Right-wing Women

sexual pleasure for the female or the male, in that pleasure does not

prohibit intercourse but neither does pleasure demand it. Intercourse is synonymous with sex because intercourse is the most systematic expression of male power over women’s bodies, both concrete and emblematic, and as such it is upheld as a male right

by law (divine and secular), custom, practice, culture, and force.

Because intercourse so consistently expresses illegitimate power,

unjust power, wrongful power, it is intrinsically an expression of

the female’s subordinate status, sometimes a celebration of that status. The shame that women feel on being fucked and simultaneously experiencing pleasure in being possessed is the shame of having acknowledged, physically and emotionally, the extent to

which one has internalized and eroticized the subordination. It is a

shame that has in it the kernel of resistance. The woman who says

no to her husband, whatever her reasons, also says no to the state,

no to God, no to the power of men over her, that power being both

personal and institutional. Intercourse is forced on the woman by a

man, his state, his God, and through intercourse an individual is

made into a woman: a woman is made. Whether a woman likes or

does not like, desires or does not desire, to be made a woman does

not change the meaning of the act. “There are many scarcely

nubile girls, ” wrote Colette, “who dream of becoming the show,

the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man.

It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfilment, a morbid

thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and

coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books and sticking

pins into the palm of the hand. ”4

Forced intercourse in marriage— that is, the right to intercourse

supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.

Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual

expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when

rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As

soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in

a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an

inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the

relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned

and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no

context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the

woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has

been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force

against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to

force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between

sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to

refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use

have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and

properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual

compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the

society’s commitment to forced sex is real: marriage defines the

normal uses to which women should be put, and marriage institutionalizes forced intercourse. Consent then logically becomes mere passive acquiescence; and passive compliance does become the

standard of female participation in intercourse. Because passive acquiescence is the standard in normal intercourse, it becomes proof of consent in rape. Because force is sanctioned to effect intercourse

in marriage, it becomes common sexual practice, so that its use in

sex does not signify, prove, or even—especially to men—suggest

rape. Forced intercourse in marriage, being both normal and state-

sanctioned, provides the basis for the wider practice of forced sex,

tacitly accepted most of the time. Forced intercourse in marriage as

the norm sanctioned by the state makes it virtually impossible to

identify (male) force or (female) consent; to say what they are so as

to be able to recognize them in discrete instances. The state can

and does make distinctions by category—for instance, sex with little girls is off limits—but no finer kind of distinction can be made because that would require a repudiation of force as a part of normal sex. Since the nearly universal acceptance of forced intercourse in marriage is a kind of universal callousness—an agreement as to

the disposition of married women’s bodies, thereby annihilating

any conception of their civil or sexual rights or any sensitivity to

force in sex as a violation of those women’s rights—it is easy to

extend the callous acceptance of men’s civilly guaranteed right to

use force to get sex to broader categories of women, also to girls,

and this has happened. There is the belief that men use force because they are men. There is the belief that women like force and respond to it sexually. There is the belief that force is intrinsically

sexy. There is the conceit that the married woman is the most

protected of all women: if force is right with her, with whom can it

be wrong? if a man does to another woman what he does to his

wife, it may be adultery but how can it be rape when in fact it is

simply—from his point of view— plain old sex? There is the definition of when a girl becomes a woman: a girl may be considered

adult because she has menstruated (at the age of ten, for instance)

or because she has a so-called provocative quality, which means

that a man wants to fuck her and that therefore she is presumed to

be a woman and to have adult knowledge of what sex is and what a

woman is. There is the definition of the female in terms of her

function, which is to be fucked; so it may be unfortunate that she

is fucked too early, but once fucked she has fulfilled a preordained

function as a woman and therefore is a woman and therefore can

legitim ately be fucked.

With respect to pregnancy, if a woman can be forced to bear a

child conceived by force in marriage, there is no logic in differentiating pregnancy as a result of rape or incestuous rape. Force is the norm; pregnancy is the result; the woman has no claim to a respected identity not predicated on forced intercourse— that is, at best her dignity inheres in being a wife, subject to forced intercourse and therefore to forced pregnancy; w hy would any woman’s body be entitled to more respect than the married woman’s? Rape,

rarely credited as such by men unless the display of force has been

brutal almost beyond imagining, is in fact an exaggerated expression of a fully accepted sexual relation between men and women; and incestuous rape adds a new element of exaggeration, but the

essential sexual relation— the relation of force to female— remains

the same. Therefore, men—especially men responsible for maintaining the right and role of sexual force in marriage (lawmakers and theologians)— cannot consider pregnancy resulting from rape

or incestuous rape as significantly different from pregnancy that results from the normal use of a married woman; and in their frame of reference regarding intercourse, it is not. The woman’s function

is to be fucked— and if she is pregnant, then she was fucked, no

matter what the circumstance or the means. Being fucked did not

violate her integrity as a woman because being fucked is her integrity as a woman. Force is intrinsic to fucking, and the state cannot allow women to determine when they have been raped (forced),

because rape (force) in marriage is supported by the state. The

willingness to consider rape or incestuous rape exceptions at all

comes from the male recognition that a man might not want to

accept the offspring of another man’s rape as his own; a father may

not want to be both father and grandfather to the daughter of his

daughter. These exceptions, to the extent that they are or will be

honored in legislation forbidding abortion, exist to protect men.

Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment forbidding Medicaid money to poor women for abortions and opponent of all abortion under all circumstances without exception for rape, was asked by a television interviewer if he would insist that his daughter

carry a pregnancy to term if she were pregnant as the result of

rape. Yes, he answered solemnly. But the question he should have

been asked was this one: suppose his wife were pregnant as the

result of rape? This would impinge not on his sentimentality, but

on his day-to-day right of sexual possession; he would have to live

with the rape and with the carnal reality of the rape and with the

pregnancy resulting from the rape and with the offspring or the

damaged woman who would have to bear it and then give it up.

Regardless of his answer to the hypothetical question, only the

male sense of what is at stake for him in actually having to accept a

pregnancy caused by rape or incestuous rape in his own life as a

husband to the woman or girl involved could make the rape or the

woman raped real. Abortion can protect men, and can be tolerated

when it demonstrably does. In terms of the woman used, herself

alone, she is her function; she has been used in accordance with her

function; there is no reason to let her off the hook just because she

was forced by a man not her husband.

*

Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with

the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the

wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.

The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more

there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should

fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that

girls should want to be fucked— as close to all the time as was

humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women

got fucked a lot more than men fucked.

Sexual-revolution philosophy predates the sixties. It shows up in

Left ideologies and movements with regularity— in most countries,

in many different periods, manifest in various leftist “tendencies. ”

The sixties in the United States, repeated with different tonalities

throughout Western Europe, had a particularly democratic character. One did not have to read W ilhelm Reich, though some did. It was simple. A bunch of nasty bastards who hated making love

were making war. A bunch of boys who liked flowers were making

love and refusing to make war. These boys were wonderful and

beautiful. T hey wanted peace. T hey talked love, love, love, not

romantic love but love of mankind (translated by women: humankind). T hey grew their hair long and painted their faces and wore colorful clothes and risked being treated like girls. In resisting going

to war, they were cowardly and sissies and weak, like girls. No

wonder the girls of the sixties thought that these boys were their

special friends, their special allies, lovers each and every one.

The girls were real idealists. T hey hated the Viet Nam W ar and

their own lives, unlike the boys’, were not at stake. T hey hated the

racial and sexual bigotry visited on blacks, in particular on black

men who were the figures in visible jeopardy. The girls were not

all white, but still the black man was the figure of empathy, the

figure whom they wanted to protect from racist pogroms. Rape

was seen as a racist ploy: not something real in itself used in a

racist context to isolate and destroy black men in specific and strategic w ays, but a fabrication, a figment of the racist imagination.

The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them

had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists

especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that

they even thought it was intended for them too. They knew that

their mothers were not free—they saw the small, constrained,

female lives—and they did not want to be their mothers. They

accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more

than any other idea or practice, made them different from their

mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so

much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their

pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the longhaired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere.

This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which

their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same

time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible

home. In other words, the girls did not leave home in order to find

sexual adventure in a sexual jungle; they left home to find a

warmer, kinder, larger, more embracing home.

Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number

of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group

sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of

gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck

had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred—it

occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed

with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because

heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to

be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream

for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy

that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality

based on what men and women had in common, what the adults

tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a

sexual community more like childhood— before girls were crushed

under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence:

transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the

adults who made w ar not love. It was— for the girls— a dream of

being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling

equality, not the traditional male dominance.

Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make

it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man,

did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the

war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in

what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction. ” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,

they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:

fucking. The men grew more m anly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women— found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his

buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and

hers too)— traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,

turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated

into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose— it turned

out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,

and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was

an intensification of the experience of being sexually female— the

precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for

themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety

of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the

impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. T hey

discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,

ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were

characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex

as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female

fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.

In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and

practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an

issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and

it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not

climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of

and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.

When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored,

often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman

white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was

likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When

a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to

describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist.

When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of

recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and

white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given

time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them.

A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not

jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of

rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against

her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the

counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that

force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women

would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so

that it was repression, not force, that stood in the w ay of freedom.

Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-

intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor

did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of

women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited

that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by

more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No

persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of

women, unless the women themselves were blamed— usually for

not com plying in the first place. These were in the main women

who wanted to com ply—who wanted the promised land of sexual

freedom— and still they had lim its, preferences, tastes, desires for

intim acy with some men and not others, moods not necessarily

related to menstruation or the phases of the moon, days on which

they would rather work or read; and they were punished for all

these puritanical repressions, these petit bourgeois lapses, these

tiny exercises of tinier wills not in conformity with the w ills of

their brother-lovers: force was frequently used against them, or

they were threatened or humiliated or thrown out. No diminution

of flower power, peace, freedom, political correctness, or justice

was seen to be im plicit in the use of coercion in any form to get

sexual compliance.

In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture, pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male

demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross,

preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties,

the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was

sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access

to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion

was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for

saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced or persuaded aw ay, even by the most astute or dazzling ar­

gument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway

were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever

they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however

much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had

consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men

nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality, and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy was the esteem in which “natural” women were held—women who

were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no

birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables

too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children, to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional ways for bearing the children—they were not labeled “bad” or

shunned—but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her

child—poor and relatively outcast—wandering within the counterculture changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got

in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck—and the

fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with

children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned,

a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal.

Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to

fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their

own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want

to die.

It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s—not only for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.

The decriminalization of abortion—for that was the political goal

—was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible, absolutely “free. ” The sexual revolution, in order to work, required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were

not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting

laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the w ay

great numbers of boys and men had always wanted— lots of girls

who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it aw ay.

The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued

for and even organized for and even provided political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The Left was m ilitant on the issue.

Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms— women who had been both politically and sexually active— became radical in new terms: they became

feminists. T hey were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. T hey had

fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them

were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights,

and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and

lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a

1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:

Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of

what passes for common practice in many places. A man can

bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and

remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for

no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up,

or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a

ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for

no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent

with her. If a macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied

by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that

anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5

Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and

he’s our friend. And dangerous. ” 6 Acknowledging the forced sex

so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if

she didn’t want to be raped. ” 7 These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded

women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used

women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers—they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing

that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually

exploited women within the movement. “But surely, ” wrote Robin

Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize

that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’—supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around

and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks— he's talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical? ” 8

It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister

but master-servant—that this brave new radical wanted to be not

only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem—that

proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they

had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual

liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another—something not done even when they had shared the same bed with the same man—and discovered that their experiences had

been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power:

they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were

revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but

even more important they hated the women for refusing to service

them anymore on the old terms— there it was, revealed for what it

was. The women left the men— in droves. The women formed an

autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to

fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight

for the sexual justice they had been denied.

From their own experience— especially in being coerced and in

being exchanged— the women found a first premise for their political movement: that freedom for a woman was predicated on, and could not exist without, her own absolute control of her own body

in sex and in reproduction. This included not only the right to

terminate a pregnancy but also the right to not have sex, to say no,

to not be fucked. For women, this led to many areas of sexual

discovery about the nature and politics of their own sexual desire,

but for men it was a dead end— most of them never recognized

feminism except in terms of their own sexual deprivation; feminists

were taking aw ay the easy fuck. T hey did everything they could to

break the back of the feminist movement— and in fact they have

not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of

heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an

intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who

could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion?

