeminism throws women to the wolves; it says “later” or

“never” to those suffering cruel and system atic deprivations of liberty; it tells women that when their lives are at stake, there is no urgency toward either justice or decency; it scolds women for

wanting freedom. It is right to see woman hating, sex hatred, passionate contempt, in every effort to subvert or stop an improvement in the status of women on any front, whether radical or reform. It is right to see contempt for women in any effort to subvert or stop any move on the part of women toward economic or sexual independence, toward civil or legal equality, toward self-determination. Antifeminism is the politics of contempt for women

as a class. T his is true when the antifeminism is expressed in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment or to the right to abortion on demand or to procedures against sexual harassment or to shelters for battered women or to reforms in rape laws. T his is true whether the opposition is from the H eritage Foundation, the Moral

M ajority, the Eagle Forum, the American Civil Liberties Union,

the Communist Party, the Democrats, or the Republicans. The

same antifeminist contempt for women is expressed in resistance to

affirmative action or in defenses of pornography or in the acceptance of prostitution as an institution of female sex labor. If one sees that women are being system atically exploited and abused,

then the defense of anything, the acceptance of anything, that promotes or continues that exploitation or abuse expresses a hatred of women, a contempt for their freedom and dignity; and an effort to

impede legislative, social, or economic initiatives that would improve the status of women, however radical or reformist those measures are, is an expression of that same contempt. One sim ply cannot be both for and against the exploitation of women: for it

when it brings pleasure, against it in the abstract; for it when it

brings profit, against it in principle; for it when no one is looking,

against it when someone who might notice is around. If one sees

how exploited women are— the systematic nature of the exploitation, the sexual base of the exploitation— then there is no political

or ethical justification for doing one whit less than everything—

using every resource—to stop that exploitation. Antifeminism has

been the cover for outright bigotry and it has been the vehicle of

outright bigotry. Antifeminism has been a credible cover and an

effective vehicle because the hatred of women is not politically

anathema on either the Right or the Left. Antifeminism is manifest

wherever the subordination of women is actively perpetuated or

enhanced or defended or passively accepted, because the devaluation of women is implicit in all these stances. Woman hating and antifeminism, however aggressive or restrained the expression, are

empirical synonyms, inseparable, often indistinguishable, often interchangeable; and any acceptance of the exploitation of women in any area, for any reason, in any style, is both, means both, and

promotes both.

Antifeminism breaks down into contempt for particular kinds of

women—as men envision the kinds of women there are. There is a

spectrum of insult. Lesbians, intellectuals, and uppity women are

hated for their presumption, their arrogance, their masculine ambition. Prudes, spinsters, and celibates may not want to be like men but they seem able to live without them; so they are treated with

contempt and disdain. Sluts, “nymphos, ” and tarts are hated because they are cheap, not expensive, and because they are their sex raw or sex itself. These epithets (often in ruder form) directed

against a woman are intended to malign her own relationship to her

own gender or to sexuality as men define and enforce it. The epithets are situational: chosen and applied not to show what she is in her essential self but to intimidate her in a particular situation. For

instance, if she does not want sex, she may be called a prude or a

dyke, and after she has had sex, she may be called—by the very

same observer—a slut. Expressing ideas a man does not like, she

may be a slut or a dyke or a prude—depending on how any given

man assesses her vulnerability to insult or depending on the man’s

own obsessional interest in prudes or sluts or dykes. Antifeminism

is in the reduction of a woman to perceptions of her sexuality or

relation to men or male sexuality; and antifeminism is in the ascribing of a specific masculine integrity to acts usually reserved for men— acts like making love with women or w riting books or w alking down the street without apology or speaking with authority.

Ideas and acts uphold the potency and cultural vigor of these epithets, which reflect real values— how women are disdained, w h y, what women do wrong and get punished for. The breaking down

of women into the insults used to describe women, the use of these

insults to describe or intim idate or discredit, granting validity to

these critiques of a female’s posture, pose, stance, attitude, or act,

are all expressions of both antifeminism and woman hating. When

a woman expresses an opinion— about anything— and the response

is to undermine perceptions of or question her sexuality, sexual

identity, fem ininity, relations with men, the response can be identified without further analysis as im plicitly antifeminist and woman-hating. It can and should be exposed as such. Antifeminism as a strategy for subverting what credibility women can muster runs the gam ut from subtle innuendoes to overt hostility, all of which is designed to remind the woman herself and those listening

to her that she is, after all, only a woman— and a defective one at

that. The woman hating im plicit in the antifeminism is designed to

humiliate the woman so that she feels the humiliation and so that

those listening can see her being humiliated and feeling it. Raising

and m anipulating antagonistic feelings toward a woman because

she is a woman, using her sex and sexuality, reminding her and

those around her of what she is and what she is f o r , are the same as

raising and m anipulating racist antagonisms against a black in a

white-supremacist context. The response to the underlining of her

sex so as to impugn her credibility should not rest on whether or

not one agrees with the woman about whatever issue; the response

should be a response to the antifeminism and misogyny being used

against her. It is w ay past time to recognize, to say, to confront,

the fact that women are isolated and destroyed by the ways in

which epithets discredit them. The epithets are symbolic reminders of what she is reduced to, not human, woman, that lower thing; the epithets are accusations that remind the accused of her

place as a woman and some alleged violation of its boundaries.

Women fear epithets because they are warnings, threats, proof that

a woman has made a wrong step in her relationship to the world

around her, proof that a man or men have noticed her and are

angry with her. Women fear these epithets because women fear the

anger of men. That anger is the substance of both antifeminism

and misogyny. The epithet is a weapon, whether hurled or delivered in a sulky or measured tone. The epithet is inevitably an act of hostility used in a spirit of vengeance. Calling a woman a name

temporarily brands her; it molds social perceptions of her in a way

that upholds her social inferiority; it frequently comes before the

fist or before the fuck, and so women learn to associate it with uses

of themselves that they abhor, hostile uses of themselves; and it

frequently comes as he hits, as he fucks. The epithet degrades a

woman by degrading her sex, sexuality, and personal integrity; it

expresses a serious, not a frivolous, hatred—the hatred of women,

a serious hatred with serious consequences to those against whom

it is directed. Epithets as sex-based insults are like machine-gun

rounds, fired off, bringing down whatever gets hit—anything

female around. The hints of these sex-based insults, shadowed references to them, evocations of them, are used with persistence and skill in the public devaluing of women—in hating women and in

the politics of contempt for women, in common discourse and in

cultural discourse. Every time this use of a lexicon of hatred passes

unremarked, every time the hate is expressed and there is no visible rebellion, no discernible resistance, some part of the woman to whom it happens dies and some part of any woman who watches

dies too. Each time the use of such an epithet or its evocation

passes without retaliation, something in women dies. Each time

slut, dyke, prude, is used to keep women intimidated and each

time its use is not repudiated (the repudiation cannot rest on

whether or not the accusation is in any sense accurate, only in its

use), antifeminism has stepped on another female life and crushed

some part of it; woman hating has humiliated and hurt another

woman or a woman again. Each time an honorable word— like lesbian— is used as a weapon of insult, or some honorable act— like a woman having sex because she wants to with a lover or lovers of

her choice— is used as a weapon of insult, or some honorable

choice— like being celibate— is used as a weapon of insult, the

women who are and who do and who choose are irrevocably hurt

and diminished. The answer is not as simple as losing one’s fear of

the words themselves (whether they apply or not), because any

woman would be a fool not to be afraid of what is behind the

words. Behind the words is the man who uses them and the power

of his whole class over the woman against whom they are used.

Each time contempt is expressed for the dyke, the prude, the slut,

hatred is being expressed toward all women. Whether the insults

are accepted in society, tolerated, encouraged, the main stuff of

humor, or m erely passively acquiesced in, the devaluing of women

is perpetuated, the intimidation of women is furthered. Each time

the insults are paraded or whispered— used against a woman as

insult— the insults gain in potency from use, acceptance, and repetition; and any woman, however much she is or is not what the insult conveys, is more liable to manipulation, distortion, extortion, slander, and harassment; and antifeminism and woman hating are that much more entrenched. Woman hating is the passion; antifeminism is its ideological defense; in the sex-based insult passion and ideology are united in an act of denigration and intimidation.

The tolerance for sex-based insult and its effectiveness in discrediting women are measures of the virulence of antifeminism and woman hating: how pervasive they are, how persuasive they are,

how deeply rooted they are, what chance women stand against

them. In our society, sex-based insult is the coin of the realm.

Women live defensively, not just against rape but against the language of the rapist—the language of what a woman is called in intimacy and in public, loud and soft.

Antifeminism is also articulated through social models, of which

there are three of continuing major importance: the separate-but-

equal model; the woman-superior model; and the trusty, familiar

male-dominant model.

The use of the separate-but-equal model is particularly cynical in

the United States, where that model applied to race was the foundation for systematic racial segregation enforced by police power.

Equality was always a chimera or a lie; separation was real. The

model held that social institutions could be reasonably and fairly

constructed on the basis of biology, for instance, race or skin color.

What made separation necessary—the presumed inferiority of one

of the biologically defined groups—made equality impossible. The

idea of separation and the institutions of separation derived from a

social inequality of such astonishing magnitude and crass cruelty

that separation in idea or practice essentially denied that blacks had

a human nature in common with whites or any common human

standing. The separate-but-equal model itself originates in the conviction that men and women could not stand on common human ground. The model originates in the effort to justify the subordination of women to men (and in the justification to perpetuate that subordination) by positing male and female natures so biologically

different as to require social separation, socially antithetical paths,

social life bifurcated by sex so that there are two cultures, one

male, one female, coexisting in the same society. The separate-but-

equal model applied to sex predated the variation of the model applied to race. With respect to sex, the separate-but-equal model held that women and men were destined by biology for different

social spheres. The spheres were separate but equal, which made

the men and women separate but equal. The sphere of the woman

was the home; the sphere of the man was the world. These were

separate-but-equal domains. The woman was supposed to bear and

raise the children; the man was supposed to impregnate her and

support them. These were separate-but-equal duties. The woman

had female capacities— she was intuitive, emotional, tender,

charming (in women a capacity to arouse or entrap, not an attribute). T he man had male capacities— he was logical, reasoning, strong, powerful (as a capacity and relative to the woman). These

were separate-but-equal capacities. The woman was supposed to

do domestic labor, the precise nature of which was determined by

her husband’s social class. The man was supposed to labor in the

world for money, power, recognition, according to his social class.

This was separate-but-equal labor.

