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