The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s

right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme

indifference.

Material resources dried up. Feminists fought the battle for decriminalized abortion— no laws governing abortion—on the streets and in the courts with severely diminished male support. In 1973,

the Supreme Court gave women legalized abortion: abortion regulated by the state.

If before the Supreme Court decision in 1973 leftist men expressed a fierce indifference to abortion rights on feminist terms, after 1973 indifference changed to overt hostility: feminists had the

right to abortion and were still saying no— no to sex on male terms

and no to politics dominated by these same men. Legalized abor­

tion did not make these women more available for sex; on the contrary, the women’s movement was growing in size and importance and male sexual privilege was being challenged with more intensity, more commitment, more ambition. The leftist men turned from political activism: without the easy lay, they were not prepared to engage in radical politics. In therapy they discovered that they had had personalities in the womb, that they had suffered

traumas in the womb. Fetal psychology—tracing a grown man’s

life back into the womb, where, as a fetus, he had a whole human

self and psychology—developed on the therapeutic Left (the residue of the male counterculture Left) before any right-wing minister or lawmaker ever thought to make a political stand on the right of

fertilized eggs as persons to the protection of the Fourteenth

Amendment, which is in fact the goal of antiabortion activists. *

The argument that abortion was a form of genocide directed particularly at blacks gained political currency, even though feminists from the first based part of the feminist case on the real facts and

figures—black and Hispanic women died and were hurt disproportionately in illegal abortions. As early as 1970, these figures were

*The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, has five sections, the first

of which is crucial here, the second of which is interesting. Section 1: “All

persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge

the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any

State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process

of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection

of the laws. ” The second section guarantees the vote to all males. It was

purposely written to exclude women. Even though women have subsequently been given the vote, laws in the United States routinely abridge the privileges and immunities of women and deprive women of liberty and

property (there are still states in which married women cannot own property on their own)— and women do not have equal protection of the laws.

The fetus, once legally a “person, ” would have all the protections guaranteed by this amendment but not in practice extended to women. The Equal Rights Amendment was in large part an effort to extend the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to women.

available in Sisterhood Is P ow erfu l: “4 . 7 times as many Puerto Rican

women, and 8 times as many black women die of the consequences

of illegal abortions as do white women. . . In New York C ity, 80

percent of the women who die from abortions are black and

brown. ”9 And on the nonviolent Left, abortion was increasingly

considered m urder— murder in the most grandiose terms. “Abortion is the domestic side of the nuclear arms race, ” 10 wrote one male pacifist in a 1980 tract not at all singular in the scale and

tone of its denunciation. Without the easy fuck, things sure had

changed on the Left.

The Democratic Party, establishment home of many Left

groups, especially since the end of the 1960s ferment, had conceded abortion rights as early as 1972, when George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon and refused to take a stand for abortion

so that he could fight against the Viet Nam War and for the presidency without distraction. When the H yde Amendment cutting off Medicaid funding for abortions was passed in 1976, * it had

Jesse Jackson’s support: he had sent telegrams to all members of

Congress supporting the cutoff of funds. Court challenges delayed

the implementation of the H yde Amendment, but Jim m y Carter,

elected with the help of feminist and leftist groups in the Democratic Party, had his man, Joseph A. Califano, J r ., head of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, halt federal funding of abortion by administrative order. By 1977 the first documented death of a poor woman (Hispanic) from an illegal abortion had occurred: illegal abortion and death were again realities for

women in the United States. In the face of the so-called human-life

amendment and human-life statute— respectively a constitutional

amendment and a bill of law defining a fertilized egg as a human

being— the male Left has simply played dead.

The male Left abandoned abortion rights for genuinely awful

* Except when the mother’s life is at stake in the original version (Hyde’s

version); as amended in the Senate, also in cases o f rape and incest.

reasons: the boys were not getting laid; there was bitterness and

anger against feminists for ending a movement (by withdrawing

from it) that was both power and sex for the men; there was also

the familiar callous indifference of the sexual exploiter—if he

couldn’t screw her she wasn’t real.

The hope of the male Left is that the loss of abortion rights will

drive women back into the ranks—even fear of losing might do

that; and the male Left has done what it can to assure the loss. The

Left has created a vacuum that the Right has expanded to fill—this

the Left did by abandoning a just cause, by its decade of quietism,

by its decade of sulking. But the Left has not just been an absence;

it has been a presence, outraged at women’s controlling their own

bodies, outraged at women’s organizing against sexual exploitation,

which by definition means women also organizing against the sexual values of the Left. When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back—begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their

legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms,

as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except

at risk of death.

And the boys of the sixties did grow up too. They actually grew

older. They are now men in life, not just in the fuck. They want

babies. Compulsory pregnancy is about the only way they are sure

to get them.

*

Every mother is a judge who sentences the children

for the sins of the father.

Rebecca West, The Judge

The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives:

they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent

about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a w ife’s attitude

toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy,

fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as

a class— be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men— and

at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the

girls for sex, it was hard for the girls to understand how to like

boys and men without also liking the sex boys and men wanted.

The girls were told nice things about human sexuality and also told

that it would cost them their lives—one w ay or another. The

mothers walked a tough line: give the girls a good attitude, but

discourage them. The cruelty of the ambivalence communicated

itself, but the kindness in the intention did not: mothers tried to

protect their daughters from many men by directing them toward

one; mothers tried to protect their daughters by getting them to do

what was necessary inside the male system without ever explaining

why. T hey had no vocabulary for the w h y— w hy sex inside marriage was good but outside marriage was bad, w hy more than one man turned a girl from a loving woman into a whore, w hy leprosy

or paralysis were states preferable to pregnancy outside marriage.

T hey had epithets to hurl, but no other discourse. Silence about

sex in marriage was also the only w ay to avoid revelations bound to

terrify— revelations about the quality of the mothers’ own lives.

Sexual compliance or submission was presented as the wife’s natural function and also her natural response to her sexual circumstance. That compliance was never seen or presented as the result of actual force, threatened force, possible force, or a sexual and

social cul-de-sac. It has always been essential to keep women

riveted on the details of submission so as to divert women from

thinking about the nature of force—especially the sexual force that

necessitates sexual submission. The mothers could not ward off the

enthusiasm of sexual liberation— its energy, its hope, its bright

promise of sexual equality— because they could not or would not

tell what they knew about the nature and quality of male sexuality

as they had experienced it, as practiced on them in marriage. T hey

knew the simple logic of promiscuity, which the girls did not: that

what one man could do, ten men could do ten times over. The girls

did not understand that logic because the girls did not know fully

what one man could do. And the mothers failed to convince also

because the only life they offered was a repeat version of their own:

and the girls were close enough to feel the inconsolable sadness and

the dead tiredness of those lives, even if they did not know how or

why mother had gotten the way she was. The girls, having been

taught well by their mothers to like men because they were men,

picked flower-children boys over their mothers: they did not look

for husbands (fathers) as dictated by convention but for brothers

(lovers) as dictated by rebellion. The daughters saw the strained

silence of their mothers on sex as a repudiation of the pleasure of

sex, not as an honest though inarticulate assessment of it. The disdain, disapproval, repugnance for sex was not credited as having any objective component. What their mothers would not tell them

they could not know. They repudiated the putative sexual conservatism of their mothers for so-called sexual radicalism: more men, more sex, more freedom.

The girls of the counterculture Left were wrong: not about civil

rights or the Viet Nam War or imperial Amerika, but about sex

and men. It is fair to say that the silence of the mothers hid a real,

tough, unsentimental knowledge of men and intercourse, and that

the noisy sexuality of the daughters hid romantic ignorance.

Times have changed. The silence has been shattered—or parts

of it have been shattered. Right-wing women defending the traditional family are public; they are loud and they are many. Especially they are loud about legal abortion, which they abhor; and what they have to say about legal abortion is connected to what

they know about sex. They know some terrible things. Right-wing

women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They

saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easier fucks—

first the political use of the issue and then, after legalization, the

actual use of the medical procedure. When abortion was legal, they

saw a massive social move to secure sexual access to all women on

male terms— the glut of pornography; and indeed, they link the

two issues, and not for reasons of hysteria. Abortion, they say,

flourishes in a pornographic society; pornography, they say, flourishes in what they call an abortion society. What they mean is that both reduce women to the fuck. T hey have seen that the Left only

champions women on its own sexual terms— as fucks; they find the

right-wing offer a tad more generous. T hey are not dazzled by the

promise of abortion as choice, as sexual self-determination, as

woman’s control of her own body, because they know that the

promise is crap: as long as men have power over women, men will

not allow abortion or anything else on those terms.

Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion

makes easier, the generalizing of force. T hey see force in marriage

as essentially containable—contained within the marriage, limited

to one man at a time. T hey try to “handle” him. T hey see that

limitation—one man at a time— as necessary protection from the

many men who would do the same and to whom they would be

available on sexual-liberation terms— terms fortified and made genuinely possible by abortion rights. With all their new public talk, they continue the traditional silence of women in that they are silent about forced sex in marriage: but all they do is predicated on a knowledge of it, and they do not see how more force is better than

less force— and more men means more force to them.

Right-wing women accuse feminists of hypocrisy and cruelty in

advocating legal abortion because, as they see it, legal abortion

makes them accessible fucks without consequence to men. In their

view, pregnancy is the only consequence of sex that makes men

accountable to women for what men do to women. Deprived of

pregnancy as an inevitability, a woman is deprived of her strongest

reason not to have intercourse. Opposition to birth control is based

on this same principle.

Right-wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the male Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not

have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they

want. They know that abortion on strictly self-actualizing terms

for women is an abomination to men—left-wing men and right-

wing men and gray men and green men. They know that every

woman has to make the best deal she can. They face reality and

what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or

not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men; abortion in the

open takes away pregnancy as a social and sexual control over men;

once a woman can terminate a pregnancy easily and openly and

without risk of death, she is bereft of her best way of saying no—

of refusing the intercourse the male wants to force her to accept.

The consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will. The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she

has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he

will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages;

and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house.

If in order to keep pregnancy as a weapon of survival she has to

accept illegal abortion and risk death, she will do it—alone, in silence, isolated, the only reproach for her rebellion against actual pregnancy being death or maiming. In this mess of illegal abortion,

she will have confirmed what she has been taught about her own

nature as a woman and about all women. She deserves punishment; illegal abortion is punishment for sex. She feels shame: she may consider it the shame of sex but it is in part the shame that

any human in captivity feels in being used—women being used in

sex feel shame inseparable from sex. The shame will confirm that

she deserves suffering; suffering in sex and birth and aborted birth

is the curse of her sex; illegal abortion is deserved suffering. But

illegal abortion also serves her because it puts abortion out of sight.

No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice,

choosing not to be a mother. No one must face women openly with

priorities other than marriage and conformity. No one must face a

woman refusing to be bound by pregnancy. The women who rebel

against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.

With illegal abortion life or death is up to God: each time, one

submits to the divine hand, divine finger on divine revolver pointed

at the already bloody flesh of a woman, divine Russian roulette. It

is a final, humiliated submission to the will of a superior Male who

judges absolutely. Death is a judgment and so is life. Illegal abortion is an individual hell; one suffers, does penance: God decides; life is forgiveness. And no one need face it until it happens to

her— until she is the one caught. This is the w ay in which women

are moral idiots in this system: ignoring whatever has to do with

other women, all women, until or unless it happens to oneself.

Right-wing women also believe that a woman who refuses to bear a

child deserves to die. Right-wing women are prepared to accept

that judgment against themselves; and when they survive, they are

guilty and prepared to pay— to m artyr themselves for an act of will

to which they had no right as women. There is no better measure

of what forced sex does to women— how it destroys self-respect

and the w ill to survive as a self-determining human being— than

the opposition of right-wing women to legal abortion: to what they

need to save themselves from being butchered. The training of a

girl to accept her place in sex in marriage and the use of a woman

in sex in marriage means the annihilating of any will toward self-

determination or freedom; her personhood is so demeaned that it

becomes easier to risk death or maiming than to say no to a man

who will fuck you anyw ay, with the blessings of God and state, ’til

death do you part.