Sex segregation in practice is necessarily different from race segregation: women are everywhere, in almost every home, in most beds, as intim ate as it is possible to be with those who want to keep

them separate. Given the nearly universal intim acy women have

with men, it is astonishing to recognize how successful sex-segre-

gation bolstered by the separate-but-equal model has been and

continues to be. Women have invaded the male sphere of the marketplace, only to be segregated in female job ghettos. In jobs, duties, responsibilities, physical, moral, and intellectual capacities, division of labor within the home, the ethic and practice that still

obtains is sex segregation. The separate-but-equal model applied to

men and women continues to be effective because it is seen to correspond to biology accurately and fairly. The model has credibility because the sexual subordination of women to men is seen to be in

the nature of things and a logical premise of social organization— a

biological reality that is properly reiterated in social institutions,

civil prerogatives, and sex-segregated obligations. The model is

perceived as fair because in it men and women are kept biologically

separate (discrete), socially separate (discrete), and they are declared equal because each is doing equally what is appropriate to

their sex. Separation is seen to be the only real vehicle of equality

for women. The notion is that women competing with men, not

limited to a female sphere, could never achieve social or economic

or sexual equality because of their nature—which in all of these

areas would simply be inferior to male nature; females are inferior,

however, only because they have left the female sphere, which in

itself is equal, not inferior; females are only inferior to men in a

male sphere, where they do not belong. Equality is guaranteed by

setting up separate spheres according to sex and simply insisting

that the spheres are equal. This amounts to a kind of metaphysical

paternalism: constructing a social model in which women need not

experience their inferiority as a burden but instead are assigned

such social value as women that their inferiority is of equal social

worth to the superiority of men. The separate spheres are declared

equal with no reference to the material conditions of the persons in

the spheres and this is the sense in which women have equality

with men under this model. There need not be equality of rights,

for instance; indeed, it is counterindicated. Since the sexes are not

the same, they should not be treated the same, and something is

wrong when a common standard is applied to both. In this social

model, separation by sex class is viewed as the only basis for equality; sex segregation is the institutional expression of this egalitarian ethic, its program in fact. With sex as with race, separation is a

fact; equality is a chimera or a lie.

The woman-superior model of antifeminism is found in two apparently opposing realms: the spiritual and the sexual. In the spiritual realm, the woman is superior to the male by definition; he worships her because she is good; her sex makes her moral or gives

her the responsibility for a morality that is sex-specific. Being

female, she is higher, by nature closer to some abstract conception

of good. She is credited with a moral sensibility that men are hard

put to match (but then, they are not expected to try): she is ethereal, she floats, her moral nature lifts her up, she gravitates toward

that which is pure, chaste, and tasteful. She has an instinctive, sex-

based knowledge of what is good and right. Her moral sensibility

is unfailingly benign, always an influence toward the good. Her

sex-class business includes the business of being virtuous— a

strange assignment by sex, since the Latin root of the word v irtu e

means “strength” or “m anliness, ” which perhaps shows the futility

of the project for her. T his goodness of her sex is essentially based

on a presumed chastity, a necessary chastity— of behavior but also

of appetite. She, as a woman, is not supposed to know sexual desire. Men lust. As one who by her nature does not lust, she is the opposite of man: he is carnal; she is good. There is no notion of

female m orality or of a woman’s being good in the world that is not

based largely on chastity as a moral value. The great female tragedies are stories of sexual falls. The tragic flaw in a female hero—

H ardy’s Tess or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina— is sexual desire. All

the drama of a female life, in great or in banal works, basically

replicates the biblical fall. Seduction (or rape) means knowledge,

which is sexual desire; sexual desire means descent into sin and

inevitable punishment. As a cultural symbol, the good female is

innocent: innocent of sex, innocent of knowledge— chaste in both

ways. H istorically, ignorance has been a form of grace for the good

woman; education was denied women to keep them morally good.

The elevation of a woman requires that she have this innocence,

this purity, this chastity: she must not know the world, which men

embody. The worship of a woman or a female religious symbol is

often the unmediated worship of chastity. The virgin is the great

religious symbol of female good, the female who is by nature (in

her body) good, who embodies the good. The awe and honor accorded the chaste female by men are frequently pointed to to show that men do not hate or degrade women, that men worship, adore,

and admire women. The m orally superior nature of women is honored mostly in the abstract, and women are worshiped mostly in the abstract. The worship is worship of a sym bol— a symbol ma

nipulated to justify the uses to which fallen women are put. The

morally good woman is put on a pedestal—a small, precarious,

raised stage, often mined, on which she stands for as long as she

can—until she falls off or jumps or it goes boom.

In the secular world, women are also credited with having a

sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men

do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature

that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed

as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women

are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were.

Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is

especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special

relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special,

intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to

women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along

the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this

view of a female biological nature that is morally good.

However this premise about a biologically based morality is

used, the woman-superior model of antifeminism is operating to

keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human

interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol

and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the

muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing

acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She

must not walk the same streets men do or do the same things or

have the same responsibilities. Precisely because she is good, she

is unfit to do the same things, unfit to make the same decisions, unfit to resolve the same dilemmas, unfit to undertake the same responsibilities, unfit to exercise the same rights. Her nature is

different— this time better but still absolutely different— and

therefore her role must be different. The worshiping attitude, the

spiritual elevation of women that men invoke whenever they suggest that women are finer than they, proposes that women are what men can never be: chaste, good. In fact men are what women can

never be: real moral agents, the bearers of real moral authority and

responsibility. Women are not kept from this moral agency by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice in m orally demanding situations. The spiritual superiority of women in this model of ludicrous homage

isolates women from the human acts that create meaning, the human choices that create both ethics and history. It separates women out from the chaos and triumph of human responsibility by

giving women a two-dimensional m orality, a stagnant m orality,

one in which what is right and good is predetermined, sex-deter-

mined, biologically determined. The worship of women, devotion

to that in woman which raises man, respect for some moral sensibility allegedly inborn only in women, is the seductive antifeminism, the one that entrances women who have seen through the other kinds. Being worshiped (for most women) is preferable to

being defiled, and being looked up to is better than being walked

on. It is hard for women to refuse the worship of what otherwise is

despised: being female. Woman’s special moral nature has sometimes been used to plead her case: being moral, she w ill be able to upgrade the m orality of the nation if she has the rights of citizenship, the tone of the marketplace if she is employed, the quality of the church if she officiates, the humanism of government if she is

in it; being moral, she w ill be on the side of good. It has also been

argued, more loudly and more often, that her moral nature must

not be contaminated by vulgar responsibilities; that she has a special moral role to play in making the nation and the world good—

she must be in her person the example of good that w ill civilize and

educate men and make the nation moral. One cannot do what men

do—not in government, not in the family, not even in religion, not

anywhere—and be an example of good. “It is the task of the Positive Woman, ” wrote Phyllis Schlafly, “to keep America good. ” 1

Women keep Amerika good by being good. Many women who

hate Schlafly’s politics would agree that women have a special

moral responsibility “to keep America good. ” They have a different political program of good in mind and a different conception of women’s rights, but their conception of a biologically determined morality in which women are better than men is not different. Antifeminism allows for this sentimentality, encourages and exploits this self-indulgence; liberation does not. As Frederick

Douglass wrote over a century ago: “We advocate women’s rights,

not because she is an angel, but because she is a woman, having the

same wants, and being exposed to the same evils as man. ” 2

The woman-superior model of antifeminism also takes a sexual

form, one that is purely pornographic. The central conceit of

woman-hating sex, sex as conquest and possession, dominance and

submission, is that the woman has real power: she is only the apparent victim; she is only seemingly powerless. Her power is in her capacity to provoke erection or lust. Men suffer arousal passively—

against their will or regardless of their will. They then act on what

a woman, or any sex object, has provoked. She provokes what she

wants. When a man has an erection and commits a sexual act because of it or in response to it, he is acting in response to a provocation by a woman, whose nature and intent are well met by his act.

In pornography, the male sexual values that inform and permeate

rape and other forced sex acts are articulated without apology. The

genre insists that sex is conquest, that the woman who resists

wants to be forced, hurt, brutalized; that the woman who wants

sex gets pleasure from being used like a thing, from pain and humiliation. The genre insists that rape, battery, physical torture, bondage, capture, and imprisonment are things done to women

because women provoke them the same way that women provoke

erection: by being there, by being female. Provoking these acts is

the power women have over men; women get men to do these

things, to perform these sex acts. In the world men seem to exercise power, but all of that comes to nothing in the face of the lust provoked by a woman. W hatever he does to her, she is still more

powerful than he is because he wants her, he needs her, he is being

driven by a desire for her. In the sexual woman-superior model,

power is articulated as being intrinsically female because power is

redefined beyond reason, beyond coherence: as if power is in the

corpse that draws the vultures. This pornographic conception of

female power is fundamental to the antifeminism of sexual-libera-

tion movements in which unlim ited sexual use of women by men is

defined as freedom for both: she wants it; he responds; vo ili! the

revolution. It is also fundamental to the antifeminism of the legal

system with respect to sexual crimes like rape, battery, and sexual

abuse of children, especially girls. The female is still seen as the

provocation for what might be a legitimate sex act, depending on

just how provocative she was. Her w ill is regarded as probably

implicit in the use the male made of her. The female is seen to have

power over the man— and responsibility for what he has done to

her— because he wanted her so bad: she has provoked whatever

desire motivated him to act. His desire is what gives her power.

Her power is in her sexual nature, her existence as a woman to

which he responds— not in her behavior. For this reason, rape inquiries search her behavior to find the truth about her nature. If her nature is finally seen to warrant his act, he is not responsible

for it— she is. T his is the power of women in pornographic sex.

The apologies for this sexual system that claim that women are

powerful because women are desired— in fact, that go so far as to

insist that women are sex-dominant and sex-controlling— uphold

this phantasmagoric female power, keeping women in real life

powerless. T he antifeminism is directly implicit in the pornographic conceptions of female power, female nature, and female

freedom. Her power is in being used, her nature is to be used, and

her freedom is in being used. Or, her power is in provoking men to

hurt her, her nature is to provoke men to hurt her, and her freedom is in provoking pain. Or, her power is in making men force her to do what she does not want to do, her nature is to make men

force her to do what she does not want to do, and her freedom is in

being forced to do what she does not want to do. These principles

of antifeminism effectively confound both power and freedom: the

response in most women is to want neither. A woman’s individual

nature is more than confounded: it is frequently annihilated.

The male-dominant model of antifeminism is virtually everywhere. Its woman-hating dimensions have been discussed brilliantly in many feminist texts; here the focus will be on how it functions to stop a liberation movement. Religion and biology are

the great roots of the metaphysical idea that men are superior to

women because they are. Whether male dominance is described as

a kind of perpetual biological pillaging or the will of a merely

wrathful God, the hostility in male dominance is what is most consistently justified by the idea of male dominance. Keeping women a subject people is hostile. The genius of the male-dominant model

of antifeminism is the transmogrification of this hostility into what

passes for love. When one group conquers another, the act of conquest is clearly hostile; when a man conquers a woman, it is to express romantic or sexual love. Invasion is an act of hostility, unless the male is invading the female, in which case “violation” is used to mean love. Beating someone up is an act of hostility, unless

a man is beating a woman whom he loves: women, it is said, consider beating proof of love and demand or provoke this proof.

When a man tyrannizes a people, he is hostile to their rights and

freedom; when a man tyrannizes a woman, he is well within the

bounds of his role as husband or lover. When a group deemed

inferior is targeted for violence in propaganda, that propaganda is

unarguably hostile; when men target women for sexual violence in

pornography, the m aterial, the targeting, and the violence are considered expressions of sexual love. Mass terrorization of one group by another is hostile, unless women are terrorized by men raping,

in which case each rape must be examined for signs of love. Confining a group, restricting them, depriving them of rights because they were born into one class and not another are hostile acts, unless women are being confined, restricted, and deprived of rights by the men who love them so that they w ill be what men can love.

There is hostility in the world, which one recognizes as historical

and social cruelty; and then there is the love of man for woman.