4

Jews and Homosexuals

A minister from Oklahoma, dressed in a shiny brown polyester

suit, hair greased down even shinier than the shiny suit, smile from

ear to ear even shinier than the shiny hair, was picketing, leaf-

leting, and preaching outside the Sam Houston Coliseum in

Houston. He was full of love for the Lord, love for his neighbors,

the love of Christ; it was sin he hated, especially when it was embodied in the filthy lesbians who had come to Houston to destroy the work of God. He kept preaching to the feminists converging on

the Coliseum that nothing was as loathsome as homosexuality; but

in women! to contemplate the abomination in women whom God

commanded to obey their husbands as Christ was so repugnant to

this minister that he predicted God might call down the walls of

the Coliseum then and there. I approached him alone to talk as

other women ignored him entirely. I asked him what he thought of

the high-spirited, vital women going in: did they all seem evil and

loathsome? could he tell which were lesbians and which were not?

what kind of harm did lesbians do to other people? if lesbians did

no one harm (for instance, did not murder, did not rape), w hy was

he, a minister, called on to denounce lesbians? was not this particular sin, so singularly lacking in malice, better left to God to judge?

why did lesbians provoke not only God’s judgment but also the

minister’s wrath? He referred to these passages from Romans: *

*The translation quoted is the King James Version. However, the phrases

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an

image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-

footed beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through

the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies

between themselves;

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped

and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed

for ever. Amen.

For this cause God g a v e them up unto vile affections: fo r even their

women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; *

And likewise also the m en, leaving the natural use o f the w om an,

burned in their lust one tow ard another; men w ith men working that

which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence o f their

error which was meet. (Italics mine)

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; t

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, t deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, convenant breakers, without natural

affection, implacable, unmerciful:

Who knowing the ju d gm en t o f God, that they which com mit such

things are w orthy o f death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in

them that do them . % (Italics mine)

Romans 1: 22-32

indicated by a footnote reference are slightly different in the Revised Standard Version and are perhaps clearer in meaning, as shown in the following notes.

* Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and men likewise gave up natural relations with women. . .

* To a base mind and to improper conduct.

X Strife.

§ Though they know' God’s decree that those who do such things deserve

to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.

There is nothing like this in the Old Testament. According to

Maimonides:

Women are forbidden to engage in lesbian practices with one

another, these being the doings o f the land o f E gypt (Lev. 18: 3),

against which we have been warned. . . Although such an act

is forbidden, the perpetrators are not liable to a flogging, since

there is no specific negative commandment prohibiting it, nor

is actual intercourse of any kind involved here. Consequently,

such women are not forbidden for the priesthood on account of

harlotry, nor is a woman prohibited to her husband because of

it, since this does not constitute harlotry. It behooves the

court, however, to administer the flogging prescribed for disobedience, since they have performed a forbidden act. A man should be particularly strict with his wife in this matter, and

should prevent women known to indulge in such practices

from visiting her, and her from going to visit them . 1

I asked the minister how Christians who value obedience to God’s

literal word justified such a radical reinterpretation of the Old Testament. The New Testament, he said, was concealed in the Old Testament; nothing in it was really new in the sense of being original; the New Testament made God’s real meaning clear; the Jew s had become blind to the spirit of the law —enter the Holy Spirit

and the revealed word. I suggested that the anti-Jewish tone of

some of the New Testament might be considered new and that it

was possibly related to what I at least considered a new attitude

toward lesbians: Jew s and female homosexuals, politically united

by damnation for the first time. In Romans, Jew s are abandoned

by God the Father; the covenant of manhood, sealed by circumcision, loses its meaning:

For he is not a Jew , which is one outwardly; neither is that

circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:

But he is a Jew , which is one inw ardly; and circumcision is

that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter. . . *

Romans 2: 28-29

The Gentile gets God’s masculinity (a new God, God the Son)

without an outward mark. The cutting of the penis no longer

means masculinity; it begins to resemble castration. All the feminized creatures—Jews, unnatural women (lesbians), unnatural men (homosexuals)— are linked together in Romans and are promised

God’s “indignation and wrath” (Romans 2: 8). The Jews who obey

the law are replaced by the Christians who know the law not by

learning it but by being it. The first Christian hit list of sinners is

compiled: lesbians, male homosexuals, Jews.

Talk of the Jews animated the minister. He was married to a

Jewish girl. He supported the state of Israel: see Amos, ninth chapter. The Jews were up on his pedestal. But the Jews, I insisted, did not abhor lesbians or forbid lesbian acts or damn or search out or

ostracize lesbians: not by law or by actual practice. Christ, he said

at some length and with no small amount of bitterness, had died

because the Jews had overlooked a lot. The Jews had had some

funny ideas until Paul came along.

But where, I asked him, did he get his sense of personal repugnance? Didn’t I see how vile a sin it was, he asked, referring back to the New Testament, which condemned not only lesbians and all

homosexuals but also those who accepted in others this most

heinous of sins? And didn’t I understand what lesbians and male

homosexuals were by nature: filled with wickedness, covetousness,

maliciousness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; backbiters,

haters of God, inventors of evil things, without natural affection,

unmerciful. Romans, it must be apparent, is not kind in its estimation of homosexuals, male or female. Any Christian who meets homosexuality in the pages of the New Testament for the first time

* Revised Standard Version: “real circumcision is a matter of the heart,

spiritual and not literal. ”

is likely to fear homosexuals, hate homosexuals, and despise any

liberal tolerance for that viciousness that God abhors. The New

Testament damns those who tolerate homosexuality; and the New

Testament does say that homosexuals “are worthy of death. ”

In the course of m y conversation with the minister, a group of

women had gathered around us. The weather was beautiful, the

convention exciting, the women were high on goodwill and feminist dreams of sisterhood and solidarity. The women, it must be said, were nice and happy and enthusiastic and everyone was

pretty from radiant smiles and high hopes. The minister’s style

was nice too—outgoing, sincere, warm, expansive, full of prejudiced conviction but without meanness. He did not want to hurt anyone. He hated sin, and especially he found lesbian sin loathsome; but it was a conviction pure in its detachment from individual human beings— he had never seen one. M any of the women listening giggled as he and I talked. But what about these women, I

asked, or what about me? Are we all damned? Are we bad? Do

you know which of us is lesbian? Are we all full of envy, murder,

strife, deceit, m alignity? Are we without natural affection or unmerciful? He looked up and around and his skin crawled. He reacted to the sight of us suddenly as frightened girls do to mice or bugs or spiders.

The women’s movement, he said, was a communist conspiracy,

an internal poison in America. The communists wanted abortion

legalized in the United States in order to exterminate Americans

and to damn us in God’s eyes. The Russians invented abortion and

they insidiously had the ideology of abortion planted in the United

States by agents and dupes; and the liberals and the Jew s spread

it. And now the communists had new tactics— lesbians in the

women’s movement. It was a Russian plot to turn the United

States into Sodom and Gomorrah so that God would hate the

United States and destroy it and the Russians would win; and

Marx, the anti-Christ, had been a Jew , and a lot of lesbians were

Jew s, he was no anti-Semite, he had married a Jewish girl but

of course she had been baptized and had accepted Christ. The

Bible—meaning the New Testament because the Old Testament

had really become irrelevant since the New Testament fully revealed what had been concealed in the Old Testament—was the only hope for America’s survival because it revealed God’s will. A

strong and righteous nation depends on fulfilling God’s will. God’s

will is that wives obey their husbands, who are as Christ to them.

Husbands must love their wives; wives must obey their husbands.

The feminists in Houston (who were, in fact, entering the Coliseum almost two by two in a sacrilegious if unintentional parody of Noah’s Ark) were part of the communist plan to spread lesbianism,

destroy the family by destroying the wife’s obedience to Christ

through the agency of her husband: the feminists were going to

destroy the United States by spreading evil. The minister’s eyes

were darting in all directions and he seemed visibly sick from the

sudden recognition that the women around him and the woman he

was talking to might actually be lesbians, and some certainly were:

full of malignity, inventors of evil things. I asked him if I could

talk with him again, some other time. He moved away, repelled,

nervous, silent, the rich evangelical blather with which he had

been fulminating when I first encountered him now stopped entirely. He had actually been near some real ones, unnatural, worthy of death.

Inside the Coliseum too there was a right-wing Christian presence. In Mississippi and Utah, official convention delegates not only embodied opposition to all women’s rights, including the

Equal Rights Amendment, but were linked with the Ku Klux

Klan. The Utah delegation, in a press release, denied any association with the Klan and claimed that the sponsors of the conference

“have sought to destroy our credibility by name-calling and trying

to link us with extremist groups like the Ku-Klux Klan. ” The Utah

delegation considered the whole conference a propaganda effort

“carefully designed to quash the views of women opposing the

Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive freedom recommendations. ” 2 The National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY) announced in September, two months before the conference, its decision to uphold the right of all elected

delegates to participate in the convention unless election fraud

could be proven. State elections were supposed to include in the

official delegations “groups which work to advance the rights of

women; and members of the general public, with special emphasis

on the representation of low-income women, members of diverse

racial, ethnic and religious groups, and women of all ages. ” 3 The

true wrath of the IWY Commission was, in fact, for the racist

composition of several of the delegations from right-wing states.

Alabama was cited as a state “whose population is 26. 2 per cent

black, yet w ill be represented in Houston by 24 delegates, 22 of

whom are w hite. ”4 Mississippi stood out as the most vicious violator of the law ’s intent. The IWY Commission characterized M ississippi as “a state whose population is 36. 8 per cent black, and yet will be represented in Houston by an all-white delegation, five of

whom are men, whose election is alleged by local authorities to be

the result of Klanlike activities. ” An individual who identified himself as Grand Dragon of the Realm of Mississippi, United Klans of America, Inc., Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed: “Wre controlled the one [delegation] in M ississippi. ” 5

I interviewed a man from the Mississippi delegation on the convention floor. Press access to the official elected delegates when the convention was in session was tightly controlled. The system of

access strongly favored male reporters, since permanent floor

passes were handed out to dailies, whose representatives were

mostly male. The women’s monthly magazines were low on the

priority list of media coverage: and most of the reporters for those

monthly women’s journals were women. As a result, someone like

myself, representing M s. , had at most a half hour on the floor with

the delegates at any single time, a very long wait for that half hour

of access—and the prospect of being physically thrown out as soon

as one’s time was up. So when I raced in, I raced right over to the

Mississippi delegation.

I asked several women to talk with me. They refused even to

look at me. Whoever managed them disciplined them well. They

were a wall of silence. Finally I approached a man sitting on an

aisle. I said that I was from Ms. magazine and would like to ask

him some questions. I was wearing overalls and a T-shirt, and a

press pass with Ms. in large inked letters was hanging from my

neck. The man laughed and turned to the woman next to him,

whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the woman next to

her and whispered in her ear, she laughed and turned to the

woman next to her and whispered in her ear, and so on down the

row of delegates. The man did not turn back to me until the identification had been passed to the end of the line. Some of the women had not laughed; they had gasped.

I asked the man why he was at the conference. He said that his

wife had wanted him to be there to protect women’s right to procreate and to have a family. I asked him if he was a member of the Klan. He claimed high office in the organization. He talked about

the Klan’s militant role in protecting women from all kinds. He

himself was physically rather slight, not particularly tall, wore

glasses; I suspected I was physically stronger than he was. Many

times during the interview I realized that it would take a white

sheet and all that that white sheet symbolized to hide this man’s

own physical vulnerability to attack. He himself was nondescript;

the Klan was not. When I recognized the fear this man inspired in

me, and measured that fear against his own physical presence, I

felt ashamed: and yet I was still afraid of him . *

*Klan and Nazi groups threatened violence at the convention: we were

promised bombings and beatings. Some women were in fact beaten up,

others were physically threatened, and the possibility of being hurt was

considered both real and immediate by all the conference participants with

whom I talked.

He said that women needed the protection of men. He said that

the Klan had sent men to the convention to protect their womenfolk from the lesbians, who would assault them. He said that it was necessary to protect women’s right to have families because that

was the key to the stability of the nation. He said that homosexuality was a Jew sickness. He said that homosexuality was a lust that threatened to wipe out the family. He said that homosexual

teachers should be found out and run out of any town they were

in. T hey could all go to Jew New York. T ryin g to keep up m y end

of the conversation, I asked him w hy he was against homosexual

teachers, especially if their homosexuality was private. He said that

there was no such thing as private homosexuality, that if homosexuals were in schools, children would be corrupted and tainted and molested and taught to hate God and the fam ily; homosexuality

would claim the women and the children if they were exposed to

it; its presence at all, even hidden, anywhere, would take people

from family life and put them into sin. His description was almost voluptuous in that no one, in his estimation, would remain untouched.