The acts m ay be the same but they are so very different, because

what is done to women is measured by an absolutely unique standard: is it sexy? Women are taken to be sex, so if it— whatever it is— is done to a woman, it is likely to be sexy. If it is sexy, it

comes under the aegis of love. H ostility is defined in the dictionary

as “antagonism . ” Love is seen to be a grand antagonism; so is a

great sexual passion, while the everyday fucks are little antagonisms oft repeated. T he torturer is just a real obsessed lover when the victim is a woman, especially a woman whom he knows intim ately. Rape is just another kind of love; and nothing— no law, no political movement, no higher consciousness— has yet made rape

less sexy for those who see love in male dominance. Chains are

sexy when women wear them, prisons are sexy when women are in

them, pain is sexy when women hurt, and love includes all this and

more. Beat up a man for speaking his mind and there is a human-

rights violation— hunt him or capture him or terrorize him and his

human rights have been violated; do the same to a woman and the

violation is sexy. Nothing that falls within the purview of the love

of man for woman qualifies as a violation of human rights; instead,

violation becomes a synonym for sex, part of the vocabulary of

love. The love of the superior for the inferior must by its nature be

fairly horrific, fairly terrifying, grossly distorted. When men love

women, every hostile act demonstrates that love, every brutality is

a sign of it; and every complaint that a woman makes against the

hostility of male dominance is taken to be a complaint against love,

a refusal to be a real woman, that is, to suffer male hostility as an

ecstasy, to suffer love.

The male-dominant model of antifeminism also proposes that

freedom is inimical to the situation of women because women must

always bargain. Since men are dominant, aggressive, controlling,

powerful because of God or nature, the weak women must always

have something to trade to get the protection of these strong men.

Either the woman is too weak to care for herself or she is too weak

to fend off men; in either case, she needs a male protector. If she

needs a male protector, she must not only bargain to get him; she

must continuously bargain to keep him or to keep him from abusing the power he has over her. This compromises any possibility of self-determination for her. The dependence of women on men, the

inability of women to have and to manifest a self-sustaining and

self-determined integrity, and the fundamental definition of a

woman as a whore by nature are all established as being implicit in

the biological relationship between men and women: implicit and

unalterable. This feature of the male-dominant model is unique to

it. Neither the separate-but-equal model nor the woman-superior

model puts women in a metaphysically defined, biologically determined relationship of prostitution to men. (Perhaps this virtue of the male-dominant model accounts for its ubiquity. ) The bargain

women must make because men are biologically dominant is

pointed to whenever a woman achieves. The bargain is searched

for—what did she sell to whom to enable her to do whatever she

did? The necessity for bargaining is used to stop rebellion. The

bargain necessitated by his greater aggression, strength, and power

is the principal reason for refuting the possibility of her claim to

independence in this model of antifeminism. He is dominant; she

must submit. Submission in the face of greater strength, greater

aggression, greater power, is unavoidable. She is simply not strong

enough to be on her own— especially not if he wants her because

she is not strong enough or aggressive enough to stop him from

taking her. So each woman has to make a deal with at least one of

the strong ones for protection; and the deal she makes, being based

on her inferiority, originating in it, acknowledges the truth and

inevitability of that inferiority. In needing to bargain because she is

too weak not to, she proves that antifeminism— the repudiation of

her freedom— is grounded in simple biological necessity, biological

common sense, biological realism.

Because the male is presumed dominant by natural right or divine w ill, he is supposed to have an exclusive authority in the realm of public power. The antifeminism predicated on natural

male dominance also maintains that men naturally dominate government, politics, economics, culture, state and m ilitary policy—

that men naturally assert their dominance by running all social and

political institutions. The token woman here and there in no w ay

interferes w ith the effectiveness of virtually all-male clubs of power

in erasing any hope of real authority or influence for women. One

woman on the Supreme Court, one woman in the Senate, a woman

prime minister, an occasional woman head of state, are not so

much role models as rebukes to economically demoralized women

who are supposed to accept the tokens as what they too could have

been if only they themselves had been different— better, smarter,

richer, prettier, not such schlemiels. Token women must go out of

their w ay not to offend the male sense of fem ininity, but by their

visibility they inevitably do so. As a result, the token women give

out the correct line on fem ininity and at the same time bear the

brunt of the critical perception that obviously they are not at home

being fucked. T he woman who is not a token is mostly condescended to by the token, a condescension that she feels not only acutely but often, since the token is always pointed out to her as

proof that her own situation does not result from an exclusionary

social system . Every all-male or nearly all-male group— profession,

institution, business, club, or power clique—is a concrete embodiment of antifeminism. By its existence it upholds and proclaims the dominance of men over women. By its existence it reinforces the

social inferiority of women to men, perpetuates the political subordination of women to men, mandates the economic dependence of women on men, and endlessly revitalizes the sexual submission of

women to men. The all-male clique of power communicates the

antifeminism of male dominance everywhere it operates, all the

time, without exception. The power of men to make decisions and

determine policy, to create culture and to control the institutions of

culture, is simultaneously held to be the logical outcome of male

dominance and proof of its existence. Every institution that is

structurally male-dominant is also ideologically male-dominant; or

its structure would change. Every group that is structurally male-

dominant functions as concrete resistance, material resistance, to

the liberation of women: it prohibits the exodus of women from the

obligations and disadvantages, not to mention the cruelties, of inferiority. Any area that is virtually all male is hostile to women, to political rights, economic parity, and sexual self-determination

for women. The verbal support of men in all-male institutions,

groups, or cliques of power for mild feminist reform has no value

in the world of real, substantive change for women: it is the allmale structure itself that must be subverted and destroyed. Male dominance and the antifeminism that defends it can only be repudiated by being ended; those who construct it by literally being the bricks of which it is built cannot change it by merely disputing

it. The antifeminism in exclusively male enclaves is not made humane through gestures; it is immune to modification through diplomatic goodwill. As long as a road is closed to women, it is closed to women; and that means that women cannot take that road, however nicely the men on it suggest they would not mind. The road is not only a road to power or independence or equity; it is often the

only road away from tremendous abuse. The antifeminism in an

all-male institution cannot be mitigated by attitude; nor can male

dominance— alw ays the meaning of an all-male enclave— ever accept that women are not inferior to men. The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to dissociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex

class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from

which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own com plicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through dissociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance. Male

dominance in society alw ays means that out of public sight, in the

private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually

dominating women. The antifeminism in the all-male rulership of

society alw ays means that in the intimate world of men with

women, men are politically suppressing women.

The three social models of antifeminism— the separate-but-equal

model, the woman-superior model, and the male-dominant model

—are not inimical to one another. T hey mix and match with perfect ease, since logic and consistency are not prerequisites for keeping women down: no one need prove his case to justify the subordination of women; no one need meet a rigorous standard of

intellectual, political, or moral accountability. Most people, whatever their political convictions, seem to believe parts of each model, the pieces adding up to a whole view. Fragmented philosophical

and ideological justifications for the subordination of women exist

in a material context in which women are subordinated to men: the

subordination is self-justifying, since power subordinates and

power justifies; power both serves and consoles itself. Separate-

but-equal, woman-superior, and male-dominant antifeminism can

even be used sequentially as one whole argument for the practice of

male supremacy: men and women have different capacities and dif

ferent areas of responsibility according to sex but their functions

and attributes are of equal importance; women are morally superior

to men (a different capacity, a different area of responsibility), except when they provoke lust, in which case they have real power over men; the biological dominance of men over women is (a) counterbalanced by the real sexual power of women over men (in which case each has separate-but-equal powers) or (b) proved in that

women are too good to be as aggressive and as rudely dominant as

men or (c) naturally fair and naturally reasonable because natural

submission is the natural complement to natural dominance (and

dominance and submission are separate-but-equal spheres, submission marking the woman as morally superior unless the submission is sexually provocative, in which case her sex gives her different-but-equal power). Either this is true or it is not. Either the arguments of antifeminism, one by one or the whole lot, are true or they are not. Either there are separate-but-equal spheres or there

are not. Either women are morally better than men or they are not.

Either women have sexual power over men simply by being

women or they do not; either provoking lust is power t)r it is not.

Either men are dominant by nature or will of God or they are not.

Antifeminism says all this is true; feminism says it is not. The so-

called feminism that says some of it is true and some of it is not

cannot combat antifeminism because it has incorporated it. Antifeminism proposes two standards for rights and responsibilities: two standards determined strictly by and applied strictly to sex.

Feminism as the liberation movement of women proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex. In this sense, feminism does propose—as antifeminists accuse—that men and

women be treated the same. Feminism is a radical stance against

double standards in rights and responsibilities, and feminism is a

revolutionary advocacy of a single standard of human freedom.

To achieve a single standard of human freedom and one absolute

standard of human dignity, the sex-class system has to be dismem

bered. T he reason is pragmatic, not philosophical: nothing less w ill

work. However much everyone wants to do less, less w ill not free

women. Liberal men and women ask, W hy can’t we just be ourselves, all human beings, begin now and not dwell in past injustices, wouldn’t that subvert the sex-class system , change it from the inside out? T he answer is no. The sex-class system has a structure; it has deep roots in religion and culture; it is fundamental to the economy; sexuality is its creature; to be “just human beings” in

it, women have to hide what happens to them as women because

they are women— happenings like forced sex and forced reproduction, happenings that continue as long as the sex-class system operates. T he liberation of women requires facing the real condition of women in order to change it. “W e’re all just people” is a stance that

prohibits recognition of the systematic cruelties visited on women

because of sex oppression.

Feminism as a liberation movement, then, demands a revolutionary single standard of what humans have a right to, and also demands that the current sexual bifurcation of rights never be let out of sight. Antifeminism does the opposite: it insists that there is a

double standard of what humans have a right to— a male standard

and a female standard; and it insists at the same time that we are all

just human beings, right now, as things stand, within this sex-class

system, so that no special attention should be paid to social phenomena on account of sex. W ith respect to rape, for instance, the feminist starts out with a single standard of freedom and dignity:

everyone, women as well as men, should have a right to the integrity of their own body. Feminists then focus on and analyze the sex-class reality of rape: men rape, women are raped; even in those

statistically rare cases where boys or men are raped, men are the

rapists. Antifeminists start out with a double standard: men conquer, possess, dominate, men take women; women are conquered, possessed, dominated, and taken. Antifeminists then insist that

rape is a crime like any other, like mugging or homicide or bur

glary: they deny its sex-specific, sex-class nature and the political

meaning undeniably implicit in the sexual construction of the

crime. Feminists are accused of denying the common humanity of

men and women because feminists refuse to fudge on the sex issue

of who does what to whom, how often, and why. Antifeminists

refuse to acknowledge that the sex-class system repudiates the

humanity of women by keeping women systematically subject to

exploitation and violence as a condition of sex. In analyzing the

sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating

it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting

that they are victims (stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized). Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulating that such degradation exists. This is a little like considering abolitionists responsible for slavery, but all is fair when love is war. In ignoring the political significance of the sex-class

system except to defend it when it is under attack, antifeminists

suggest that “we’re all in this together, ” all us human beings, dif-

ferent-but-together, a formulation that depends on lack of clarity

for its persuasiveness. Indisputably, we’re all in rape together,

some of us to great disadvantage. Feminism especially requires a

rigorous analysis of sex class, one that is ongoing, stubborn, persistent, unsentimental, disciplined, not placated by fatuous invocations of a common humanity that in fact the sex-class system itself suppresses. The sex-class system cannot be undone when those

whom it exploits and humiliates are unable to face it for what it is,

for what it takes from them, for what it does to them. Feminism

requires precisely what misogyny destroys in women: unimpeachable bravery in confronting male power. Despite the impossibility of it, there is such bravery: there are such women, in some periods

millions upon millions of them. If male supremacy survives every

effort of women to overthrow it, it will not be because of biology

or God; nor will it be because of the force and power of men per

se. It will be because the will to liberation was contaminated, un

dermined, rendered ineffectual and meaningless, by antifeminism:

by specious concepts of equality based on an evasion of what the

sex-class system really is. The refusal to recognize the intrinsic despotism of the sex-class system means that that despotism is inevitably incorporated into reform models of that same system: in this, antifeminism triumphs over the w ill to liberation. The refusal to

recognize the unique abuses inherent in sex labor (treating sex labor as if it were sex-neutral, as if it were not intrinsically part of sex oppression and inseparable from it) is a function of antifeminism; the acceptance of sex labor as appropriate labor for women marks the trium ph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation. The

sentimental acceptance of a double standard of human rights, responsibilities, and freedom is also the triumph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation; no sexual dichotomy is compatible with real

liberation. And, most important, the refusal to demand (with no

compromise being possible) one absolute standard of human dignity is the greatest trium ph of antifeminism over the w ill to liberation. W ithout that one absolute standard, liberation is mush; feminism is frivolous and utterly self-indulgent. Without that one

absolute standard as the keystone of revolutionary justice, feminism has no claim to being a liberation movement; it has no revolutionary stance, goal, or potential; it has no basis for a radical reconstruction of society; it has no criteria for action or organization; it has no moral necessity; it has no inescapable claim on the conscience of “mankind”; it has no philosophical seriousness; it has

no authentic stature as a human-rights movement; it has nothing to

teach. Also, without that one absolute standard, feminism has no

chance whatsoever of actually liberating women or destroying the

sex-class system . Refusing to base itself on a principle of universal

human dignity, or compromising, retreating from that principle,

feminism becomes that which exists to stop it: antifeminism. No

liberation movement can accept the degradation of those whom it

seeks to liberate by accepting a different definition of dignity for

them and stay a movement for their freedom at the same time.

(Apologists for pornography: take note. ) A universal standard of

human dignity is the only principle that completely repudiates sex-

class exploitation and also propels all of us into a future where the

fundamental political question is the quality of life for all human

beings. Are women being subordinated to men? There is insufficient dignity in that. Are men being prostituted too? What is human dignity?

Two elements constitute the discipline of feminism: political,

ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system—

with sex hierarchy and sex segregation—and a single standard of

human dignity. Abandon either element and the sex-class system is

unbreachable, indestructible; feminism loses its rigor, the toughness of its visionary heart; women get swallowed up not only by misogyny but also by antifeminism—facile excuses for exploiting women, metaphysical justifications for abusing women, and shoddy apologies for ignoring the political imperatives of women.

One other discipline is essential both to the practice of feminism

and to its theoretical integrity: the firm, unsentimental, continuous

recognition that women are a class having a common condition.

This is not some psychological process of identification with

women because women are wonderful; nor is it the insupportable

assertion that there are no substantive, treacherous differences

among women. This is not a liberal mandate to ignore what is

cruel, despicable, or stupid in women, nor is it a mandate to ignore

dangerous political ideas or allegiances of women. This does not

mean women first, women best, women only. It does mean that

the fate of every individual woman—no matter what her politics,

character, values, qualities—is tied to the fate of all women

whether she likes it or not. On one level, it means that every

woman’s fate is tied to the fate of women she dislikes personally.

On another level, it means that every woman’s fate is tied to the

fate of women whom she politically and morally abhors. For in-

stance, it means that rape jeopardizes communist and fascist

women, liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican women,

racist women and black women, Nazi women and Jew ish women,

homophobic women and homosexual women. The crimes committed against women because they are women articulate the condition of women. T he eradication of these crimes, the transformation of the condition of women, is the purpose of feminism: which means that feminism requires a most rigorous definition of

what those crimes are so as to determine what that condition is.

This definition cannot be compromised by a selective representation of the sex class based on sentim entality or wishful thinking.

This definition cannot exclude prudes or sluts or dykes or mothers

or virgins because one does not want to be associated w ith them.

To be a feminist means recognizing that one is associated with all

women not as an act of choice but as a matter of fact. The sex-class

system creates the fact. When that system is broken, there w ill

be no such fact. Feminists do not create this common condition

by making alliances: feminists recognize this common condition

because it exists as an intrinsic part of sex oppression. The fundamental knowledge that women are a class having a common condition— that the fate of one woman is tied substantively to the fate of all women— toughens feminist theory and practice. That fundamental knowledge is an almost unbearable test of seriousness.

There is no real feminism that does not have at its heart the tempering discipline of sex-class consciousness: knowing that women share a common condition as a class, like it or not.

W hat is that common condition? Subordinate to men, sexually

colonized in a sexual system of dominance and submission, denied

rights on the basis of sex, historically chattel, generally considered

biologically inferior, confined to sex and reproduction: this is the

general description of the social environment in which all women

live. But what is the real map of that environment? Which crimes

create the topography? Drawing 1 shows the basic condition of

E CONOMI C

R A P E

EXPLOI TATI ON

P R O S TI TU T I O N

DRAWING 1. THE CONDITION OF WOMEN

women, a lateral view of the female bottom of sex hierarchy. Rape,

battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation are

the basic crimes committed against women in the sex-class system

in which they are devalued because they are women. The crimes

are points on a circle because it is a closed system , from nowhere to

nowhere. These specific crimes are each committed against huge

percentages of the female population at any given time. Rape, for

instance, consists not only of police-blotter rape but also marital

rape, incestuous abuse of girls, any sex that is coerced. Battery is

estimated to have happened to 50 percent of married women in the

United States alone. All housewives are economically exploited; all

working women are. Reproductive exploitation includes forced

pregnancy and forced sterilization. There are few female lives not

touched by one, two, or three of these crimes and significantly

determined by all of them. At the heart of the female condition is

pornography: it is the ideology that is the source of all the rest; it

truly defines what women are in this system — and how women are

treated issues from what women are. Pornography is not a metaphor for what women are; it is what women are in theory and in practice. Prostitution is the outer w all, sym bolically the mirror reflection of the pornography, metaphorically built out of brick, concrete, stone, to keep women in—in the sex class. Prostitution is the all-encompassing condition, the body trapped in barter, the body

imprisoned as commodity. W ith respect to the circle of crim es—

rape, battery, reproductive exploitation, economic exploitation—

the crimes can be placed anywhere in the circle in any order. T hey

are the crimes of the sex-class system against women; they are the

crimes that keep women women in an immovable system of sex

hierarchy. T hey are crimes committed against women as women.

Economic exploitation is a specific of women’s condition; it is not a

sex-neutral political category into which the experience of women

sometimes falls. Women are segregated in job ghettos as women;

the lower pay of women is systematic; the sale of sex is a funda

mental dimension of economic exploitation, whether in prostitution, marriage, or in the marketplace; when women move in large numbers into high-status jobs (male jobs), the jobs lose status (become female jobs); doing the same or comparable jobs as men, women get paid less. Economic exploitation is a key crime against

women but it is not the same economic exploitation that men experience. The construction of causality among the crimes or even the establishment of sequentiality (in which order the crimes appeared

in history or prehistory) is ultimately irrelevant. It does not matter

whether rape came first and caused the systematic economic degradation of women, or whether economic exploitation created conditions in which the production of children got the value it now has, or whether men batter because of jealousy over women’s reproductive capacity, or whether the etiology of rape is in the superior physical strength of men to women discovered in acts of battery

that later became sanctioned and systematic. One can follow the

circle around in either direction (see drawing 2) and construct marvelous theories of causality or sequentiality, most of which are plausible and interesting; and one can try to prioritize the political

importance of the crimes. But what must matter now is the condition of women now: these crimes are now its features, its characteristic events, its experiential absolutes, its inescapable attacks on women as women. These crimes are real, systematic, and define

the condition of women. The relationships between them do not

matter so much as the fact that they are facts: equal, essential,

basic facts. Seen in this light, prohibition against lesbianism, for

instance, is not the same kind of equal, essential, basic fact, nor is

lesbianism an obvious or sure road to freedom. Lesbianism is a

transgression of rules, an affront; but its prohibition is not a basic

constituent part of sex oppression and its expression does not substantively breach or transform sex oppression. There is no state of being or act of w ill, including lesbianism, that changes the circle:

there is no state of being or act of will that protects a woman from

D R A WI NG 2. THE C I R C L E OF

C R I M E S A G A I N S T WOME N

the basic crimes against women as women or puts any woman outside the possibility of suffering these crimes. Great wealth does not put a woman outside the circle of crimes; neither does racial supremacy in a racist social system or a good job or a terrific heterosexual relationship with a wonderful man or the most liberated (by any standard) sex life or living with women in a commune in a

pasture. The circle of crimes is also not changed by how one feels

about it. One can decide to ignore it or one can decide it does not

apply for any number of reasons, emotional, intellectual, or practical: nevertheless it is there and it applies.

Going back to the whole model—the circle, the pornography at

the center of it, the all-encompassing wall of prostitution that circumscribes it—it does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest

recesses of the psyche; or whether pornography is perceived as the

surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual-economic necessity of women. (See drawings 3 and 4. ) Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women—pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, the circle of crimes being what women are for. Rape, battery, economic exploitation, and reproductive exploitation require pornography as female metaphysics so as to be virtually self-justifying, virtually invisible abuses; and they also require the wall of prostitution confining women (meaning that whatever women do is within the bounds of prostitution) so that women are always and absolutely accessible. The heart of pornography and the wall of prostitution mirror each other in that both are meant to mean—and concretely do mean in the male system—that women deserve the

crimes that define their condition, that those crimes are responses

to what women are and what women do, that the crimes committed against women define the condition of women correctly— in accordance with what women are and what women do.

T he meaning of this description of what women’s subordination

is, how women are kept subordinate, how that subordination is

acted out on women system atically, is simple for feminists: breaking the circle up, breaking down the w all, annihilating the system ’s heart, are what we must do. The meaning for antifeminists is also

simple: whatever strengthens or vitalizes any aspect of the model is

of great practical value in keeping women subordinate. Antifeminists can disagree strategically (for instance, on whether pornography should be public or private) without disagreeing in principle on what is necessary to keep women encapsulated in subjection (the

use of pornography, its cultural and psychic centrality whether it is

public or private, the use of women as pornography in public and

in private). But one cannot be a feminist and support any element

in this model: there are no exceptions— not civil liberties lawyers

or liberals or sym pathetic men or so-called feminists who indulge

in using the label but evading the substance. Antifeminist politics

come in many guises, but a vivid memory of what the condition of

women is— w hat crimes articulate it, what is at its heart, what is

the impenetrable boundary beyond which women do not pass—

provides a standard for discerning antifeminism in any political

stance. No one can defend or give aid and comfort to that which

keeps women subordinate and at the same time claim to be acting

in behalf of women’s liberation: feminism is not a lifestyle or an

attitude or a feeling of vague sym pathy with women or an assertion

of modernity. Antifeminism saturates the political spectrum from

Right to Left, liberal to conservative, reactionary to progressive.