Are you really saying, I asked slowly and clearly and loudly (so

that the women delegates could continue to overhear the conversation), that if homosexuality were openly visible as a sexual possibility or if there were homosexual teachers in schools, everyone would choose to abandon heterosexuality and the family? Are you

really saying, I asked carefully and clearly and slowly, that homosexuality is so attractive that no one would choose the heterosexual family over it? He stared at me, silent, a long time. 1 am afraid of

violence and the Klan, and I was afraid of him. 1 repeated my

questions. “You’re a Jew , ain’t y a , ” he said and turned away from

me, stared straight ahead. All the women in the row who had been

looking at me also turned away and stared straight ahead in utter

silence. The only woman whose head had been otherwise engaged

had not looked up except once: she had taken one hard stare at me

in the beginning and had then turned back to her work: knitting

blue baby booties, the Klan’s own Madame Defarge; and I could

imagine my name being transferred by the work of those hands

from the press pass on my chest into that baby-blue wool. She sat

next to the Klansman, and she knitted and knitted. Yes, I am a

Jew , I said. I repeated my questions. He memorized my face, then

stared straight ahead.

In my few remaining minutes on the floor, I implored the Mississippi women to talk to me. I went hurriedly from row to row, expecting somewhere to find one rebellious sign of interest or simple compassion. One woman dared to speak to me in whispers, but did not dare look at me; instead she looked down into her own lap,

and the woman next to her got jittery and upset and kept telling

her to “think again. ” She whispered that she was against the Equal

Rights Amendment because girls would have to go to war. I said:

we say we love our children but isn’t it true that if we send our

boys to war we can’t love them very much? why are we willing to

have them killed if we love them? At this point the marshals forced

me physically to leave the floor. They did not ask or tell or say,

“Tim e’s up”; they pushed. *

In the face of the Klan and the marshals, I risked one more trip

back to the Mississippi delegation. On the floor, delegates were

milling around; it was a brief recess (but the same strict time limits

applied for journalists). In the sheer confusion of the numbers and

the noise, the discipline of the Mississippi delegation had relaxed

slightly. A Mississippi woman explained to me that as a Christian

woman she was in a superior position, and that this superior position was not to be traded for an equal position. I asked her if she really meant to say that boys were less valuable; and was that why

we sacrificed them in wars— because we didn’t think they were

worth very much? She said that it was the nature of boys to guard

*The system o f press access to the convention floor that favored male

journalists over female was set up by a male “feminist. ” It was outrageously, unashamedly, and inexcusably sex-discriminatory.

and to protect, which included going to war and also taking care of

their families. She was not prepared to say that boys were less

valuable than girls, only that women were superior to men in

Christianity, had a favored place based on and because of the

male’s role as protector. God, she said, wanted her husband to

protect her. The Equal Rights Amendment would force her to take

responsibility for decision making and for money. She did not

want to take this responsibility because to do so would be against

the w ill of God. She then said that she was equal spiritually in

God’s eyes but in no other w ay. I said that seemed to mean that in

every other w ay she was inferior, not superior. She said that feminists want women and men to be the same but that God says they are different. The Equal Rights Amendment would permit homosexuality because men and women would no longer be as different as God wanted them to be. Being homosexual was a sin because

women tried to be the same as men, and homosexuality confused

the differences between men and women, those differences being

the will of God. The recess ended, and with the return of order

(delegates seated and under discipline again) no more talk between

the Mississippi woman and m yself was possible. The marshals approached; don’t you fucking touch me, I said loudly, ending forever the possibility of further conversation with the Mississippi delegation; and I ran out fast so that the marshals fucking wouldn’t

touch me.

The Utah delegation had women supporters who attended the

convention as observers, a non voting status. Most of the right-wing

women did not care to attend the conference unless they were delegates; instead they attended Phyllis Schlafly’s counterconvention in another part of town. I was interested in the Utah women because

they had wanted to show themselves in an arena where they were a

small and unpopular minority. T hey all wore similar black dresses,

mourning I supposed for the unborn, mourning perhaps for us all,

the feminists so ungodly who surrounded them. The Mississippi

delegation had been a unit unto itself, not interacting at all with the

world of people and ideas around them. M y own evaluation was

that indeed the Mississippi delegation had strong Klan participation and leadership; more generally, it was not only male-dominated but male-controlled, almost martially controlled. The Utah

delegation with its supporters who dared to mingle with the enthusiastic feminists who numbered in the thousands acted with a different kind of conviction: the women were especially concerned with stopping abortion; they were passionate advocates of their values, tied to the Mormon Church, perhaps under direct orders, but nevertheless speaking for themselves with emotional conviction. A

state legislator from Utah, an official delegate, was stern, forbidding, serious, and willing to exercise what power she had in the service of her beliefs: the Equal Rights Amendment legalizes abortion; * the Supreme Court, in saying that all women could have abortions, opened the door for the state to say that all women must

have abortions; pro-ERA women are ignorant and malicious; she is

a feminist and introduces legislation in behalf of women, but finds

that pro-ERA feminists do not know what the interests of women

are; the interests of women are in a strong home and strong laws

protecting the family in which the man, not the state, protects the

woman; also the federal government in following any kind of feminist program takes freedom from her directly as a state legislator, which she finds a violation of states’ rights. Another Utah delegate

said she attended the convention because she did not want her tax

money to go to pay for abortion. I asked her about Viet Nam War

tax resisters: they withheld taxes because they did not want their

money to pay for the war; did she withhold taxes to keep her

money from paying for abortion? Yes, she said. Then, as an afterthought, she said that actually she didn’t pay any taxes at all. Did her husband pay them, I asked. She thought so.

During the ratification of the resolution supporting homosexual

rights, I sat in the audience. There was yelling and cheering;

*Sec chapter 1, p. 33, for an explanation of this non sequitur.

balloons were let loose through the whole hall when the resolution

was finally ratified after some debate. The scene was one of wild

exhilaration: the thousands of delegates and observers were celebrating. In the highest balcony I spotted a group of Utah women, dressed in their black dresses all the same, slowly, grim ly exiting.

There were maybe ten of them; they had seen it through to the

end; they were not happy. I raced to the high balcony to talk with

them. It was deserted up there; all the noise was hundreds of feet

below us; them and me.

T hey were somber. How did they feel about this, I asked. It

was horrible, the end of everything, the death of the country, an

affront to God; homosexuality was a sin that deserved death, and

here women had voted for it, were clapping and cheering in behalf

of it. T hey were mortified, ashamed of women, ashamed of the

ignorance of women’s libbers. T hey admitted to never having

known any homosexuals; they admitted that churchgoing men in

their own communities were sexually molesting their own daughters; they admitted that they were surrounded by men who went to church and were at the same time adulterers. I asked them why

then they were afraid of homosexuals. One woman said, “If you

had a child and he was playing out in the street and a car was

coming you would move him out of the w ay, wouldn’t you? W ell,

that’s all we’re trying to do—get homosexuality away from our

children. ” I began to argue that the car coming down the street was

more likely to be a heterosexual male neighbor, or even daddy,

than a male homosexual or a lesbian. One woman stopped being

nice. “You’re a Je w , ” she said, “and probably a homosexual too. ” I

found m yself slowly being pushed farther and farther back against

the balcony railing. I kept trying to turn m yself around as we

talked, to pretend that my position in relation to the railing and the

fall of several hundred feet was not precarious; I kept talking with

them, lowering the threshold of confrontation, searching m y mind

for pacifist strategies that would enable me to maneuver away from

the railing by getting them to turn at least slightly toward it. T hey

kept advancing, pushing me closer and closer to the railing until

my back was arched over it. They kept talking about homosexuals

and Jews. I kept saying pleasant things about how I respected their

religious views; I kept asking them about their own lives and plans

and ideas. They closed in around me. I was completely isolated up

there, and I was getting panicky, they were getting moblike and

intransigent, I kept trying to make myself human for them, they

kept at transforming me into the embodiment of every homosexual

Jew in the hall, the direct cause of their frustration and anger, they

kept saying there was no middle ground and sin had to be wiped

out and they hated sin; and I was deciding that I had better risk

breaking through what had become a menacing gang, breaking

away from the railing by pushing them as hard as I could, knowing

that if I didn’t make it they would start beating on me, when two

dykes, one of whom I knew well, appeared there and just stood,

watching. I made the religious women aware of the presence of the

lesbian women, just standing, watching; and they moved away

slightly, they moved reluctantly backward. I straightened up,

moved away from that dreadful railing. I kept talking and slowly

walked through the group of them, and the two lesbian feminists

and 1 exited. I was shaking a lot. The woman I knew said quietly:

we saw you up there and thought you might be in trouble, you just

kept getting closer and closer to that railing, they were crowding

you pretty bad, you shouldn’t have been up there alone with them.

She was right; but in common with so many other women I did

not take the danger to myself seriously—a self-deprecating habit.

Jew , lesbian, feminist: I knew the hatred was real, but I had not

imagined these apparently docile women hating so much that with

tiny steps they would become a gang: so full of unexamined hate

that they would have pushed me over that railing “accidentally” in

defense of Christianity, the family, and the happily heterosexual,

churchgoing child molester down the block. In my own body, bent

back over that railing, I knew the cold terror of being a homosexual

Jew in a Christian country.

*

“Anti-Sem itism , ” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “does not fall within the

category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. Indeed, it

is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a p a s sio n ”6

The great hatreds that suffuse history, pushing it forward to inevitable and repeated horror, are all first passions, not ideas. Hatred of blacks, hatred of Jew s, and long-standing, intense, blood-drenched nationalist hatreds* are forms of race hatred. Hatred of

women and hatred of homosexuals are forms of sex hatred. Race

hatred and sex hatred are the erotic obsessions of human history:

passions, not ideas. “If the Jew did not exist, ” Sartre wrote, “the

anti-Semite would invent him . ” 7 The carrier of the passion needs

the victim and so creates the victim; the victim is an occasion for

indulging the passion. One passion touches on another, overlays it,

burrows into it, enfolds it, is grafted onto it; the configurations of

oppression emerge.

In patriarchal history, one passion is necessarily fundamental

and unchanging: the hatred of women. The other passions molt.

Racism is a continuous passion, but the race or races abused

change over the face of the earth and over time. The United States

is built on a hatred of blacks. In Western Europe, the Jew is the

primary target. This does not stop the black from being hated by

those who hate Jew s first, or the Jew from being hated by those

who hate blacks first. It means instead that one, and not the other,

signifies for the dominant culture its bottom, its despised, its

expendables. Homosexuality is elevated and honored in some societies, abhorred in others. In societies where hatred of homo­

* Noting the high opinion Amerikan slaveholders had of Irish laborers,

English actress Fanny Kemble wrote in 1839: “How is it that it never

occurs to these emphatical denouncers o f the whole Negro race that the

Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves. . . ” See

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18 3 8 -18 3 9 (New York: New

American Library, 1975), p. 129.

sexuality has taken hold, fear of homosexuality is a terrifically

powerful tool in the social manipulation and control of men: pitting

groups of men—all of whom agree that they must be m en, higher

and better than women—against each other in the futile quest for

unimpeachable masculinity. Hatred of homosexuality makes possible astonishing varieties of social blackmail and male-male conflict.

In racism, the racially degraded male is sexually stereotyped in one

of two ways. Either he is the rapist, the sexual animal with intense

virility and a huge and potent member; or he is desexualized in the

sense of being demasculinized—he is considered castrated (unmanned) or he is associated with demeaning (feminizing) and demeaned (not martial) homosexuality. It is the relationship of the dominant class to masculinity that determines whether males of the

racially despised group are linked with rape or with castration/

homosexuality. If the dominant group insists that the racially

despised male is a rapist, it means that the dominant males are

effeminate by contrast; it is they who are tinged with homosexuality in that they are less manly. They will climb the masculinity ladder by killing or maiming those whom they see as racially inferior but sexually superior. The Nazis transparently craved

masculinity. It was the Jew who had stolen it from them by stealing the women they should have had. According to Hitler in Mein Kampf:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth

lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his

blood, thus stealing her from her people. 8

German men unmanned by their own recent history (World War I)

and a host of social and psychological inadequacies, as exemplified

in their leader, found a savage redemption: the annihilation of a

racial group of men perceived as being more male *—which, in this

*The racist perception of the Jewish woman “as a harlot, wild, promiscuous, the sensuous antithesis of the Aryan female, who was blond and

setting, means more animal, less human, not the human husband

but the animal rapist. This annihilation was an act of mass cannibalism by which one group of men, lacking m asculinity, got it from a mountain of corpses and from the actual killing as well.