Antifeminism is resistance to the liberation of women from the sex-

class system , that resistance expressed in constructing political defenses of the constituent parts of sex oppression. This antifeminism is a vital part of programs, values, ideologies, philosophies, arguments, actions, economic, sexual, and social manipulations that are the substance of most political discourse and organizing. Antifeminism is a potent expression of reaction, backlash, and suppression;

DRAWING 3. PROSTITUTION AS

THE MATERIAL REALITY;

PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE UNDERLYING IDEOLOGY

THE C I R C L E OF C R I M E S A G A I N S T WO M E N

P R O S T I T U T I O N

DRAWING 4. PORNOGRAPHY AS

THE SURFACE PHENOMENON:

PROSTITUTION AS

THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM

it is protean; it is easy, popular, and always fashionable in one

form or another.

Antifeminism is also operating whenever any political group is

ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women,

some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to

pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including on both extreme

ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves,

to the brothels or to the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly antifeminist; it is also profoundly immoral. Men mostly accept the disposition of women under the sex-class system and they mostly accept the crimes committed against women: but sometimes the

status of women is addressed, those crimes are addressed, in political discourse. Whenever some women are doctrinally delivered to sex exploitation, the political stance is corrupt. Virtually all ideologies are implicitly antifeminist in that women are sacrificed to higher goals: the higher goal of reproduction; the higher goal of

pleasure; the higher goal of a freedom antipathetic to the freedom

of women; the higher goal of better conditions for workers not

women; the higher goal of a new order that keeps the sex exploitation of women essentially intact; the higher goal of an old order that considers the sex exploitation of women a sign of social stability (woman’s in her place, all’s right with the world). Some women are sacrificed to a function—fucking, reproducing, house-cleaning, and so on. A political promise is made, and kept, that

some women will do some things so that all women must not do all

things. Women accept the sacrifice of other women to that which

they find repugnant: a seduction of antifeminism that outdoes worship of female good in getting female adherents because it is more practical. Men all along the political spectrum manipulate this seduction with great skill. Some women are sacrificed by race or class: kept doing some kinds of work that other women will then

not have to do. Supporting the use of some women in any area of

sex exploitation is the w illful sacrifice of women on an altar of sex

abuse and it is a political repudiation of the sex-class consciousness

basic to feminism: it is— whoever does it— antifeminism. And then

there is the psychological use of the same reactionary strategy: some

women, of course, like being. . . (beaten, raped, exploited, bought

and sold, forced to have sex, forced to have children). Antifem inism is also a form of psychological warfare, and of course some women do like. . . Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman. T his is practical and true because of the nature of sex

oppression. Men, who use power against women in sex exploitation, know that it is practical and true: which is w hy it is a fundamental strategy of antifeminism to encourage the sacrifice of some women by a ll women.

*

Now look at the world as right-wing women see it. T hey live in

the same world as all women: a world of sex segregation and sex

hierarchy; a world defined by the crimes of rape, battery, economic and reproductive exploitation; a world circumscribed by prostitution; a world in which they too are pornography. T hey see

the system of sex oppression— about which they are not stupid—as

closed and unalterable. It is unchangeable to them, whether they

take as their authority God or man. If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right-wing women are more logical than not. M arriage is supposed to protect them

from rape; being kept at home is supposed to protect them from

the castelike economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have and so they must increase the value of reproduction even if it means increasing their

own vulnerability to reproductive exploitation (especially forced

pregnancy); religious marriage—traditional, correct, law-abiding

marriage—is supposed to protect against battery, since the wife is

supposed to be cherished and respected. The flaws in the logic are

simple: the home is the most dangerous place for a woman to be,

the place she is most likely to be murdered, raped, beaten, certainly the place where she is robbed of the value of her labor. What right-wing women do to survive the sex-class system does not

mean that they will survive it: if they get killed, it will most likely

be at the hands of their husbands; if they get raped, the rapists will

most likely be their husbands or men who are friends or acquaintances; if they get beaten, the batterer will most likely be their husbands—perhaps 25 percent of those who are beaten will be

beaten during pregnancy; if they do not have any money of their

own, they are more vulnerable to abuse from their husbands, less

able to escape, less able to protect their children from incestuous

assault; if abortion becomes illegal, they will still have abortions

and they are likely to die or be maimed in great numbers; * if they

get addicted to drugs, it will most likely be to prescription drugs

prescribed by the family doctor to keep the family intact; if they

get poor—through being abandoned by their husbands or through

old age—they are likely to be discarded, their usefulness being

over. And right-wing women are still pornography (as Marabel

* Before 1973, both abortion and contraception were mostly illegal. Perhaps two thirds of women aborting were married (in one good study 75

percent were married) and most had children, as far as can be discerned

from the scanty evidence. With legal abortion and legal contraception,

about three quarters of the women seem to be single. As many people

suggest, women no longer feel compelled to marry on becoming pregnant,

which accounts in part for the demographic change. But I think that the

availability of contraceptives in conjunction with abortion is mainly responsible for the lower percentage of married women among those aborting. I suspect that married women use contraceptives with more precision

Morgan recognized in The Total Woman) just like other women

whom they despise; and what they do— just like other women— is

barter. T h ey too live inside the wall of prostitution no matter how

they see themselves.

More than anything else, it is antifeminism that convinces right-

wing women that the system of sex segregation and sex hierarchy

is immovable, unbreachable, and inevitable— and therefore that

the logic of their world view is more substantive and compelling

than any analysis, however accurate, of its flaws. It is not the antifeminism of the Right specifically that keeps the allegiance of these women: it is the antifeminism that saturates political discourse all

along the political spectrum, the antifeminism that permeates virtually all political philosophies, programs, and parties. Antifeminism is not a form of political reaction and suppression confined to the far Right. If it were, women would have compelling reason for

moving aw ay from the far Right toward philosophies, programs,

and parties not fundamentally antifeminist; women would also

have good reason to see sex-class oppression as transformable, not

absolute and eternal. It is the pervasiveness of antifeminism, its

ubiquity, that establishes for women that they have no w ay out of

the sex-class system . The antifeminism of Left, Right, and center

fixes the power of the Right over women—gives the huge majority

of women over to the Right— over to social conservatism, ecoand consistency than do single women—certainly than do the teenagers who characteristically do not use contraceptives at all and who skew the

percentages toward single women. If the Human Life Amendment or Statute passes, or any similar legislation, both the intrauterine device and the low-dosage birth control pill will become illegal. They will be considered

abortifacients because they are known to stop the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thereby “killing” it. If effective contraception is once again unavailable—so that both contraception and abortion are inaccessible—I suspect the percentage of married women having abortions will once again skyrocket.

nomic conservatism, religious conservatism, over to conforming to

the dictates of authority and power, over to sexual compliance,

over to obedience—because as long as the sex-class system is intact, huge numbers of women will believe that the Right offers them the best deal: the highest reproductive value; the best protection against sexual aggression; the best economic security as the economic dependents of men w ho must provide; the most reliable

protection against battery; the most respect. Left and centrist philosophies, programs, and parties tend to vicious condescension with respect to women’s rights; they lie, and right-wing women are

quite brilliant at discerning the hypocrisy of liberal support for

women’s rights. Right-wing women do not buy the partial truths

and cynical lies that constitute the positions of various liberal and

so-called radical groups on women’s rights. They see antifeminism,

though they call it simple hypocrisy. They are outraged by it.

What is it that right-wing women see, then, when they look at

feminists? The Right, Left, and center have firm bases of power in

that they all come out of and serve and are led by the top class in

the sex-class system: men. They are all profoundly opposed to the

destruction of the sex-ckss system. Feminists want to destroy the

sex-class system but feminists come out of and serve and are led by

the bottom class in the sex-class system: women. The feminism of

women cannot match the power, the resources, the potency of the

antifeminism of the whole male political spectrum. Looking for a

way out of the sex-class system, a way beyond the boundary of

prostitution, a way around the crimes of rape, battery, economic

exploitation, and reproductive exploitation, a way out of being pornography, right-wing women look at feminists and they see w om en: inside the same boundary, victims of the same crimes, women who

are pornography. Their response to what they see is not a sense of

sisterhood or solidarity— it is a self-protective sense of repulsion.

The powerless are not quick to put their faith in the powerless.

The powerless need the powerful, especially in sex oppression be

cause it is inescapable, everywhere: there are no free zones, free

countries, underground railways away from it. Because feminism

is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a

closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women

judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted

by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance. Since antifeminism is based in power (the sex-class power of men along the whole political spectrum) and feminism is based in

powerlessness, antifeminism effectively turns feminism into a political dead end. It is the antifeminism of Right, Left, center, and all variations thereof, that makes the situation of women hopeless:

there is no hope of escape, no hope of freedom, no hope for an end

to sex oppression, because all power-based political parties, programs, and philosophies abhor the liberation of women as a basis of action, as a real goal, even as an idea. Being doomed by a reactionary political stance to social subordination is not the same as being doomed by God or nature to metaphysical inferiority—a crucial

point—but it is still real rough. The defenses of sex exploitation

are simply too consistent, too strong, too intensely felt, all along

the political spectrum of power-based discourse and organizing to

be ignored by women who recognize that they are women, not

persons, as right-wing women do. Simply put, the Right will continue to have the allegiance of most women who see how real the sex-class system is, how intransigent it is, as long as antifeminism

is the heartfelt stance of those with other political views, whatever

the views. Those optimistic women who think the antifeminism of

the Left or center is somehow more humane than the antifeminism

of the Right will ally themselves as persons with whatever groups

or ideologies best reflect their own social or human ideals. They

will find without exception that the antifeminism they ignore is a

trenchant political defense of the woman hating they are victimized

by. Right-wing women, who are less queasy in facing the absolute

nature of male power over women, will not be swayed by the politics of women who practice selective blindness with regard to male power. Right-wing women are sure that the selective blindness of

liberals and leftists especially contributes to more violence, more

humiliation, more exploitation for women, often in the name of

humanism and freedom (which is why both words are dirty words

to them).

Facing the true nature of the sex-class system means ultimately

that one must destroy that system or accommodate to it. Facing the

true nature of male power over women also means that one must

destroy that power or accommodate to it. Feminists, from a base of

powerlessness, want to destroy that power; right-wing women,

from a base of powerlessness, the same base, accommodate to that

power because quite simply they see no way out from under.

Those with power will not help; those who are powerless like

themselves arguably cannot. Feminists, after the defeat of previous

movements throughout history and facing some kind of disintegration again (with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, the possible enactment of the Family Protection

Act, the Human Life Amendment or Statute, and other social,

political, and legal initiatives promoting female subordination*),

have to face the real questions. Can a political movement rooted in

a closed system of subordination—with no political support among

power-based political movements—break that closed system apart?

Or will the antifeminism of those whose politics are rooted in sex-

class power and privilege always destroy movements for the liberation of women? Is there a way to subvert the antifeminism of power-based political programs or parties—or is the pleasure and

profit in the subordination of women simply too overwhelming,

* Feminists all over the world report similar backlash.

too great, too marvelous, to allow for anything but the political

defense of that subordination (antifeminism)? Will it take a hundred fists, a thousand fists, a million fists, pushed through that circle of crime to destroy it, or are right-wing women essentially

right that it is indestructible? Can the wall of prostitution be

scaled? Can what is at the heart of sex oppression—the use of

women as pornography, pornography as what women are—be

stopped? If antifeminism triumphs over the liberation movement of

women—now, again, always—whoever has political power or represents social order or exercises authoritarian rule—whatever they are called, whatever they call their political line—has women for

good; the Right, broadly construed, has women for good. Stasis

and cruelty will have triumphed over freedom. The freedom of

women from sex oppression either matters or it does not; it is either essential or it is not. Decide one more time.