In the United States, the black man was characterized as a rapist

after the end of slavery. During slavery, his condition as chattel

was seen to unman him entirely. His degradation was as a sym bolically castrated man; a mule, a beast of burden. (His use as a stud to impregnate black women slaves to increase the slave wealth

of the white master does not contradict this. ) Vis-a-vis the white

man, he was unmanned; and vis-^-vis the white woman he was

unmanned. * Early in Reconstruction, M ay 1866, a fairly optimistic

Frederick Douglass wrote that, though sometimes he feared a genocidal slaughter of blacks by whites, the movement of the former slaves “to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education”9 would lead finally to acceptance by whites. He recognized that even in success there was danger,

for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among

them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The Negro as

a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of

the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race

than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, pure” (see Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women [New*

York: Perigee Books, 1981], p. 147) also exacerbated the conviction that

the racially superior men were not man enough: she provoked them endlessly with her savage eroticism, but they could not tame or satisfy her—

they could not satisfy their craving for what they took her to be.

*The raping, impregnating, and whipping o f black female slaves, women

and girls, affirmed their gender: their slavery was an intensification o f how

men use women, not a contradiction of how women should be used in

terms of sex. Slavery unmanned a man; it sexed a woman, made her even

more absolutely available for sex and sadism. White male sexual domination of her, unrestrained use of her, made Southern white manhood supreme and irrefutable.

and yet I think that that resistance will gradually yield to the

pressure of wealth, education, and high character. 10

By 1894, scores of black men had been murdered, lynched, beaten;

mob violence against black men was frenzied and commonplace.

“Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states, ” Douglass wrote in “Why Is The Negro Lynched? ” published in a pamphlet in 1894, “that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood. ” 11 The white Southerners, deprived of their unmanned

slaves, had found a justification for racist hatred: the black man—

as part of his racial nature—raped white women. “It is a charge of

recent origin, ” wrote Douglass rightly, “a charge never brought

before; a charge never heard of in the time of slavery or in any

other time in our history. ” 12 The end of slavery unmanned the

white slaveowners. It was the former slaves who reminded them at

every turn of that lost manhood, that lost power. It was gone,

someone had taken it; they had been humiliated by the loss of the

war and the loss of their slaves (those who had not owned slaves

were still humiliated by the loss of them). The whites created the

black rapist to reflect what the whites had in fact lost: the right to

systematic rape of women across race lines. The whites created the

black rapist to justify the persecution and killing of black men—

and the literal castration of individuals to stand in for the symbolic

castration of the whole group under them in slavery, the foundation of their sense of male power, the material basis of their male power. Rape has been traditionally viewed as a crime of theft: a

woman stolen from a man to whom she rightfully belongs as wife

or daughter. The black rapist was accused of a crime of theft, only

what he stole was not the white woman; he stole the master’s masculinity. The crime had nothing to do with women— it almost never does. The white men, unmanned, were accusing the black

man of having raped them; the white woman was used as a figurehead, a buffer, a symbolic carrier of sex, a transmitter of sex

man-to-man*— she almost always is.

Jew ish males have experienced many turns of this homophobic

screw. As the putative killers of Christ, it was hard for the “turn-

the-other-cheek” Christians to take m asculinity from them: killing

God is a virile act. But the early Christians did just that. Jew s and

homosexuals are linked together in Romans in a propagandistic,

highly evocative w ay. What has gone wrong? There are lesbians

and male homosexuals, and the Jew ish relationship to God through

law is not enough. Lesbians are explicitly named to make the social

consequences of sin clear: the women have become unnatural; they

are no longer sexually submitting to men. The men are not just

having sex with each other; they are unmanly enough to leave the

women to each other. Naming lesbians provides a frame of reference in which one can gauge the loss of m asculinity inherent in the unnatural acts of men. The unnatural acts of men are seen to lessen

the polarization of the sexes. (In a society that admires male homosexuality, for instance, ancient Greece, these same acts are seen to heighten that polarization by glorifying maleness and so serve male

suprem acy. ) So Paul, in Romans, establishes that homosexuals—

lesbians named first— are full of m alignity and worthy of death and

then goes on to blame the failure of Jew s and Jew ish law for all that

is most odious in the world— nam ely, homosexuality first:

* Strindberg wrote in his diary when his third wife left him: “It is as if,

through her, I was entering into forbidden relationships with men. . .

This torments me, for I have always had a horror o f intimacy with my

own sex; so much so that I have broken off friendly relations when the

friendship offered became o f a sickly nature, resembling love. ” (See

August Strindberg, Inferno and From an Occult Diary, trans. Mary Sand-

bach [New York: Penguin Books, 1979], p. 314. ) He also quotes Schopenhauer: “M y thoughts are led through my woman to the sexual acts of an unknown man. In certain respects she makes a pervert o f me, indirectly

and against my w ill” (p. 310).

And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had

left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like

unto Gomorrha.

What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed

not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even

the righteousness which is of faith.

But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness,

hath not attained to the law of righteousness.

Romans 9: 29-31

The Jew is even insidiously likened to the Greek, that pederast of

universal fame: “For there is no difference between the Jew and the

Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon

him” (Romans 10: 12).

Then there is circumcision. According to Paul, it no longer signifies manly connection with God. Paul’s denunciation of Jewish law virtually effeminizes not only the law—ineffectual against sin

as it is—but the Jew , whose carnality could be restrained or governed by it. Paul’s repudiation of Jewish law sounds almost like a sexual boast: “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am

carnal, sold under sin” (Romans 7 : 14). Anti-Semitism has been so

versatile in so-called Christian societies because the Christians,

nominal or passionate, could exploit the Jews both as killers of

Christ (rapists*) or as overt or covert homosexuals (unmanly,

wicked, deceitful, full of strife, malignity, unnatural; intellectuals

tied to the abstract, ineffective law; smart as men who know the

law are and also devious the way men who know the law are; faithless to God because they engaged in homosexual acts, because women castrated or effeminized them by being lesbian, because

they socially tolerated homosexuality). Early on, Paul understood

that his pacifist God nailed in exemplary masochistic sexual passion

*The sadism o f this deicide establishes a basis for attributing to the Jews

the most vile acts of cruelty, all tinged with sexual sadism: slaughter of

infants to use their blood is a charge that, with rape, reappears cyclically.

to a cross had to offer converts masculinity: otherwise, C hrist’s

suffering would not play in Peoria. The sexual brilliance of the

passion could not hide the morbid fem ininity of the Jew who suffered it— w illingly, as an act of human w ill. It was Paul’s genius to link ineffective and effeminate Jewish law and Jew s with unnatural

homosexuals worthy of death. It was Paul’s genius to exploit Christ

as the prototypical Je w — he suffered like a female, it was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration— and then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, a Christian nature: it dies, then rises. The son, born a Jew , was worthy of death— homosexual as Jew s are, effeminate as Jew s are, with their weak law and tenuous m asculinity. The son resurrected triumphed over the

father and over death. Those who were like him, Christians,

shared in the victory, got closer to the real God (the one who won);

got more masculine than that Jew who had died in unspeakable

agony on the cross because the resurrected Christ was more masculine. The crucifixion without the resurrection would have left Jews and their God the repositories of patriarchal religious authority. The resurrection turned Jews from patriarchs into pansies, except when it was more useful to concentrate on them as the killers of Christ. The simple, cruel, rather monotonous God of the Jews could scarcely compete with the trebled divinity: The Father,

The Son, The Holy Ghost—a father whose son superseded him in

range of affect, emotion, and bravery, and whose Holy Ghost was

purely and ideally phallic and all-penetrating. It was Paul, back on

earth, who established the social ramifications of this religion of

revelation rather than of law for the Jew s who might be queer

enough to cling to one god rather than his trebled usurper: like

homosexuals, you are worthy of death.

*

The Old Testament does not contain the bloodlust against homosexuals and homosexuality found in the New Testament. There is

no mention of lesbians at all. Lesbian acts are inferred to be among

the “doings of Egypt” prohibited in Leviticus. No textual reference

to Gomorrah suggests that it was destroyed because of lesbianism:

this too has been inferred. It is not women who are commanded:

“The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover” (Leviticus 18: 9). All of the

sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, including the prohibition against

male homosexuality, are rules for effectively upholding the dominance of a real patriarch, the senior father in a tribe of fathers and sons. The controlling of male sexuality in the interests of male

dominance—whom men can fuck, when, and how—is the essential in tribal societies in which authority is exclusively male. The rules in Leviticus are blueprints for minimizing intratribal sexual

conflict among men. In chapter 18 of Leviticus, incest is broadly

defined and prohibited; adultery, male homosexuality, intercourse

with a menstruating woman, and intercourse with animals are also

forbidden. In chapter 20 of Leviticus, death by stoning is the sentence “for every one that curseth his father or his mother” (Leviticus 20: 9), for adulterers, for one who has intercourse with his father’s wife or his daughter-in-law, for male homosexuality, for

bestiality. Incest with one’s sister and intercourse with a menstruating woman are not capital crimes: the punishment is being cut off from one’s people. The heinous crime is not in the sexual

act committed per se; it is certainly not in any abuse of women per

se. The heinous crime is in committing a sexual act that will exacerbate male sexual conflict and provoke permanently damaging sexual antagonism in the tribe among men. For the Hebrews, sexual transgression that warranted death had the potential, if widely

practiced, to cause the erosion of the power of men as a class by

creating internecine sexual warfare within the class. The subordination of women was a means to male social cohesion. The regulation of that subordination through a regulation of male sexual behavior was straightforward and eminently practical: men were

supposed to sacrifice some measure of pleasure to maintain power.

Incest with one’s sister did not incite male-male conflict so much as

did intercourse with one’s daughter-in-law or with the wife of one’s

father. Therefore, the punishment was not death by stoning. The

prohibitions in Leviticus on sexual practices are without exception

shrewd and pragmatic in these terms. All of the prohibitions further the aims of male dominance in the patriarchal tribe and contribute to the stability of male power. This is true too of the oft quoted prohibition of male homosexuality: “Thou shalt not lie with

mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18: 22).

This means sim ply that it is foul to do to other men what men

habitually, proudly, m anfully, do to women: use them as inanimate, em pty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex. The abomination is in the meaning of the act: in a male-supremacist system, men cannot simultaneously be

used “as women” and stay powerful because they are men. The

abomination is also, perhaps most of all, in the consequences of the

act in a rigidly patriarchal tribal society: sexual rivalry among men

meant trouble, feuds, war. The Jews were a tribe perpetually at

war with others; they could not afford war among them selves. *

And from the real beginning—once outside of Eden— the Jew s

reckoned with the anarchistic evil of fratricide: Cain and Abel,

Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers— all were tragic stories

of brothers torn apart by jealous conflict over the blessing that

showed they were the beloved, and these struggles to be the bestloved had huge historical consequences for the Jew s. Actual carnal sex, the patriarchs recognized, would have made it worse, not better, intensified the conflict. Sexual acts among men threatened the social harmony on which the power of men depended, a social harmony made tenuous enough by the kind of sexual lust that male

*A more complex martial society, which the Hebrews became, could

more easily socially tolerate homosexual liaisons, which the Hebrews apparently did. See discussion of David and Jonathan, p. 134.

dominance produces: the lust for forced sex. Directing that lust

toward women, and trying to regulate which women, made the

lust produced by male dominance work in behalf of male dominance, not against it so that it would collapse of its own sexual weight. In the Hebrew system, adultery and some other sexual

transgressions of the familial pact were genuinely construed to be

as bad as male homosexuality. There is no special repudiation of

male homosexuality in the laws of Leviticus. There is no special

punishment for it, though the punishment is death. There is no

special characterization of the one who commits the act: he is not

different in kind or degree from those who break other sexual prohibitions and are judged to deserve death by stoning.

The fact that the Hebrews attributed no special significance to

the prohibition against male homosexuality in Leviticus and had no

strictly sexual repugnance for the act is revealed and underscored

by Maimonides’ explication of the law, which will no doubt astonish modern readers:

In the case of a man who lies with a male, or causes a male

to have connection with him, once sexual contact has been initiated, the rule is as follows: If both are adults, they are punishable by stoning, as it is said, Thou shalt not lie with a male

(Lev. 18: 22), i. e. whether he is the active or the passive participant in the act. If he is a minor, aged nine years and one day, or older, the adult who has connection with him, is punishable

by stoning, while the minor is exempt. I f the minor is nine years

old, or less, both are exempt. It behooves the court, however, to have the adult flogged for disobedience, inasmuch as he has

lain with a male, even though with one less than nine years of

age. 13 (Italics mine)

The Hebrews wanted the perpetuation of male dominance. A male

child under nine did not have male status. Sex with that male child

did not count as a homosexual act. Maimonides takes it on himself

to remind the court that the child is male—though not male

enough to warrant the real protection provided by capital punishment as a deterrent, which is what the death sentence was in the Hebrew system. The rules governing judgments of guilt were so

strict in actual practice that it is unlikely that capital punishment

could have been invoked for private, consensual sexual acts of any

sort. It was the intrusion of sex into the larger society that concerned the Hebrews. A male child under nine, at any rate, did not warrant that protection because he was not yet part of the ruling

class of men.

Sim ilarly, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah shows that it is

essential to male power (to the power of men as a class) to protect

men from the sexual lust of other men— to protect men from

forced sex by putting women in their place. No legal piety interferes with protecting men from homosexual assault by other men (in the story of Sodom, homosexual gang rape). The story of

Sodom is meant to show that when the simple mechanical strategy

of using women, not men, as targets for nonconsensual sex breaks

down entirely, a patriarchal society w ill be destroyed. So God ordains; so the Old Testament describes: and it is an accurate assessment of the importance of keeping women the objects of forced sex so that men w ill not be subjected to it and need not fear it.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah begins with a conversation

between God and Abraham: God says that “[b]ecause the cry of

Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous; I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know” (Genesis 18: 20-21). Abraham asks God if he will

destroy Sodom if there are fifty righteous men in the city. God

promises that if there are fifty, he w ill spare the city. Abraham,

after a few more interchanges, gets God to promise: “I w ill not

destroy it for ten’s sake” (Genesis 18: 32). Two angels go to Sodom,

where Lot bows down to them and offers them hospitality: safety

in his home, washing of the feet, unleavened bread:

But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men

of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young,

all the people from every quarter:

And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the

men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us,

that we may know them.

And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door

after him.

And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known

man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye

to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.

Genesis 19: 4 -8

The crowd, “both old and young, all the people from every quarter, ” attacked; the angels who appeared as men pulled Lot inside to save him, and “they smote the men that w ere at the door of the

house with blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied

themselves to find the door” (Genesis 19: 11). The angels told Lot

to leave Sodom because they were going to destroy it. Lot told his

sons-in-law, but they did not believe him. In the morning, the

angels told Lot to take his wife and two unmarried daughters; he

lingered, the angels transported Lot and the women outside the

city. God told Lot to go into the mountains and not to look back;

Lot pleaded to be able to go to a nearby city; God said he would

spare that city for Lot’s sake: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom

and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of

heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the

inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground”

(Genesis 19: 24-25). God remembered Lot, and spared him, and in

the wave of destruction of cities, God sent Lot into the mountains,

where Lot lived with his two daughters: “And the firstborn said

unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the

earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: Come,

let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that

we may preserve seed of our father” (Genesis 19: 31-32). On successive nights, each had sex with her drunken father and both became pregnant. Both had sons, a blessing, and each of those sons became the father of a whole people, a blessing.

That the people of Sodom meant the strangers harm is clear.

The nature of that harm is less clear. The demand of the mob to

bring the strangers out “that we may know them” is sexual because

the use of “know” usually is in biblical diction. The attempt of Lot

to substitute his virgin daughters for the men suggests that the mob

would have gang-raped the men. Whether the women in the mob

were voyeurs or purveyors of other forms of violence is impossible

to know: and yet the threat to the men does not seem to be only

sexual; it seems to include sexual assault by men, beating, maiming, and murder. The mixed mob indicates the breakdown of male class power in the same w ay that the assault on the male visitors

does: the rules that keep men exercising power as a class over

women as a sexually and socially subject group have broken down

absolutely; that is the destruction of the city. The destruction of

Sodom is certainly not for breaking a sexual prohibition on homosexuality. The daughters who get their father drunk to have intercourse with him and bear his children also break laws: yet they are blessed. The lesson is not that the inferred homosexual assault is

worse than the accomplished incest because one is homosexual and

the other is heterosexual. Laws against incest come first in Lcvit-

icus and are repeated or invoked in other parts of the Old Testament. The lesson is that when men are not safe from other men— a safety that can only be achieved by keeping women segregated and

for sex— the city w ill be wiped out. The daughters, in committing

incest, broke the law in order to perpetuate patriarchal power: as a

result of what they did, peoples, tribes, cities, were created. W hatever furthers male dominance, even when forbidden, will not destroy the city but build it. Sin, in the Old Testament, is first of all political. Law in the Old Testament is the regulation of society for

the purposes of power, not morality. The Old Testament is a

handbook on sexual politics: the rights of patriarchs and how to

uphold them.

David perhaps also breaks a sexual prohibition. His love for

Jonathan is indisputable, probably carnal, and goes beyond the

abomination of lying with mankind as with womankind: “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of

women” (II Samuel 1: 26). David makes this declaration of love on

learning of Jonathan’s death in battle. Jonathan’s father, Saul, also

died, and he is remembered in the most heterosexual of frameworks: “Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put ornaments of gold upon

your apparel” (II Samuel 1: 24). The passage on Jonathan follows

the passage on Saul, so the contrast is very marked. And then there

was a lot more war and David became king and time passed; but

still, David’s concern was with Jonathan: “Is there yet any that is

left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for

Jonathan’s sake? ” (II Samuel 9 : 1). David found that Jonathan had a

son who was lame and serving another family. David restored all

Saul’s land to this son “for Jonathan thy father’s sake” (II Samuel

9: 7) and claimed Jonathan’s son as his own: “he shall eat at my

table, as one of the king’s sons” (II Samuel 9 : 11). There is no sin,

no condemnation, no wrath of God. Like the incest of Lot and his

daughters, this union made Israel stronger, not weaker. The homosexual bond extended the loyalty and protection of King David to Jonathan’s son, the grandson of Israel’s first king, Saul. David,

through his love of Jonathan, a love “passing the love of women, ”

having survived Jonathan, might be seen as Saul’s logical heir.

Hebrew society had become more complex than in the early tribal

days; Saul and David led armies; in a martial society, homosexuality is often seen to contribute to social cohesion among men. At least in this period, the Hebrews seem to have viewed it that way;

with David and Jonathan in particular it worked that w ay; and

Israel, its patriarchy intact (unlike that of Sodom), thrived. The

God of the Jew s may not have been tolerant, but he was practical.

There is nothing in the Old Testament to justify the vilification

of homosexuals or homosexuality that began with Paul and still

manifests virulently in the fundamentalist Right in Amerika. It

takes the magical claim that the New Testament is “concealed” in

the Old to sustain the illusion of divine sanction for this special

hatred of homosexuality. It is more than concealed; it is not there.

Paul saw the power of the father in decline. The power of the son

was taking its place. The Jew s were confused and divided, and

patriarchal power was not effectively being maintained by Jew ish

law. Paul worshiped male power; therefore Paul worshiped the

son, was converted to the son’s side when he saw the potential of

that side for power. He was opportunistic, politically brilliant, and

a master of propaganda. It was the shrewd Paul who finally undermined the law that had for centuries kept patriarchal power intact but now was failing, in decline. He scapegoated homosexuals as

unnatural, deceitful, full of m alignity, worthy of death, the source

of intolerable evil; and then he blamed the Jew s, and especially the

law of the Jew s, for the existence of homosexuality. “Therefore, ”

Paul proclaimed in Romans 3: 20, “by the deeds of the law there

shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin. ” Paul introduced the hatred of homosexuality into the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he introduced the hatred of Jew s

into it too. In Christian countries, the two groups have suffered contempt, persecution, and death in each other’s shadow ever since; they have been linked by demagogues seeking power

through hate—demagogues like Paul; trying to pacify the likes of

Paul, they have often enough repudiated and hated each other; and

each group has hidden from the soldiers of Christ in its own w ay.

*

Democracies electing their sewage

till there is no clear thought about holiness

a dung flow from 1913

and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud

and the american beaneries

Filth under filth. . .

Ezra Pound, “Canto 91”

The textual bases for what became the major anti-Semitic charges

against the Jews are in the Gospels. Some Jews were money

changers in the temple, tax collectors, liked money; some Jews

plotted to have Christ killed; some Jews asked Christ tricky legalistic questions to try to expose him as a poseur or a heretic (claiming to be God violated Jewish law); it was a crowd of Jew s—but not all

the Jew s—that demanded the crucifixion of Christ. Jews denied

Christ and Jews believed in Christ. Most Jews may have been the

enemy of this new God because they did not recognize him; but it

was Paul who made all Jews into the enemy of all Christians. The

acts against Christ came to represent, as Paul saw it, the Jewish

character; the acts against Christ summed up the Jews. It is Paul

who begins to build institutional Christianity by destroying the

institutions of Judaism; and it is Paul who begins to build a distinctly Christian character by annihilating the character of the Jews. The roots of the continuing association of the Jews as a people with culture, social liberalism (tolerating sin), and intellectual-ism go back to Paul: he constructed the modern Jew in history.

Before the coming of Christ, the law was God’s word. The law

signified God’s presence on earth and among his people. The law

had a divine significance. The Jews did not consider the law social;

for them, one obeyed because it was written—obedience was faith.

The coming of Christ meant that God’s will was embodied in a

person: son of man. In Paul’s interpretation, the law became a

body of dogma that interfered with faith. It became cultural, not

sacred. It was the legalism of the Jews, their intellection, their pedantry, that kept them in sin, kept them from recognizing the Christ: in practical terms, the law became the symbol of Jewish

resistance to this personal God, this God whom Paul knew— unlike Abraham, Moses, or David. Paul could speak in behalf of this new God, and any adherence to law that challenged Paul’s authority was wickedness. The law of the Jew s, the intellect of the Jew s, and the culture of the Jew s in fact were the enemies of Paul’s

authority as one, sim ply, who knew Christ.

In undermining the authority of Jew ish law, Paul over and over

linked that law to sin, especially to homosexuality. It was the social

tolerance of the Jew s for homosexuality in private that proved the

corruption of Jew ish law. It was the lack of m asculinity implicit in

this tolerance that lost the Jew s physical circumcision as their mark

of supreme manhood; spiritual circumcision, the kind that would

not tolerate homosexuality, became the proof of manhood.

Paul named the Jew s the enemy of Christ, of Christianity, and

of Paul. He emphasized the Jew ish character, which he invented:

legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant in putting law over revelation and faith, lost to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism, having a false relationship to God (no longer God’s people).

Paul was not talking about some Jews who did this and some Jew s

who did that; Paul was talking about the Jews.

It was especially important for Paul, in getting power, to change

the perception of what Jew ish law was and how it functioned.

Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the

work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the

relative. A nything cultural can be changed or abandoned or manipulated. The people whose law begins to represent culture, not divinity, are more imperiled than they were because their status depends on the status of culture in general in any given society: the

infamous “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”

denotes how low the status of culture can be with obvious consequences to those who represent it. Also, unless the law is made concrete because people obey it, it is abstract: and the abstraction

of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;

in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally

turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith

in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and

writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.

What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of

homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;

Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise

of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.

Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals

(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For

hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass

murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems

of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews

have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all

manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual

intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In

at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to

purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or

exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution

has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader

said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would

wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us

and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to

their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was

the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we

were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are

God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as

recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have

shown.

Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew

is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates

the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the

Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient

in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one

will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,

Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.

First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest

were talking. T he priest said: we feel about abortion the w ay you

feel about Israel. I think we can talk, said the rabbi. It is in the

interests of male Jew s (the power structure) to increase the population of Jew s. The trade-off—abortion for Israel— is in the interests of Jew s both for the sake of Israel and for the sake of rebuilding a

Jewish population in the easiest w ay— through male domination.

Second, there is the effort to dissociate the Jewish men from any

perception of fem ininity, being less masculine. Israel, of course,

makes Jew s more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a

nation, having an arm y, having borders to defend and to transgress. In associating with the Christian Right, there is a repudiation of homosexuality, liberal social tolerance of it (still blamed on Jews), a strong move against women (reestablishing male dominance), and in general making an alliance with the rulers— with the

Christians who run a Christian country.

Third, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are greedy Jews who think that power

means safety and also who take pleasure in power. The Christian

Right offers Jews not only a means of dissociation from homosexuality but also real dominance over women, if the social order the Christians want is effectively legislated.