Notes

1. T h e P r o m is e o f t h e U l t r a -R ig h t

1. M arilyn Monroe, in a dressing-room notebook, cited by Norman M ailer, M arilyn: A B iography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), p. 17.

2. Terrence Des Pres, The S u rvivor: An A natomy o f Life in the

Death Camps (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), p. vi.

3. Leah Fritz, Thinking Like a Woman (Rifton, N . Y .: W in Books,

1975), p. 130.

4. Anita B ryant, Bless This House (New York: Bantam Books,

1976), p. 26.

5. Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (New York: Pocket Books,

1975), p. 57.

6. Ruth Carter Stapleton, The Gift o f In ner H ealing (Waco, T ex.:

Word Books, Publisher, 1976), p. 32.

7. Ibid., p. 18.

8. Morgan, Total W oman, p. 8.

9. Ibid., p. 96.

10. Ibid., p. 60.

11. Ibid., p. 161.

12. Ibid., pp. 140-41.

13. Anita Bryant, M ine Eyes H ave Seen the Glory (Old Tappan,

N. J .: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1970), pp. 26-27.

14. Ibid., p. 84.

15. Bryant, Bless This H ouse, p. 42.

16. Bryant, M ine Eyesy p. 83.

17. Bryant, Bless This House, pp. 51-52.

18. “Battle Over Gay Rights, ” Newsweek, June 6, 1977, p. 20.

19. Phyllis Schlafly, The P ow er o f the P ositive Woman (New Rochelle, N . Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1977), p. 89.

2. T he Po l it ic s o f In t e l l ig e n c e

1. Norman Mailer, Advertisements fo r M yself (New York: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, Perigee Books, 1981), p. 433.

2. Edith Wharton, “The Touchstone, ” in Madame de Treymes and

Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p. 12.

3. Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child o f the Dark: The Diary o f Carolina

M aria de Jesu s, trans. David St. Clair (New York: New American Library, 1962), p. 47.

4. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and

the State: An Agenda for Theory, ” Signs: A Jou rn a l o f Women in

Culture and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring 1982.

5. De Jesus, Child o f the Dark, p. 29.

6. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (Old Westbury, N . Y.: The

Feminist Press, 1979), p. 49.

7. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay Portion o f 'The

Y ears” ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: The New York

Public Library & Readex Books, 1977), pp. 164-65.

8. Abby Kelley, in a speech, cited by Blanche Glassman Hersh

in The Slavery o f Sex (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press,

1978), p. 33.

9. Alice James, The Diary o f Alice Jam es, ed. Leon Edel (New

York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1964), p. 66.

10. Woolf, P argiters, pp. xxxix-xxxx [sic] (speech given January

21,

1931).

11. Olive Schreiner, The Story o f an African Farm (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 148.

12. Nightingale, Cassandra, p. 25.

13. Victoria Woodhull, “Tried As By Fire; or, The True and The

False, Socially, ” 1874, The Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1974), p. 19.

14. Ibid., p. 8.

15. Victoria Woodhull, cited by Johanna Johnston, Mrs. Satan

(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), p. 205.

16. W oodhull, “T he Principles of Social Freedom, ” 1871, Victoria

W oodhull R eader, p. 36.

17. W oodhull, “Tried As By Fire. . . , ” Victoria W oodhull R eader,

p. 39.

18. Ibid.

19. Robin M organ, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and

R ape, ” 1974, pp. 163-69; Going Too F ar (New York: Random

House, 1977), p. 165.

20. W illiam Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity F air (New York: New

American L ibrary, 1962), p. 168.

21. De Jesus, Child o f the Dark, p. 50.

22. Kate M illett, The P rostitution Papers (New York: Avon, 1973),

pp. 78-79.

23. Linda Lovelace and Mike M cG rady, Ordeal (Secaucus, N . J .:

Citadel Press, 1980), p. 66.

24. M aryse Holder, G ive S orrow Words (New York: Avon, 1980),

p. 3.

25. M illett, P rostitution Papers, p. 95.

26. Jenn y P. D’H ericourt, A Woman's Philosophy o f W oman; or

Woman A ffranchised (New York: Carleton, Publisher, 1864),

p. 41.

27. Joseph Proudhon,

in D’Hericourt,

Woman's Philosophy,

p. 36.

28. Woolf, P a rgiters, p. 120.

29. Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (New York: H ill and W ang,

1980), p. 108.

3. A b o r t io n

1. Jerom e E. Bates and Edward S. Zawadzki, C rim inal A bortion

(Springfield, 111.: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), p. 4.

2. Jesse L. Jackson, “How We Respect Life Is Over-riding Moral

Issue, ” N ational R ight to Life N ews, January 1977. Reprint.

3. R. D. Laing, The F acts o f Life (New York: Pantheon Books,

1976), p. 27.

4. Colette, M y A pprenticeships, trans. Helen Beauclerk (New York:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), p. 23.

5. M arge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn, ” pp. 421-38, Sis-

terbood Is P ow erful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random

House, 1970), p. 430.

6. Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All T hat, ” 1970, pp. 121-30,

Going Too Far (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 122.

7. Ibid., p. 128.

8. Robin Morgan, “Take a Memo, Mr. Sm ith, ” pp. 68-70, Going

Too F ar, p. 69.

9. Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is P ow erful, p. 559.

10. Jim Douglass, “Patriarchy and the Pentagon Make Abortion

Inevitable, ” Sojourners, November 1980, p. 8.

4. J e w s a n d Ho m o s e x u a l s

1. Maimonides, “Book of Holiness, ” fifth book of the Code of

Law, in Sex Ethics of Maimonides, ed. Fred Rosner (New York:

Bloch Publishing Company, 1974), p. 101.

2. Utah Delegation, “Utah Delegation Challenges the IWY, Resents Smear Tactics, ” press release, no date (but issued at conference November 1 8 - 2 1 , 1977), mimeographed.

3. From the public law mandating the conference, cited by

National Commission on the Observance of International

Women’s Year, Press Release 103, September 1977, mimeographed, pp. 1-2.

4. IWY Press Release 103, p. 3.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew , trans. George J. Becker.

(New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p. 10.

7. Ibid., p. 13.

8. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf‘ trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), p. 325.

9. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass,

vol. 4, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 194.

10. Ibid., p. 195.

11. Ibid., p. 492.

12. Ibid., p. 493.

13. Maimonides, Sex Ethics of Maimonides, pp. 9 7 - 9 8 .

14. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, undated m s., Schlesinger L ibrary,

cited by Linda Gordon, Woman's B ody, Woman's R ight (New

York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), p. 145.

15. Phyllis Schlafly, The P ow er o f the P ositive Woman (New Rochelle, N . Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1977), p. 47.

5. T h e C o m in g G y n o c id e

1. John Langdon Davies, A Short History of Women, cited by V irginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace

& W orld, 1957), p. 116.

2. Adolf H itler, 1934, cited by Clifford Kirkpatrick, Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Mer-rill Com pany, 1938), pp. 111-12.

3. W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land (Baltimore:

T he Johns Hopkins U niversity Press, 1979), p. 94.

4. Bruce C. Vladeck, Unloving Care: The Nursing Home Tragedy

(New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 3.

5. Ibid., p. 4.

6. M uriel N ellis, The Female Fix (New York: Penguin Books,

1981), p. 68.

7. Ibid., pp. 1-2.

8. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the

Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books,

1972), p. 138.

9. Roland A. Chilton, Consequences of a State Suitable Home Law fo r

ADC Families in Florida (Tallahassee: Florida State University/

Institute for Social Research, 1968), p. 65, cited in Piven and

Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 140.

10. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York:

Grossman Publishers, 1976), p. 311.

11. W illiam Acton, Prostitution (New York: Frederick A. Praeger,

Publishers, 1969), p. 26.

12. Josephine Butler, cited by Kathleen B arry, Female Sexual Slavery (Englewood Cliffs, N. J .: Prentice-Hall, 1979), p. 25.

13. Elizabeth C ady Stanton, “The Solitude of S elf, ” in History

of Woman Suffrage, vol. IV , ed. Susan B. Anthony and Ida

Husted H arper (New York: Source Book Press, 1970), p. 189.

14. Abram Tertz, The Trial Begins, cited by Richard Lourie, Letters

to the Future: An Approach to Sinyavsky-Tertz (Ithaca, N . Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 91.

15. Hipponax of Ephesus, cited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and

Maureen B. Fant, ed., Women in Greece and Rome (Toronto:

Samuel-Stevens, 1977), p. 18.

6. A n t ife m in ism

1. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, N . Y.: Arlington House Publishers, 1977), p. 166.

2. Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, October 30,

1851, Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights, ed. Philip S. Foner

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 55.

Index

Abortion, 7 1 - 1 0 5

Adam, 144, 192

antifeminism and, 197

Adaptation to prevailing rule, 19

and Communists, 111

Aeschylus, 42

decriminalization of, 9 4 -9 5 , 97

Affirm ative action, 197

dissociation from other women

Aid to Families with Dependent

having had, 73

Children (AFDC), 16 5 -6 7

and hatred, 7 5 -7 7

American Civil Liberties Union,

and hysteria o f men, 74

79 n

illegal, 7 1 - 7 7 , 9 8 - 9 9

Amos, 110

legalized, 9 7 -9 8

Antifeminism, 195 -2 3 7

and Monroe, 18

male-dominant model of, 202,

and Mormon women, 118

2 1 0 - 1 5

and protection o f men’s rights,

separate-but-equal model of,

88

2 0 2 -4 , 215

rape and, 73, 9 9n

right-wing women and, 2 3 1 -3 7

return to illegal, 99, 171, 172

woman-superior model of, 202,

as right, 97

2 0 4 -1 0 , 2 1 5 - 1 6

right-wing view of, 32 -3 3

Anti-Semitism

right-wing women risking illegal,

A d olf Hitler and, 122, 148

104

Christian Right and, 139, 142

right-wing women’s view of

fundamentalist expression of, 33

legal, 10 2 -3

Holocaust and, 12 2 -2 3 , 138

in sixties, 9 4 -9 5 , 9 9 - 1 0 0

Jesus Christ and, 33

social effects o f prohibiting, 192

and Jew s depicted as rapists, 126

as torture for sex, 74

Ku Klux Klan and, 1 1 2 - 1 8 , 142

use o f contraceptives, married

Nazism and, 142#, 1 4 8 -4 9

women and return to illegal,

as passion, 121

2 3 2 » -3 3 »

See also Jew s

at w ill, 149

Asians, 155

See also Birth control; Pregnancy

Assimilation o f Jew s, 14 0 -4 1

Abraham, 131, 137

Austen, Jane, 39

Acton, William, 180

Actress as woman empowered to

Babies, see Children

act, 1 7 - 1 8

Bates, Jerom e, 72

Battery

Califano, Joseph A ., J r., 99

cause of, 143

Carter, Jimmy, 99

incidence of, 223

Cassandra (Nightingale), 38, 45

See also Violence

Cesarean sections, 188

Beecher, Henry Ward, 57#

Charcot, Jean Martin, 152

Beauvoir, Simone de, 44

Chesler, Phyllis, 15

Birth control, 41, 93, 149-50*

Children, 38

232#-33#

and conservatism o f women,

criminal and illegal abortions

1 3 -14

among married women,

effects o f having, 143-48

232#-33#

forcing women to have, 33 (see

illegal abortions and illegal, 73

also Forced sex; Intercourse;

Nazis and, 148, 149

Pregnancy)

principle of opposition to, 103

God and bearing, 144, 145

See also Abortion; Pregnancy

of the sixties, 94

Blacks

welfare for women and their dewith dependent children, 165

pendents, 165-69, 173

Douglass on, finally accepted by

women refusing to bear, deservwhites, 123-24

ing to die, 105

hatred of, as passion, 121

Christ, see Jesus Christ

hurt by, and dying from illegal

Christianity

abortions, 9 8 -9 9

Paul and institutional, 110,

motherhood and respect for, 143

125-27, 135-38

percent o f old, as percent o f pop

See also God; Jesus Christ

ulation, 155

Circumcision, 126

and population control, 148, 149,

Civil rights, 86

151

marital law as violating, 7 8 -7 9

and sixties counterculture, 89, 92

Clafin, Tennessee, 57

and Southern welfare depart

Clitoridectomies, 162

ments, 162-63

Cloward, Richard A ., 162, 167

and welfare, 162-63, 168-72

Colette, 85

Bless This House (Bryant and Green),

Communist Manifesto (Marx and

23, 27

Engels), 56-57

Bodies

Communists, 111, 112

control over own, as premise of

Comstock Law (1872), 57

feminist movement, 97

Conservatism, 13 -17

See also Feminism; Women’s

See also specific related topics

movement

Contraception, 41, 93, 149-50,

Brothel model

232#-33#

of social control and sexual use,

Corea, Gena, 181#, 187#

174-85

Counterculture, 9 1 - 9 7

See also Prostitution

Crawford, Alan, 142#

Bryant, Anita, 23, 2 6 -2 9 , 40 -4 3

Creationism, 142#

Butler, Josephine, 182—83

Creative intelligence, 50-52

Crimes Against Women: Proceedings o f

as o ff limits, 4 8 - 4 9

the International Tribunal

and poverty, 170

(Russell and Van de Ven),

and right-wing Jew s, 140

l\n

Egg

Criminal Abortion (Bates and

contraception “killing, ” 233»

Zawadski), 72

effects o f bringing each to term,

1 7 1 -7 2

legal rights of, 151

Darwin, Charles, 142»

male and fertilized, 7 4 -7 5

David (Hebrew king), 134, 137

and Right to Life groups, 193

Death, 1 8 - 1 9

in vitro fertilization of, 192

abortion and, 104, 105 (see also

See also Fetus

Abortion)

Elderly, the, see Old, the

homosexuals as w orthy of, 111,

Eliot, George, 39

119

Employment, suitable, 167

o f minorities, 9 8 -9 9

Epithets used against women,

racism and, 155

199 -2 0 2

solution o f religion to not want

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

ing, 1 9 0 -9 4

antifeminism and opposition to,

See also Murder

197

Decriminalization o f abortion,

Bryant on, 29 n

9 4 -9 5 , 97

defeat of, 236

DeCrow, Karen, 29 n

and girls going to war, 116

D ’Hericourt, Jenny P., 62, 65, 66

and legalized abortion, 32

Democratic Party, 99

Mississippi women’s view of,

Divine law, 78

117

See also God; Jesus Christ

Mormon women’s view of, 118

Doctors, 15 7 -6 2

purpose of, 98 n

Douglass, Frederick, 12 3 -2 4 , 208

and reproductive freedom,

Dreams o f women, 45

1 1 2 - 1 3

Drugs, 173

Schlafly and, 29, 30

in nursing homes, 15 5 -5 6

Eve, 14 4 -4 5

among women, 15 6 -6 2

Dubrovsky, G ertrude, 154»

Family

Klan protection of, 114, 115

Economic exploitation (force, coer

See also Mothers

cion), 5 7 -5 8 , 6 5 -6 7 , 82, 92,

Family Protection Act, 151, 236

16 2 -6 3 , 170, 2 2 3 -2 4

Farming model

Education

o f social control and sexual use,

denied, to keep women morally

17 4 -7 5 , 1 8 4 -8 6

good, 205

See also Mothers

leaving out inquiry or passion for

Fear

knowing, 4 3 -4 4

Right answer to, 2 1 - 2 3

Fear (cont. )

(see also Forced sex;

Right as built on ignorance and,

Intercourse)

34-35

submission and nature of, 101

See also Religion

See also Male dominance

Female Fix, ^ ( N e llis ) , 156

Forced sex

Femininity, 80-82

as central issue, 80-87

Feminism (and feminists), 195-237

in counterculture, 90, 9 2 -9 3 ,

basic claim o f radical, 59

9 5 -9 6

and breaking sex-class system,

destructiveness of, 105

227

male dominance producing lust

and circle o f crimes in sex-class

for, 129-30

system, 2 2 1-2 6

pornography and, 2 0 8 -9 (see also

end-of-sixties, 95

Pornography)

and Fourteenth Amendment, 98»

protecting men from, 131

hatred of, 195-202

right-wing women and, in mar

Left and, 100 (see also Left, the)

riage, 103 (see also Marriage)

as liberation movement, 2 16 -2 0

See also Intercourse

(see also Women’s movement)

Form, 22, 31

Mormon women and, 118

Fourteenth Amendment, 98

and right-wing women, 103,

Freud, Sigmund, 136, 141, 142,

23 1-3 7

158

and sacrifice o f women, 230-31

Friedan, Betty, 95

solution of, to not wanting to

Fritz, Leah, 23

die, 190-91

Fuller, Ida M ., 152

theoretical integrity of, as essen

Fundamentalism, 33, 14 1-4 3

tial to practice, 220-21

See also Religion

two elements constituting, 220

as unnecessary, 193

Gift of Inner Healing, The

and woman's will, 18

(Stapleton), 23

Fetus

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 14 3-44

submitting to, 78

Give Sorrow Words (Holder), 64

therapeutic Left and, 98

Glasgow, Ellen, 68

See also Egg

God

Force

Bryant and, 27

cultural, 82-83

and childbearing, 144, 145

differential in power as kind of,

and Communists, 111

82 (see also Power)

as god o f males, 84

economic, 5 7 -5 8 , 82, 92,

homosexual rights and, 119

1 6 2 - 6 3 , 170, 223 -2 4

illegal abortion and, 105

physical violence as kind of, 82

o f Jews, as practical, 134-35

(see also Violence)

Jews and Christian, 1 0 9 -10 ,

promiscuity as generalization of,

125-27, 136-38, 141

103

and Klan view o f homosexuality,

required for intercourse, 82-83

115

and lesbians, 107-9

worth of women in, 66, 67

man’s authority over woman’s

See also Family; Mothers

body willed by, 78

Homosexuality

men as, 192

Bryant and, 27, 28

minister’s view of will of, 112

Bryant and Mailer views of,

M. Morgan’s discovery of will of,

compared, 40-41

25

Christians and, 109-11

Paul, Jews and, 136-38

death for, 111, 119

and Right to Life women, 193

hatred and fear of, 121-22

right-wing woman’s view of men

hatred of, as sex hatred, 121

and women before, 117

among Hebrews, 109, 112,

and role of men, 212, 216

127-31, 134, 135

Sodom and Gomorrah and,

as “Jew sickness, ” 115

131-32

and Jews as part of Christian

and trying to please, 23

Right, 139-40

welfare and state as instrument

male (sixties), 90

of, 167

meaning extinction, 143

woman cursed by, 144

a minister’s view of, 107, 110,

See also Jesus Christ

111

Goodman, Emily Jane, 15

Paul’s view of, 125-27, 137, 138

“Goon Squads” (LaRouche), 142#

resolution supporting rights of,

Gordon, Linda, 168

118-19

Green, Bob, 26-28, 29 n

right-wing women’s view of, 117

Gynocide, see Population control;

and Sodom, 133

Reproduction

and terror of extinction, 143-46

See also Lesbianism

Hardy, Thomas, 205

Hospitals, 153

Hate, see Anti-Semitism, Racism,

Human dignity, feminism and one

Sex hatred, and other specific

standard of, 219-20

entries

Human Life Amendment, 151,

Himmler, Heinrich, 148-49

171, 236

Hipponax of Ephesus, 194

Hyde, Henry, 88

Hispanics

Hyde Amendment (1976), 88, 99

control of population of, 148

Hysteria, 158

hurt by, and dying from illegal

abortions, 98-99

in nursing homes, 155

Ideals, 63

as test subject for drugs, 149

Ideas, 40-43, 48-49

and welfare, 170, 171

and right-wing Jews, 141-42

Hitler, Adolf, 122, 148

See also Education; Intelligence

Holder, Maryse, 64

Incest, 223

Holocaust, 122—23, 138

abortion and, 99 n

Home

and Hebrews, 128, 129, 132-34

suitable, 166-67

Incestuous rape, 86-88

Inferno and From an Occult Diary

Jews, 34, 35, 148

(Strindberg), 125»

charges against, in Gospels,

Inquiry (Cranford), 142»

136-38

Inquisition, 138

alnd Christian God, 10 9 -10 ,

Insults, 199-202

125-27, 136-38, 141

Intellect, 50

Christian view of, 109-12

Intelligence, 38-69

Christian women and, 1 19 -2 0

creative, 50-52

expression of hatred of, 33

as energy, 37-38

God of, as practical, 134-35

literacy and, 46—49

hatred of, as passion, 121

moral, 52-55

homosexuality and ancient, 109,

sexual, 5 3-56, 58-61

112, 12 7 -3 1, 134, 135

used to survive men, 39

male dominance among ancient,

See also Education; Ideas

12 8 -3 1, 133-35

Intercourse

right-wing, 139-42

to maintain power and domi

Jonathan, 134

nance, 83-85

Jose Carlos, 38

as measure o f women, 80-82

Judaism, 136, 140, 142, 143

in Old Testament, 128

pregnancy as reason not to have,

Kelley, Abby, 49

103, 104

Kemble, Fanny, 121 n

rape as, not willed and initiated

Ku Klux Klan, 1 1 2 -18 , 142

by women, 60

in sixties, 92

Labor

See also Forced sex

sex, 6 2 -6 9

Israel, 139-41

suitable, 167

welfare and cheap pool of,

Jackson, Jesse, 74, 99

162-63, 168

James, Alice, 49

Labor Statistics, Bureau of, 170

Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 38, 44, 63

Laing, R. D., 75

Jesus Christ

LaRouche, Lyndon, 142»

anti-Semitism and, 33

Lawrence, D. H., 40, 4 2 -4 3

Bryant and, 27, 28

Left, the, 68, 69, 103, 104, 190

and control over women, 192

and abortion rights, 95, 9 9 -1 0 0

Jews and, 10 9 -10 , 125-27,

antifeminism of, 195, 198, 227,

136-38, 141

233-35

and a minister, 107

and counterculture, 9 1 - 9 7

and M. Morgan’s definition of

girls of, wrong about sex and

love, 25

men, 102

Paul and, 126-27, 136-38

and sexual revolution, 8 8 -8 9 ,

as perfect son, 23

209

and Schlafly, 29

Lesbianism

Stapleton surrender to, 2 3 -2 4

antifeminism and, 198, 201

See also God

and Christians, 109, 110, 1 1 9 -2 0

Klan man on, 115

Male-dominant model for social

a minister’s view of, 107-9,

control and sexual use, 202,

1 1 1 - 1 2

210-15

negating reproductive value of

Marcuse, Herbert, 175

women to men, 144

Marital law, 77-80

in Old Testament, 127-28

Marketplace, freedom from sexual

Paul’s view of, 125-27

coercion in, 68

right-wing fear of, 31-32

Marriage, 40

and sex oppression, 224, 226

and abortions, see Abortions

sixties, 90

Bryant, 26-29

See also Homosexuality

as delivery of body to another,

Let's Make Love (film), 17

61

Leviticus, 128-30, 192

economic exploitation through,

Liberation movement, see

224

Feminism; Women’s

economic and sexual profit from,

movement

57-58

Literacy, 46-49

force in, as containable, 103

Lot, 131-32, 134

forced sex in, 85 (see also Forced

Love

sex; Intercourse)

in male-dominant model, 210-12

M. Morgan, 25-26

M. Morgan’s definition of, 25

and mothers of girls of the sixand Right’s promise, 22-23

ties, 100-2

Lovelace, Linda, 63

rape in, 57-60, 77-78, 79»,

Lubitsch, Ernst, 188

85-86, 231-32

Lynching, 124

right-wing women view of, 68,

69, 105

McGovern, George, 99

Stapleton, 23-25

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 29

and women on welfare, 167

MacKinnon, Catharine A., 30», 39

as women’s work, 63-65, 67-69

Mailer, Norman, 18, 37, 41-43,

Marx, Karl, 111, 136, 141, 142,

88, 189

190

Maimonides, 109, 130

Masturbation, 41

Male dominance

Medicaid, 88, 99

“biological origins” of, 46

Mein Kampf (Hitler), 122

among Hebrews, 128-31,

Millett, Kate, 63, 65, 183»