Fourth, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are Jews who hate homosexuals, women,

blacks, children, reading, writing, air, trees, and everything else

the Christian Right seems to hate.

Fifth, the right-wing emphasis on the importance of property

offers Jews a way of changing the history of Jews with respect to

property—whether the property is Israel or land or housing or factories or farms. The protection of property suggests to Jews that they will not be driven off what they own.

Sixth, religious conservatism has its analogue in social conservatism, in that both particularly uphold the rights of men to ownership of women and children. Right-wing Jews who are religiously orthodox see the secular pluralism of Western society in general and the United States in particular as taking Jews away

from Judaism: this, despite the emphasis that Judaism puts on

learning, makes them hostile to secular learning, secular intellectuals, secular Jew s, any education that is not strictly and explicitly Jewish. This brings them into a harmony of values with Christians

who do not like Jews because Jews represent learning: the right-

wing Jews are under the illusion that they and the Christian Right

dislike the same Jews for similar reasons.

Seventh, strangely enough it is in this quasi-religious coalition

with the Christian Right that right-wing Jews seek to find the assimilation that has always been the hope of Jews. We feel the same way you do, they say; we have the same values you have, the same

ideals, the same goals, and we are doing our share. It has been

brilliant strategy on the part of the Christian Right in the United

States to welcome the participation of Jew s, to support the state of

Israel, and to use pedestal anti-Semitism: rather than being ground

under stomping boots, Jew s loyal in their right-wing values are

being lifted up onto a pedestal— where the footing is always precarious, as women know. Believing they can fit in— assimilate

—these Jew s are turning to the one group of people— the fundamentalists— who w ill never forget that “the Jew s killed C hrist. ”

Anything not to be that castrate, that homosexual; there is more

dignity in the killing of Christ than in the concentration camps

when the measure is masculinity.

In the contemporary world, Jew s have an extra burden as creators of culture: Freud and Marx were Jew s. The ideas of both are repugnant to the Christian Right. Freud, right or wrong, made sex

a central social issue. Marx brought half the world to revolution. It

is Marx that the United States government and the Christian Right

are fighting; armies are raised and missiles are built to do it. It is

Freud who asked w hy the family works the w ay it does and suggested that the fam ily was a sexual unit. The intellectual Jew Freud had ideas that undermined what the Christian Right regards

as the cornerstone of Amerikan life: the family. The real question,

of course, was not about the family as such but about the paterfamilias: who is daddy having sex with and why? Freud refused to ask that question finally; but perhaps it would not have ever been

asked, or no one would be asking it now, if Freud had not dissected the sexual underbelly of the family with his formidable intellect.

Right-wing Jew s have a special stake in repudiating the ideas of

both Freud and Marx. Ideas are sissifying, and Jew s need masculinity. The ideas of these two Jewish intellectuals are dangerous: dangerous because right-wing Christianity hates them, therefore

dangerous to Jew s who do not want to be hated. Jew s are cultural

radicals and political revolutionaries by contamination. It’s the

damn Jews, a Klan member will say; and even he will mean Freud

and M arx. * Ideas, however potent, do not serve to masculinize

Jews. Ideas only make Jews more Jewish: more effeminate as

intellectuals.

In the end, Jewish men join up with the Christian Right because

they want domination over women and children, which is the social program of the Right; and because they want to be the opposite of homosexual, whatever that is.

*

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in

woman hath one solution— it is called pregnancy.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Within the frame of male domination, there is good reason for

women to adhere to conservative or right-wing or orthodox Judaism or conservative or right-wing or fundamentalist or orthodox Christianity; and within the frame of male domination, there is

good reason for women to hate homosexuality, both male and

female.

* Charles Darwin, whose ideas are as radical and as central to the contemporary epoch as are Freud’s and Marx’s, was not a Jew, but never mind.

Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a neo-Nazi movement that is getting

powerful in the United States, claims that “the Zionist evil” is one of the

“key arms of the British intelligence body which is behind the operation to

destroy America” and that the Anti-Defamation League is “literally the

Gestapo of the British secret intelligence” in the United States. In the

propaganda of Lyndon LaRouche, who has been behind such diverse

groups as the U . S. Labor Party, the Fusion Energy Foundation, the

National Democratic Policy Committee, and the National Anti-Drug

Coalition, “British” is virtually a synonym for “Jewish. ” (See “Lyndon

LaRouche’s Goon Squads, ” Alan Crawford, Inquiry, February 15, 1982,

pp. 8 - 1 0 . ) “Creationism” (God created the world in seven days, there was

no evolution) is a main tenet of the orthodox (not neo-Nazi) Right; the

ideas of Darwin are as despised as the ideas of Freud and Marx.

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly

less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get

is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is

all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best

thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact

that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don’t get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don’t get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don’t get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one— pregnancy is now considered

a cause of battery (stress on the male, don’t you know): in perhaps

25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant

woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean

both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a fam ily; it may hurt a woman’s health or jeopardize her in a host of other

ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to

women— it is the bedrock of women’s social worth. Despite all the

happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim

private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. Right-wing Judaism and right-wing Christianity both guarantee that women will continue to have a place outside

history but inside the home: through childbearing. Without that,

women know they have nothing. Homosexuality for women means

having nothing; it means extinction. Well, who’s going to have the

babies? men ask when faced with women surgeons and politicians— as if the question had an intrinsic logic; or as if ending war were not logically a part of having “enough” people. “All this talk,

for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins G ilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and

rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are run­

ning short of children—make some more. ’” 14 The extinction

women fear is not this extinction men conjure up: who will make

the babies so that we can fight our wars? It is the extinction of

women: women’s function and with it women’s worth. Men have

one reason for keeping women alive: to bear babies. The sex of

domination leads to death: it is the killing of body and w ill—conquest, possession, annihilation; sex, violence, death—that is pure sex; and it is the slow annihilation of the woman’s will that is eros,

and the slow annihilation of her body that is eros; her violation is

sex, whether it ends in her aesthetic disappearance into oblivion or

her body bludgeoned in a newspaper photograph or the living husk

used and discarded as sexual garbage. Annihilation is sexy, and sex

tends toward it; women are the preferred victims of record. Only

having children moderates men’s sexual usage of women: use them

up and throw them away, fuck them to death, killing them softly.

If women are not needed to run the country or write the books or

make the music or to farm or engineer or dig coal or fix plumbing

or cure the sick or plav basketball, what are women needed for? If

the absence of women from all these areas, from all areas, is not

perceived as loss, emptiness, poverty, what are women for? Right-

wing women have faced the answer. Women are for fucking and

having children. Fucking gets you dead, unless you have children

too. Homosexuality—its rise in public visibility, attempts to socially legitimize or protect it, a sense that it is attractive and on the move and winning not only acceptance but practitioners—makes

women expendable: the one thing women can do and be valued for

will no longer be valued, cannot be counted on to be that bedrock

of women’s worth. This is true of both lesbianism and male homosexuality, in that both negate women’s reproductive value to men; but male homosexuality is especially terrifying because it suggests

a world without women altogether—a world in which women are

extinct. “[I]n sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, ” God cursed

Adam’s woman (Genesis 3: 16)— she is referred to as “the woman”

until she and Adam are expelled from Eden and Adam names her

Eve “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3: 20). On

expulsion from Eden man knew sex leading to death; and woman

knew childbearing in sorrow and pain, on which her well-being,

such as it is, still depends. The sorrow was apparently avoided

altogether by Phyllis Schlafly, who waxes euphoric on having children: “None of those measures of career success [traveling to “exciting faraway places, ” having authority over others, winning, or earning a fortune] can compare with the thrill, the satisfaction, and

the fun of having and caring for babies, and watching them respond and grow under a mother’s loving care. More babies m ultiply a woman’s jo y . ” 15 The thrill, the endlessly m ultiplying joy, was not in God’s original intention; and indeed, it is unlikely that

Schlafly has outwilled him. In the sorrow of having children there

is the recognition that one’s humanity is reduced to this, and on

this one’s survival depends. Being a woman is this, or it is unspeakably worse than this. Homosexuality brings up for women the barrenness of not even having this. A woman has committed

her life to bringing forth children in order to have a life of dignity

and worth; she has found the one w ay in which she is absolutely

necessary; and then, that is gone as an absolute. It must be an

absolute, because there are women who stake their lives on it as an

absolute; it is certainly what women have had to count on. Everything that women have to gain from homosexuality— and women have a great deal to gain from it: less forced penetration of themselves, for instance— is obliterated by the fear of losing what value women have, a fear conjured up by homosexuality in women

whose own right to life is in having children. Despite all the happy

talk of the total women, there is a fierce anxiety there: if men did

not need babies, and women to have them, these bright wives

would be shivering on street corners like the other fast fucks. Her

womb is her wealth; her use in childbearing is his strongest tie to

her; she holds his [sic] children, actual and potential, hostage, for

her own sake. It is not rational to hate homosexuals because they

force one to experience a terror of extinction: the cold chill of being

useless, unnecessary, expendable. But passions are distinguished

by their illogic: one can describe them and find an interior logic in

them up to a point—then there is a sensational leap into hate, dazzling, crazed, obsessional. Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, is not an idea; it is a passion. For women, hatred of homosexuals—

despised because they are associated with women—is more than

self-defeating; it is almost breathtakingly suicidal, encouraging as it

does the continuing hatred of anything or anyone associated with

women. But the perception that having children is the only edge

women have on survival at the hands of men is right; it is an acute

perception, grounded in an accurate reading of what women are for

and how women are used by men in this sexual system. Without

reproduction, women as a class have nothing. In sorrow or not,

bearing babies is what women can do that men need—really need,

no handjob can substitute here; and homosexuality makes women

afraid, irrationally, passionately afraid, of extinction: of being unnecessary as a class, as women, to men who destroy whatever they do not need and whose impulses toward women are murderous

anyway.

5

The Coming Gynocide

Rich as you are

Death will finish

you: afterwards no

one will remember

or want you;. . .

Sappho

In A Room o f One's O w n, first read as a paper in 1928, the prescient

Virginia Woolf called the attention of the women in her audience

to a statement by a popular British journalist of the time who

warned “that when children cease to be altogether desirable,

women cease to be altogether necessary. ” 1 The woman who is deviant because she has no children, as Woolf was even in her avant-garde set, is often aware of how tenuous her existence is: it is a

courtesy extended to her— letting her go on—despite the fact that

she is not earning her womanly keep in the womanly w ay. She

knows how little the world at large needs her or values her for

anything else she does even when she is exceptional; and if she

understands how systematic and relentless the valuation of her

kind is, she also knows that at the heart of the male system there is

a profound contempt for anything in women that is individual, that

is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.

Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be

altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population control: there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways

to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a

humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less

burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving

birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.

There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to

be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those

dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women

on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and

sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the

Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a

plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would

give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising

was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions

were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion

laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis

established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s

movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in

1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that

must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-

ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these

women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may

get rewards for meeting them but outside of them she has no

chance. While the racially inferior women are being used one way,

the racially superior women are being used in what appears to be

an opposite way: but it is not. These are two sides of the same

coin. The two sides travel together, materially inseparable and yet

unalterably divided. Neither side, in this case, has a life outside

totalitarian womanhood. In such a society, the racially privileged

woman has the best deal; but she is not free. Freedom is something

different from the best deal—even for women.

State-run population programs always have the racist tinge and

are sometimes explicitly and murderously racist. Population-con-

trol programs run by any state or state-controlled agency or beholden to any male interest or clique are very different from the ideology and practice of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom has as its basic premise the notion that every individual woman must control her own reproductive destiny. She has a right

to be protected from state intrusion and from male intrusion: she

has a right to determine her own reproductive life. Abortion on

demand, for instance, is at the will of the pregnant woman; sterilization of poor women is usually at the will of the male doctor who represents his race and class and is often paid by the state or acts

in accordance with the interests of the state. Sterilization abuse in

the United States has been practiced primarily on very poor black

and Hispanic women. Contraceptives are tested on the women in

Puerto Rico, which has the virtue of being a U . S. colony as well as

having a brown-skinned population. Contraceptive drugs known to

be highly toxic are tested systematically on women in the Third

World with that astonishingly familiar misogynist justification—

“They want it. ” The evidence of this collective will is that the

women line up for injections of such drugs. It is frequently not

mentioned that a chicken or other food is payment for taking the

shot, and the women are starving and so are their children. Those

who have seen institutionalized programs of population control as a

humane and sensible solution to some aspects of mass poverty have

been unable to face the problem intrinsic to these programs: the

poor are often also not white, and the enthusiasm of state planners

for population control is often based on this fact. Children of these

women long ago ceased to be altogether desirable; and these

women long ago ceased to be altogether necessary.

The marginality of these masses of women because of race has

obscured how much their expendability has to do with being

women. “Made in South America Where Life Is Cheap” read the

advertisements for the pornographic film Snuff\ which purported to

show the torture, maiming, and murder of a woman for the purposes of sexual entertainment: the removing of the woman’s uterus from her slit abdomen was the sexual act to which the man in the

film who was doing the cutting supposedly climaxed. Life is cheap

for both women and men wherever life is cheap, and life is cheap

wherever people are poor. But for women, life is in the uterus; and

the well-being of women—economic, social, sexual—depends on

what the value of the uterus is, how it will be used and by whom,

whether or not it will be protected and why. Whatever her race or

class—however much she is privileged or hated for one or both—a

woman is reducible to her uterus. This is the essence of her political condition as a woman. If she is childless, she is not worth much to anyone; if her children are less than desirable, she is less than

necessary. On a global scale, racist population programs already

exist that provide the means and the ideological justifications for

making masses of women extinct because their children are not

wanted. The United States, a young, virile imperialist power compared to its European precursors, has pioneered this kind of reproductive imperialism. The United States was the perfect nation to do so, since the programs depend so much on science and tech­

nology (the nation’s pride) and also on a most distinctive recognition of precisely how expendable women are as women, simply because they are women. Obsessed with sex as a nation, the

United States knows the strategic importance of the uterus, abroad

and at home.

Inside the United States, gynocidal polices are increasingly discernible. The old, the poor, the hungry, the drugged, the mentally ill, the prostituted, those institutionalized in wretchedly inhumane

nursing homes and mental hospitals, are overwhelmingly women.

In a sense, the United States is in the forefront of developing a

postindustrial, post-Nazi social policy based on the expendability

of any group in which women predominate and are not valued for

reproduction (or potential reproduction in the case of children).

Public policy in the United States increasingly promises to protect

middle-class or rich white women owned in marriage who reproduce and to punish all other women. The Family Protection Act— a labyrinthian piece of federal legislation designed to give

police-state protection to the male-headed, male-dominated, fe-

male-submissive fam ily— and the Human Life Amendment, which

would give a fertilized egg legal rights adult women are still without, would be the most significant and effective bludgeoning instruments of this public policy if passed. Along with already actual cutbacks in Social Security, Medicaid, and food programs, these

laws are intended to keep select women having babies and to destroy women who are too old to reproduce, too poor or too black or brown to be valued for reproducing, or too queer to pass. This, in

conjunction with the flourishing pornography industry in which

women are sexually consumed and then shit out and left to collect

flies, suggests that women will have to conform slavishly to right-

wing moral codes to survive; and that, too poor or too old, a

woman’s politics or philosophy however traditionally moral will

not make her life a whit more valuable. The use the state wants to

make of a woman’s uterus already largely determines— and will

more effectively determine in the future— whether she is fed or

starved, genuinely sheltered or housed in squalor, taken care of or

left in misery to pass cold, hungry, neglected days.

The association of women with old age and poverty predates the

contemporary Amerikan situation, in which women are the bulk of

both the old and the poor. In 1867, Jean Martin Charcot, known

primarily for his work with the institutionalized insane, did a systematic study of old age. The population he studied was old women in a public hospital in Paris—female, old, poor, urban.

Since that time, many psychological and sociological generalizations about the old have been framed as if the population under discussion were male, even when it was exclusively female as in

Charcot’s study. Many observations about the old were made by

professional men about poor women. As if to signal both the symbolic and actual relationship between old age and women, the first person in the United States to receive a Social Security check after

the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 was a woman, Ida

M. Fuller. Now in the United States, when there is no doubt

whatsoever that the old are primarily female, that the poor are prim arily female, that those on welfare are primarily female, that those in nursing homes are primarily female, that those in mental

institutions are primarily female, there is still no recognition that

the condition of poverty is significantly related to the condition of

women; or that the status of old people, for instance, is what it is

because the bulk of the old are women. “Indeed, ” writes one writer

on old age, “relatively recent trends in the aging of America may

have changed the status of older Americans. It is conceivable, for

instance, that the elderly have become a much larger burden to

society since World War I. After all, women, very old persons,

and those ‘stuck’ in deteriorating locations now constitute a greater

proportion of the aged population than ever before. ” 3 Women,

very old persons, and those “stuck” in deteriorating locations:

women, women, and women. “After all, ” women, women, and

women “now constitute a greater proportion of the aged population

than ever before”—the status of the old has changed, gone down;

they are more of a burden; “after a ll, ” they are women. In 1930,

there were more men over sixty-five than women; by 1940, there

were more women. In 1970, there were 100 women to 72 men over

sixty-five. In 1990, for every 100 women there w ill “only” be 68

men (as the experts put it). The situation is getting worse: because

the more women there are, the fewer men, the worse the situation

gets. Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. T hey live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death. Their tenacity in holding on to life is held against them.

Cuts in Social Security and food programs for the old directly issue

from the willingness of the U . S. government to watch useless

females go hungry, live in viciously degrading poverty, and die in

squalor. On the television news, social workers tell us several times

a week that old people are going hungry: “they have just enough

food to keep them alive, ” one said, “but they never eat enough to

stop them from being hungry. ” Then we see the interviews with

old people, the cafeterias where old people who can walk go to get

their one meal of the day. T hey are mostly women. T hey say they

are hungry. We can observe, if we care to, that they are female and

hungry.

W ithin this population of the old, there are the people in nursing

homes. “There are more than 17, 000 nursing homes in the United

States— as opposed to roughly 7, 000 general hospitals— and their

aggregate revenues exceed $12 billion a year, ” writes Bruce C.

Vladeck in U nloving Care: The N ursing Home Tragedy. “T hey have

been described as ‘Houses of Death, ’ ‘concentration cam ps, ’ ‘warehouses for the d yin g. ’ It is a documented fact that nursing home residents tend to deteriorate, physically and psychologically, after

being placed in what are presumably therapeutic institutions. The

overuse of potent medications in nursing homes is a scandal in itself. Thousands of facilities in every state of the nation fail to meet minimal government standards of sanitation, staffing, or patient

care. The best governmental estimate is that roughly half the na­

tion’s nursing homes are ‘substandard. ’”4 In 1978, according to

Vladeck, there were still nursing homes “with green meat and

maggots in the kitchen, narcotics in unlocked cabinets, and disconnected sprinklers in nonfire-resistant structures. ” 5 Over 72 percent of the nursing home population is female. Women in nursing

homes are generally widows or never married, white, poorer than

most of their peers (70 percent having incomes under $3000 a year

consisting mainly of Social Security benefits), and have several

chronic diseases. According to The New York Times (October 14,

1979), the average age of the person in such an institution is 82 and

50 percent have no family, get no visitors, and are supported by

government money. Conditions are most terrible in nursing homes

supported by government funding of patient care: nursing homes

for the destitute, for those on Medicaid. The policy of the United

States government is that old people must become paupers: * spend

any money of their own that they have, after which the government takes over; the paupers are unable to defend themselves

*See “Loose Laws Make Care of Aged Costly, ” by Gertrude Dubrovsky,

The New York Times, October 21, 1979. In a subsection called “How the

Programs W ork, ” Dubrovsky explains:

“As of April 1977, the last period for which such figures were available,

a nursing-home patient under Medicaid could not have an income greater

than $533. 39 a month. However, should this same person want to remain

at home and receive community-based health-related services, his monthly

income must be less than $200.

“Thus, Medicaid laws are biased in favor of institutional care.

“Morever, Medicaid imposes strict personal-asset limits of $ 1 , 500 for a

single person or $ 2 , 500 for a couple.

“To be accepted by a nursing home under Medicaid, a person must sell

his home, liquidate his assets and turn them over to Medicaid as a gift, in

which case he stays on Medicaid.

“Or, he may give the funds directly to the nursing home as a private

payment until the money falls below the allowable level. When that happens, the patient reapplies for Medicaid, but may be put on a waiting list. ”

against the conditions in the homes in which they are kept. Once

paupers, they must accept confinement on the state’s terms because

they have no money and nowhere to go. The state’s terms all too

frequently are neglect, degradation, filth, and not infrequently outright sadism.

The nursing home population is markedly white. Blacks die

younger than whites in the United States— perhaps the result of

systematic racism, which means inadequate health care, shelter,

and money over a lifetime. Blacks alone comprise a full 11. 8 percent of the U . S. population and yet only 9 percent of the old are people of color, including Asians, Native Americans, and Hispanics. N ationally, so-called nonwhites (including blacks) comprise

only 5 percent of the nursing home population. In New Jersey, for

instance, according to The New York Times (October 21, 1979), out

of 8, 683 beds in eighty nursing homes, blacks occupied 532 and

Hispanics or “others” occupied 38 (6. 5 percent). It seems that

blacks especially are left to suffer the diseases of old age on their

own and to die on their own; and that whites are institutionally

maintained in appalling conditions— kept alive but barely. If this is

true, the social function of nursing homes becomes clearer: out of

sight, out of mind. Blacks are already invisible in ghettos— young,

middle-aged, old. Black women have been socially segregated and

marginalized all their lives. Perceptions of their suffering are easily

avoided by an already callous white-supremacist populace, the so-

called mainstream. It is white women who have become poor and

extraneous with old age; they are taken from mainstream communities where they are useless and dumped in nursing homes. It is important to keep them away from those eager, young, middle-class white women who might be demoralized at what is in store

for them once they cease to be useful. Kept in institutions until

they die as a punishment for having lived so long, for having outlived their sex-appropriate work, old white women find themselves drugged (6 . 1 prescriptions for an average patient, more than half

the patients given drugs like Thorazine and Mellaril); sick from

neglect with bedsores, urinary, eye, and ear infections; left lying in

their own filth, tied into so-called geriatric chairs or tied into bed;

sometimes not fed, not given heat, not given any nursing care;

sometimes left in burning baths (from which there have been

drownings); sometimes beaten and left with broken bones. Even in

old age, a woman had better have a man to protect her. She has

earned no place in society on her own. With a man, she will most

likely not end up in a prison for the female old. She has more social

value if she has a man, no matter how old she is—and she will also

have more money. After a lifetime of systematic economic discrimination—no pay for housekeeping, lower pay for salaried work, lower Social Security benefits, often with no rights to her husband’s pension or other benefits even after decades of marriage if he has left her—a woman alone is virtually resourceless. The euphemistically named “displaced homemaker” foreshadows the old woman who is put away.

The drugging of the predominantly female nursing home population continues in old age a pattern established with awful frequency among women: women get 60 to 80 percent of the prescriptions for mood-altering drugs (60 percent of the prescriptions for barbiturates, 67 percent for tranquilizers, and 80 percent for

amphetamines). Women are prescribed more than twice the drugs

that men are for the same psychological conditions. One study of

women in Utah, cited by Muriel Nellis in The Female Fix, “showed

that 69 percent of women over the age of thirty-four who were not

employed outside the home and who were members in good standing of the Mormon Church use minor tranquilizers. ”6 Such women are considered a high-risk group for addiction by the time

they are forty-five or fifty.

The dimensions of female drug addiction and dependency are

staggering. In 1977, 36 million women used tranquilizers; 16 million, sleeping pills; 12 million, amphetamines; and nearly 12 mil­

lion women got prescriptions for these drugs from doctors for the

first time. As N ellis, who cites these figures, * makes clear:

Those numbers do not include whole classes of prescribed pain

killers, all of which are mood altering and addictive. Nor do

they include the billions of doses dispensed to patients directly, without a prescription, in doctors’ offices, in m ilitary, public, or private hospitals, and in clinics or nursing homes. 7

According to the Food and Drug Administration, between 1977

and 1980 Valium was the most prescribed drug in the United

States.

At best it can be said that the woman’s lot in life, the female

role, necessitates a lot of medical intervention in the form of mood-

altering drugs. At worst it must be said that these drugs are prescribed to women because they are women— and because the doctors are largely men. The male doctor’s perception of the

female patient, conditioned by his belief in his own difference from

her and superiority to her, is that she is very emotional, very upset, irrational, has no sense of proportion, cannot discern what is trivial and what is important. She has no credibility as an observer