133-35

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory

intercourse to maintain, 83-85

(Bryant), 26, 27

(see also Intercourse)

Money

Jews, Christian Right and, 139,

sex and, 176

142

See also Economic exploitation;

as leading to death, 144

Prostitution

producing lust for forced sex,

Monroe, Marilyn, 17-18

129-30 (see also Forced sex)

Moral intelligence, 52-55

and welfare system, 163-73

Moral sensibility, 206-8

Moralism, 52 -5 4

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 142

Morgan, Marabel, 23, 25 -2 6 , 28,

Nightingale, Florence, 38, 45, 52

40, 43, 56, 233

Nixon, Richard M ., 99

Morgan, Robin, 60, 9 5 -9 6

Nursing homes, 153-56, 172

Moses, 137

Mother Machine, The (Corea), 187#

O ’Brien, Tim, 174

Mothers

Old, the, 172

employable, 163

in nursing homes, 153-56

in farming model, 174-75,

as primarily female, 15 1 -5 4

184-86

Old Testament, see God; Jesus

life, motherhood and, 206

Christ

motherhood, respect and, 143

Ordeal (Lovelace), 63

motherhood as new branch of

Ozick, Cynthia, 41

female prostitution, 18 1-8 8 ,

19 1-92

sexual liberation of, 100-2

Panama Canal Treaty, 2 9 -3 0

surrogate, 181

Paul, 110, 125-27, 135-38

value of women as, 143

Phallus, marriage and, 40

See also Pregnancy; Reproduction

Piercy, Marge, 95

Ms. (magazine), 113, 114

Piven, Frances Fox, 162, 167

Murder

Planned parenthood, 41 #-42#

abortion as, 99

Poe, Edgar Allan, 14

abortion and fear of, 74-75

Population control, 148-51

of sexual intelligence, 55

Pornography, 103, 197, 223

liberation movement and apologists for, 2 19 -2 0

National Commission on the Obin sex-class system, 226-27

servance o f International

of woman-superior model o f anti

Women’s Year, 113

feminism, 20 8 -12

National Enquirer (newspaper), 29#

Pornography: Men Possessing Women

National Organization for Women,

(Dworkin), 122#—23#

29#

Pound, Ezra, 136

National Women’s Conference

Poverty, 163-73

(1977), 31, 1 1 2 -1 9

Power

Nationalist hatreds, 121

differential in, as kind of force,

Native Americans, 155

82 {see also Force)

Nazism, 114#, 122, 142#, 148-49,

intercourse to maintain male,

188

83-85 (see also Intercourse;

Nellis, Muriel, 156, 157

Male dominance)

New Testament, see God; Jesus

Power o f the Positive Woman, The

Christ

(Schlafly), 33

New York Times, The (newspaper),

Pregnancy

29#, 154, 155

as cause o f battery, 143

Newsweek (magazine), 28

as consequence o f submission, 79

in counterculture, 93-94

antifeminist view of, 217-18

drugs and, 157

as better than masturbation, 42 n

forced, 59, 87, 223

comfort in normalcy of hetero

Nietzsche on, 142

sexual, 32

as reason to refuse intercourse,

in counterculture, 96

103, 104 (see also Intercourse)

as expression of accepted sexual

right to terminate, 97 (see also

relation, 87-88

Abortion)

fake opposition to, 85-86

See also Reproduction

feminist view of, 217

Promiscuity

incestuous, 86-88

abortion equated with, 72

incidence of, 196

Left and logic of, 101-2

marital, 57-60, 77-78, 79»,

and right-wing women, 103

85-86, 231-32

Prostitution, 60-61, 223

pornography and, 208-10 (see also

antifeminism and, 197

Pornography)

and brothel model, 174-85

as putting all women in

economic exploitation and, 224

jeopardy, 221

encouraged for women on welsexual freedom and, 60-61

fare, 163-65

as sexual intercourse not willed

literacy of Greek prostitutes, 48

and initiated by women, 60

motherhood as new branch of,

in sixties, 92

181-88, 191-92

in workplace, 67

in sex-class system, 226-27

Rapists

sexual intelligence and, 61

Jews as, 126

and wives, 56-62

racially despised males as,

as women’s work, 63-65, 67, 68

122-24

Prostitution Papers, The (Millett), 63,

Reagan, Ronald, 30a

183*f

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of

Proudhon, Joseph, 65, 66

Public Welfare (Piven and

Psychosurgery, 162

Cloward), 162

Punishment, illegal abortion as de

Reich, Wilhelm, 89

served, 104

Religion

marital law and, 78

solution of, to not wanting to

Racism, 34, 35, 48, 121, 122-24

die, 190-94

and different death rates, 155

See also God; Jesus Christ

economic value of, 162-63

Reproduction

in population control, 149, 150

by men, 172-73

welfare and, 170

selling capacity for, 181-82

See also Blacks; Hispanics

technology to control, 181-88,

Rage, displaced, 34

191-92

Rape, 223

See also Egg; Fetus; Pregnancy

abortion and, 73, 99 n

Reproductive freedom, 29, 97,

as another kind of love, 211

112-13, 149

Right, the

See also Women’s movement

as built on fear and ignorance of

Sexual Politics (Millett), 183#

women, 34-35

Sexual-preference resolution, 31

See also specific related entries

Sexual revolution, 8 8 -9 8 , 209

Right to Life groups, 33, 192-93

Sexual use

Rights c f Women (Ross), 79 n

brothel model of, 174-85 (see also

Rimbaud, Arthur, 43

Prostitution)

Romans (Paul), 10 7 -10 , 125, 126,

farming model of, 174-75,

135

184-86 (see also Mothers)

Room o f One's Own, A (Woolf), 147

male-dominant model of, 202,

Ross, Susan C., 79 n

2 1 0 -1 5

Rules, 22, 31

separate-but-equal model of,

20 2-4, 215

Safety, 22, 31

woman-superior model for, 202,

Sandbach, Mary, 125#

2 0 4 -10 , 2 1 5 - 1 6

Sappho, 147

Shange, Ntozake, 195

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 44, 121

Shelter, 22, 31

Saul (Hebrew king), 134

Sisterhood Is Powerful, 99

Schlafly, Phyllis, 2 9 -3 1 , 117, 145,

Slavery, 123

208

Snuff (film), 150

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 125#

Social control, see Sexual use

Schreiner, Olive, 51

Social environment, general de

Separate-but-equal model for social

scription of, 221, 223

control and sexual use,

Social Security Act (1935), 152

2 02-4, 215

Sperm, 41

Sex

Stalin, Joseph, 188

as labor o f women, 6 2 -6 9

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 59, 174,

women as, 40# {see also Forced

190

sex; Intercourse; Mothers;

Stapleton, Ruth Carter, 2 3 -2 5 , 28

Prostitution)

Steiner, George, 189, 194

Sex-class system, 22 1-2 7

Sterilization, 149, 168, 17 1-7 2 ,

Sex hatred, 121

192, 223

Sex labor, 6 2 -6 9

Strindberg, August, 125#

Sex segregation, 2 0 3 -4

Submission

Sexual domination

before greater strength, 2 1 2 - 1 3

Right and, 34

illegal abortion and, 105

See also Male domination

and nature o f force, 101

Sexual freedom, 6 0 -6 1

reasons for, 79, 193 (see also

and reproductive freedom, 29,

Pregnancy)

97, 1 1 2 -1 3 , 149

of right-wing women, 2 2 -2 9

Sexual harassment, 67

Subordination, internalized and

Sexual intelligence, 5 3 -5 6 , 5 8-59,

eroticized, 84

61

Suffering

Sexual liberation, 100-2

denied, 2 0 -2 1

in illegal abortion, 104, 105

Right promise to restrain, 21

Suicide

sexual coercion by, 78

of Monroe, 18

Virgin, the, 205

Stapleton attempt at, 24

Vladeck, Bruce C., 153, 154

of Woolf, 45

Supreme Court, 71, 73#, 97, 118

Survival, 63, 68, 69

Wages, unequal, 65-67

Walker, Alice, 60#

Talese, Gay, 170

Welfare system, 163-73

Technology to control reproduc

West, Rebecca, 100

tion, 181-88, 191-92

Wharton, Edith, 37

Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky),

Whitman, Walt, 50

193

“Why Is the Negro Lynched? ”

Thackeray, William, 61-62

(Douglass), 124

Thinking Like a Woman (Fritz), 23

Wives

Tilton, Elizabeth, 57#

prostitution and, 56-62

Token women, 213-15

See also Marriage; Mothers;

Tolstoy, Leo, 205

Prostitution

Total Woman, The (Morgan), 23, 25,

Woman-centered sexuality, 81

40#, 233

Woman-superior model for social

Tradition, conforming to, 14

control and sexual use, 202,

204-10, 215-16

Unloving Care: The Nursing Home

Woman's Body, Woman's Right

Tragedy (Vladeck), 153

(Gordon), 168

Women, Money, and Power (Chesler

Value(s)

and Goodman), 15

based on conformity, 81

Women’s movement, 29

catering to system of, 14, 21, 25

antifeminism opposing, 217-20

human dignity as, 219-20

male-dominant model used to

necessity for women to be destop, 210-17

fined in terms of having

a minister’s view of, 111

children as, see Mothers

and Nazis, 148

and reproductive freedom, 29,

origin of sixties, 96-97

97, 112-13, 149

See also Feminism

See also Male dominance

Woodhull, Victoria, 56, 58-61, 66,

Violence

68

in Bryant’s life, 27

Woodhull and Clafin's Weekly

conforming and protection

(newspaper), 57

against, 14-17

Woolf, Virginia, 37, 39, 45-46, 49,

in counterculture, 92

67-68, 147

male sexual, and right-wing view

Worship of women, 205-7

of lesbians, 32

physical, as kind of force, 82 (see

also Force)

Zawadzki, Edward S., 72

Content

Dworkin Andrea Right-wing Women